Tenuta di Trinoro Rosso Toscana 2008 Museum Release

"2008 is a wine so aromatic and bright in its fruit that here, more than in other vintages of Tenuta di Trinoro, one has to look at what happened before this year’s ripening season to see why a wine like this has come about. During all the previous 2007 a lack of rain had left the grounds dry and the plants unable to store for the next year. After a wet winter the 2008 spring rains kept coming on the vineyards with cold spells until far into June; a lot of very late nourishment was carried to the vine and uneven flowering and uneven fruit-setting came to all the varietals. With leafs very green but small where they cover the grapes, vineyards marched into a blazing, old-fashioned Val d’Orcia summer.

Because of the nourishment it had, it resisted stressing and grinding to a halt for the whole of August but then it got stuck during, and for all of, the month of September. The grapes that had travelled through the summer in uneven stages of growth, some of them exposed directly to the sun, tasted green as I went around the property looking for something to harvest at the end of the month. For weeks of what is, usually, the picking season all stayed still: the valley green, the weather forecasts on the computer screens uncertain. Then, in jerks, some Merlot started ripening suddenly, and it was the middle of October. All and everything being two weeks later than the usual made this vintage’s Merlot and Cab Franc’s pickings the longest and, because of looming rains, the most dangerous I can remember, a season really packed with suspense; all along I was harvesting small spots: sun-roasted berried first, in early trial tanks; very good berries from the sudden ripening; and berries with a sort of lean over ripeness in the end. Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot came in much later, and we weren’t almost interested at that point because we were so tired of waiting, but they were good, though a bit wet. Forty different tanks had perplexingly different aromas, the juices had many shades of red. This vintage still stays in the mind with a feel of infantile colors, and the season seemed a fall of freshness as opposed to autumn, the large, ending season.

The wines were also like that: jolly, strange, aromatic, and foreign when they started showing a few months later. After mixing them, the 2008 vintage seems to be being borne powerful, vast and ringing, quite unusual among the vintages of this valley." - Vini Franchetti