the Cellar

The cellars at Tenuta San Leonardo occupy several areas under ground, or several levels in the same vaulted area. All offer ideal conditions in terms of temperature stability and levels of humidity. The grapes used in winemaking are carefully selected at harvest in the month of October. Yields are about 70 quintals per hectare. When vinifiying this excellent fruit, we strive to keep winemaking procedures as simple as possible (see individual wine profiles for more details), with several pump-overs daily, and low fermentation temperatures, in order to extract from the must the greatest possible quantity of noble tannins. Maceration lasts for about two weeks.

Obviously, our three grape varieties are vinified and aged separately. While proportions may vary slightly from one vintage to the next, blending itself is carried out just before the wine goes into bottle.

In many respects, the great Châteaux of Bordeaux have remained our natural point of reference but at Tenuta San Leonardo, we follow our own path in ageing and maturing our wines. After a period in small cement vats, where malolactic fermentation is completed, the wines spend at least six months in 60-hectolitre barrels of Slavonian oak, and then go into small barrels of French oak for 24 months. For barrel maturaton, we adopt a combination of new, once-used and even twice-used wood. In our opinion, this approach is necessary to give the wines softness and to temper the contribution of the wood, which might be excessive for our winemaking project if we used only small oak.

The next step is Bordeaux blending. The winemaker carefully gauges the proportions to go into the blend, selecting only the barriques that are absolutely convincing at tasting. At this stage, the long experience and supremely talented nose of our consultant winemaker, Giacomo Tachis, are crucially important. The wine then goes into bottle.

However, it is not yet ready for release. The bottles will stay in the binning cellar for at least eight months (four, in the case of Merlot), although we want to extend this period to a full year. We encourage our customers to keep Tenuta San Leonardo wines in their cellar for a while to be able to appreciate them at their best.