Antinori in the Americas
By Margaret Rand
Read the full article here.
Antinori has four estates in the Americas, with 80 degrees of latitude between the most northerly and the most southerly.
Two were started as joint ventures; the third, Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, was bought from its founder Warren Winiarski for all sorts of reasons, of which strict commerce was not the main driver. (Atlas Peak is another subject and not part of this piece.) The two joint ventures are now wholly owned by Antinori, and the wines have changed. Dramatically.
Wines are changing everywhere, of course, at the moment. Climate change is one reason, and fashion is another; the two go hand-in-hand. Big, rich, ripe wines were fine when summers were cooler. Now, warmer weather and higher sugar levels means that to produce wine that is enjoyable you have to fight richness, fight sugar, fight alcohol – fight the very things that nature is offering. But if that sounds a mad thing to do, remember that viticulture for the last 30 or 40 years has been directed towards getting greater ripeness. Now it has to change gear and unwind a lot of what it has achieved.
Take Stag's Leap. Winiarski had founded his estate with the intention that it should be a family company, passed on to the next generation. But the next generation had other plans, and eventually Winiarski had to find another solution.
In 2007 he approached Piero Antinori. Winiarski was never guilty of being too direct; if he could be oblique, he would. So he rang Antinori and just happened to mention that there was a winery for sale in Napa Valley. "Warren said things without saying them," says Antinori head winemaker Renzo Cotarella; "he'd say three words and you had to understand the rest." It turned out that not only did he want to sell to Antinori, but he didn't want to sell to anyone else. Antinori is an old family company: it shared Winiarski's values. Winiarski thought that Antinori and only Antinori could be trusted to look after his baby.
But Antinori at that moment had spent a lot of money and was due to spend more – there was a new logistics centre near Cortona and other building projects elsewhere – and buying Stag's Leap just wasn't feasible. It also already had Atlas Peak, which it had bought in 1993 and leased back to the original owners for 15 years; that lease was nearing its end. And then 2008 came along and, says Cotarella, "we decided not to buy. We could have had problems, and you can't risk the company because the company belongs to future generations.
"We bought it 15 years later, and paid four times as much."
It was expensive, he agrees, and "we probably paid too much, but in the light of the next generations…"
The wines they are a-changin'
The estate was in excellent condition. "The place is unique," says Cotarella. "You can't touch a wine like this; it's too important." And yet they are beginning to change a few things, and what they're doing has implications for Col Solare and Haras de Pirque.
They're looking back at wines which no longer exist: the Napa Cabs of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which were 12.5 percent alcohol, quite often "a bit green," says Cotarella, "but plenty of character". Stag's Leap had never been seduced into overripeness or over-extraction; Winiarski was always firmly against that. The 1976 Stag's Leap that won the Judgement of Paris tasting in 1976 was made from vines on their fourth leaf, and Cotarella points out that the reason it won was because the judges thought it was French. Stag's Leap is in a relatively cool part of Napa, and never did pick at 27º Brix, says Cotarella. "It was always in the European taste." Nevertheless, alcohol had crept up: Cask 23 2016, a wonderfully racy, detailed wine, is 14.5 percent.
Says Cotarella, "you must recognise the variety, the place and the vintage in a wine. If not, there's no need to buy the wine every year, if every year is the same. In Europe, climates are more influenced by the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, and each year is different to others. In the New World, most years are much more the same." There are wildfire years, yes, and some freak temperatures at harvest, "and you pick earlier or later, but they're not that different. So if you pick at the same level of ripeness every year, of course the wines are the same. In Europe we are less stable."
To bring back that feeling of vintage variation, of each year reflecting something different, in 2023 they decided to pick some white grapes at 12.5 percent, and some red at 12.8 percent. "It was a difficult decision,' says Cotarella; 'we had to persuade people to do it. They weren't comfortable. We did it to understand the difference. If you pick at 28 Brix, you don't know what happens if you pick at 23 Brix."
The results were good; so good that in 2024, a long growing season, they broadened the trial and picked at an average of 13.5 percent; some lower, to understand the impact and evolution.
The 2024 wines are still infants, of course, and Cotarella, when we spoke, was preparing to go to Napa to taste them. (His impressions so far have been promising.) "We don't want to change the style overnight. You have to do it over five, six, seven, ten years so as not to shock your customers."
The style, and the problems, in Washington State at Col Solare, were always different. But change here has the same driver, which is Cotarella's search for identity, vibrancy and energy. "The 2019 vintage was a milestone in the new approach," he says: the Cabernet Sauvignon is rich, soft and floral, but it has freshness and elegance too; perfume and suppleness, but more directness than in the past, and more sense of effortlessness. It's not a matter of alcohol so much – the 2019 is 14.5 percent – but overripeness has been banished, and so has any sense of austerity.
Some background: Col Solare was started as a joint venture with Chateau Ste Michelle. In 2021 the latter was bought by a private equity company which had nothing to do with wine, and Antinori had to decide whether to stay or leave. They stayed because "when you're making wine you have to be in love with the place". And they were.
The wines, perhaps, not so much. Did they ever feel that it was quite theirs? "To make a wine in a team is something very complex," says Cotarella. Usually, in a winery – and Antinori is no exception – the winemakers and blenders share the same aim and have the same understanding of style. "We have many winemakers at Antinori, and we take them straight from university, without experience. The team is based on that. If we want an outside opinion we ask a consultant winemaker and talk together. We need people in the company with the same idea, the same stylistic idea…. Wine is not a democratic product."
If you take two teams with different ideas the result is a committee decision. The grapes at Col Solare, from Red Mountain, he says, have a slightly jammy taste when you pick them off the vine; they're a bit like overripe Syrah, with lovely texture. But the season is short there, with late budbreak, and the custom was to acidify, both at harvest and after the malolactic, "so the wine lost grace, and became hard, unbalanced and austere".
So now they no longer seek concentration. They want balance, not just Brix, so they look for flavour and fruit as well as sugar and tannin ripeness. That means that extraction from the skins must be careful, to avoid pyrazines. "If you pick overripe it's easier, because the tannins are very sweet." What was a short drinking window for the wines is now longer, and earlier.
In the vineyard they're looking for a better balance of leaves, which means fewer leaves per hectare, and maybe increasing the yield to lengthen the season. "The best season is the longest one. Long seasons were 2007, '04, '10,'15, '16, '21 and '24."
The idea used to be that at least 6000 vines per hectare was ideal. "It depends on the place and the slope, but now we want no more than 4000 or 4500 per hectare, with wider rows. If you have 20 percent fewer vines then you have 20 percent less leaves making sugar for the same yield per hectare." ("Even Champagne is thinking of lower density," he says as an aside.) Raising the trellis gives more ventilation and less heat from the soil at night, too. "It's nuances, but a series of nuances."
They've been replanting at Haras de Pirque, too. This was a joint venture, started in 2007, with the Matte family, which owned the estate. In 2014 Antinori took over the vineyards and winemaking and started to change the planting, and in 2017 took full ownership. They changed the clones, the training, put the right varieties in the right place; it was a pretty major spring clean. "You have to address your vineyards according to the style you want to pick. You have to plan."
The difference shows in Albis, the flagship blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Carmenère. For the 2020 vintage the vineyards were split between old and new plantings; for 2021 most were new plantings. There's complexity and grip in the 2020, plus silk and lots of chocolate and some violets. The 2021 is tighter – okay, it's a year younger, but it's a lot tighter. And Pitío, from selected parcels of both grapes, is terrific: soft acidity, plenty of grip, and lovely poise. "The vineyards are more civilised than before," says Cotarella. "After several vintages you start to understand a place, its difficulties and opportunities. Making wine with authenticity needs a lot; it needs culture. It's much harder than just making good wine… And how can you express the vineyard if you don't own the vineyard?"
