MAY 2025 - MINERALITY
We are already halfway through the month of May and amidst the wonderful signs of spring - flowers everywhere and the abundance of green leaves from the trees and bushes. And of course the warm weather. Oh the warm weather. May is a transition month, one that takes us through the last stages of spring and into summer, when school lets out and prepares us for the hot days, the long nights, and the delight of backyard gatherings, patio sipping and barbecuing. It is the moment in Chicago for the entire population to grasp that we are ready to embark on another summer season, taking advantage of being outside- walking, running, biking, swimming, sunning, boating and on and on and on. We are celebrating this month’s wine clubs with a virtual visit to Italy, one that allows us any opportunity to pop a bottle of rosato sparkling wine from Emilia-Romagna, chill down a white wine from Soave for the early evening patio hang and unleash a red from Umbria for the smell of the seasonal bbq’s kicking off.
Thanks, as always, for being an integral part of Red & White, members of our wine club and our community.
Vini Ferretti - Al Cer 2022
salamino, maestri, grasparossa, marani - Emilia-Romagna
Nestled between Reggio Emilia and Parma in the Po Valley, Italy, and within the province of Case Cocconi, lies the home of Vini Ferretti. They have been growing vines here since the early 1900’s. These days the sisters Elise and Denise Ferretti, under the tutelage of their cellar master father Sante, tend to 3 hectares of vineyards, planted to Trebbiano, Malvasia, Fortana and the various native Lambrusco varietals, which include Grasparossa, Salamino, Ancellotta, Maestri, Marani, etc. They believe that their wines are truly made in the vineyard, adhering to strict principles of organic farming, without the use of chemicals, pesticides and herbicides. Everything is done by hand in the vineyards and once harvested they utilize native yeasts for fermentations. They are left to age on their lees for extended periods and bottled without any fining or filtration, with most of their method ancestral wines being bottled with very little presence of sugar, allowing for the finished sparkling wines to be dry. The wines are incredibly alive, constantly evolving in the bottle. They are simplistic wines in a broad sense, with saline and mineral qualities, pithy fruit skin bitterness to equally offset the abundance of sun kissed fruit and rustic volatility that makes them equally enjoyable, both on their own and also in the presence of food. They are real wines, truthful and thought provoking, at the same time utterly quaffable and thirst quenching.
Filippi - Monteserino 2022
garganega - Soave
As far back as the 1300’s, there are family roots tied to grape cultivation at the top of the hill in the Colli Scaligeri subregion of Soave, located in the town of Castelcerino. In the beginning of the 20th century, the estate was sold by the Conti Alberti family to their cousins, the Visco family, and this is when winemaking actually began on the property. Filippo Filippi, current head of the estate, began bottling his own wines in 2003. He has chosen a distinctly different path than the majority of others in Soave, choosing to highlight differences in his terroir through biodiversity in farming from low yields, rather than harvesting massive amounts of fruit to produce extremely generic, unmemorable wines. The results are stunning! His wines are rich, complex, multilayered and intensely mineral, with ageing potential on all of his creations, including the younger vine, entry level wine. He achieves this through the adherence to biodynamic practices in the vines, planted to the native varietal Garganega, in rocky, volcanic clay soils that are rich in limestone and that benefit from the high elevation and the surrounding forests. Everything is manually harvested and sorted by hand, with long, indigenous fermentations taking place in stainless steel, allowing for the entire process and the wines to mature at their own pace, helping develop the character of each cuvée based on the sight specific parcels. Most of the vines were planted back in the 1950’s and he farms 16 hectares in total.
Cantina Cenci - San Biagio Rosso 2021
sangiovese/merlot - Umbria
Cantina Cenci rests on lands that were once part of the Olivetan monastery, a sub-order of the Benedictine monks, going back to 1389, in the Italian province of Perugia which is located in the Umbrian region. Honest agriculture and working the land dates back at least to the time the monks occupied the monastery here, arguably much longer. The farm is located in a hilly area with the soils mainly consisting of clay, sand and limestone. It totals 30 hectares planted to grains and animal grazing, with another 7 hectares planted to vines, which include Grechetto & Trebbiano Toscana for whites, with the remaining mostly dedicated to Sangiovese, Merlot and Petit Verdot. In all aspects, it is a polyculture farm practicing organic and biodynamic agriculture. They have eschewed most tractor equipment in an effort to reduce the copper inputs on the soil, realizing the drastic imprint large machines have on the microbial life in the soils. They are constantly looking for ways to improve the health and vitality of their land in order to realize the most reflective wines of each vintage and the place. Giovanni Cenci has himself accumulated vast experiences working on other biodiverse farms around the world, bringing everything he has learned from others to help him listen to and guide the living ecosystem he has. After harvest, Giovanni prefers indigenous yeasts for fermentation without temperature control. The reds rest on the skins for 1-2 days before being pressed. The wines rest for many months on the lees with daily bâtonnage to help encourage the complete development of each wine. The wines are incredibly precise, lithe and with integral structural minerality that helps carry the profound fruit quite buoyantly on the palate.