Working With Barbiere

Valerio
Barbieri. He has not been on the cover of The Wine
Spectator, nor even in the fine print. Robert M. Parker, Jr.
has not anointed him the rising star of the wine firmament.
No importer has bragged that such-and-such an estate is now
“working with Valerio Barbieri”. Yet Barbieri has helped
make Tuscany a magic name for wine.

He
never asked for recognition and no one ever found it in his
or her interests to give it him. Many of the star Tuscan
enologists would have had much more limited success had they
and their clients not sought his help. Barbieri, a
viticultural consultant, oversees the planting and
management of vineyards. Starting this work thirty-five
years ago, he was one of the very first such consultants.
Still out in the Tuscan vineyards, day in and day out, he is
a storehouse of the wisdom of the land. He remains the only
active consulting viticulturalist of his
generation.

He was born in 1942 at
Greve-in-Chianti, one of the important wine towns in the
Chianti Classic zone. As far as he knows, his ancestors were
Chiantigiani (had ancient ancestral origins in the heart of
the Chianti Classico area). He studied agriculture in
Florence at the city’s technical institute for agriculture,
where he selected viticulture as his specialization. His
first job was as a technician in the University of
Florence’s experimental farm. After working there for
several years, he became director of Isole e Olena, a large
farm in Barberino-Val d’Elsa with vineyards in the Chianti
Classico wine zone. He transformed that farm’s patchwork of
small vineyards, once farmed by hand, into larger modern
ones that could be farmed by machine.

This was a transformation
that was occurring all over Tuscany. The sharecropping
system that had existed for centuries suddenly collapsed.
Landholders were left with a farm management system based on
the management of small pieces of land by sharecropping
families. The system of land management had to change. The
vineyards had to be totally reconstructed and replanted.
Most of the sharecroppers had packed up their belongings and
left for factory jobs in the cities. The resulting lack of
farm labor necessitated that the new vineyards be designed
for mechanization. European Economic Community funds
designated for agricultural improvements made the
reconstruction possible.

It was in this era of rapid
change that Barbieri spread his wings as a viticulturalist.
At Isole e Olena he had the good fortune to come in contact
with Giacomo Tachis, enologist at the Marchesi Antinori wine
company. The De Marchi family, the Piedmontese owners of the
estate, had sold most of their grapes to Antinori. Tachis,
Piedmontese by birth, became a friend of Barbieri and the De
Marchi family. Isole e Olena bottled its first wine with the
1969 vintage. As of 1972, Barbieri left Isole e Olena and
began to consult for individual estates, principally in
Chianti. It was a radical move because in those days an
agronomist typically worked for a large farm as an
agricultural manager. Barbieri kept in close contact with
Tachis. It was in the interest of Marchesi Antinori for
Tachis to recommend skilled viticulturalists and enologists
where Antinori purchased either grapes or wine. For this
reason, Tachis recommended Barbieri to many farms in need of
viticultural help. During the 197Os, 198Os and 199Os, Tachis
also worked closely with another agronomist, senior to
Barbieri, Dottor Carlo Modi. Modi was an agronomist who had
worked for most of his life as a functionary within the
agricultural sector. As Modi began to retire in the late
‘9Os and the first years of the new century, Barbieri took
over many of his clients. As a consequence, Barbieri’s work
became even more closely connected to Tachis. Barbieri,
often aided by his daughter, Elisabetta, collaborates with
other consulting enologists, including Giorgio Marone,
Federico Staderini, Gabriella Tani, and Graziana Grassini.
In the past, he worked at estates such as Fonterutoli and
Castello di Brolio, which have played crucial roles in the
development of the Tuscan wine industry. His present clients
are Fattoria di Pisignano (San Casciano Val di Pesa), Villa
Branca (Mercatale Val di Pesa, Chianti Classico), Villa
Caffaggio (Panzano-in-Chianti, Chianti Classico), Marco
Felluga’s estate, Azienda Agricola San Niccolo’ a Pisignano
(San Casciano Val di Pesa, Chianti Classico), Casa Sola
(Barberino, Chianti Classico), Rocca delle Macie
(Castellina-in-Chianti, Chianti Classico), Scopone
(Montalcino), Fattoria di Magliano (Scansano), Tenuta di
Risseccoli (Greve-in-Chianti, Chianti Classico), Azienda
Agricola Regionale Alberese (on the coast just north of
Grosseto) and one estate, Illuminati, in Abruzzo in Southern
Italy. He has also worked in Tuscany’s Bolgheri zone as well
as on the island of Elba and Giglio off the coast of
Tuscany.

Barbieri is not proud of
the 196Os and 197Os reconstruction of the Tuscan vineyards.
The European Economic Community via the Italian political
system threw money into a Tuscany not prepared to use it
wisely. Decisions were made which had no solid base in
research or past practice. At that time, “wine was made in
the cellar”. Viticulture was not held in high esteem. The
volume of a harvest, not its quality, was the measure of its
success. The nursery industry was neither organized nor
prepared to supply the trade with the large amounts of
quality rootstocks, scions and grafts. Landowners selected
vineyard expositions out of expediency or fancy, not out of
an interest to take advantage of sun exposure, elevation or
soil suitability. Agricultural functionaries recommended
rootstocks, particularly Kober 5BB, which encouraged too
much vigor and production. The vine varieties were planted
in proportions recommended by Chianti laws of the day, which
included white grapes and far too much Canaiolo. Clonal
selections of Sangiovese did not yet exist. In order to
propagate more vines, nurseries used whatever budwood that
they could get their hands on. Thankfully the sharecroppers
who had farmed the land, buried manure in the soil. Farmers,
therefore, generally did not apply large amounts of
synthetic fertilizers. Tuscany also has a dry growing season
which limits fungus diseases except for oidium. Hence
fungicide use has not been excessive. Because of these
conditions, Barbieri feels that Tuscany’s soil has been less
abused than those of other regions of Europe.

In the 198Os, the requests
for high quality wines increased dramatically. The wine
style desired by a new generation of consumers emphasized
darker wine color, more alcohol and softer tactile
sensations. Since the Chianti vineyards had not been set up
to produce raw material that could produce this end result,
Barbieri and others like him had to develop strategies that
essentially enabled average vineyards to produce excellent
grapes. The methods he and others employed were shorter
pruning and reduced fertilization. At the beginning of the
decade, Barbieri and others used mass selection to propagate
the better clonal material within a farm. Later in the
decade, they employed the more scientific method of clonal
selection. The characteristics they sought included the
ability of the vine to ripen early in the season, to have
berries hanging loosely within each bunch, to produce small
berries, and to give a reduced production per plant.
Barbieri visited French wine regions several times during
the 198Os. Some of what he saw he integrated into his work.
Other improvements such as denser vine spacing had to wait
until the next major replanting. The 198Os was a preparation
period for Barbieri and others like him for the major
replanting of the 199Os and early 2OOOs.

Because a winegrape
vineyard has to be replaced every 25 to 3O years, the
vineyards planted in the 196Os and 197Os were ready to be
replaced by the 199Os and early 2OOOs. Barbieri and the
remnants of his generation now had the chance to right the
wrongs of the past. Because the market had moved towards
higher quality wines, quality not quantity of production
became the fundamental goal of reconstruction. Vineyards
were reconstructed from the subsoil up so as to provide good
drainage, a loose subsoil, higher vine density, lower vigor
rootstocks and clones of varieties that assured less
vigorous growth, looser bunches and smaller berries.
Horizontal cordon was introduced because it was a better fit
for mechanization. The white grapevines were not replaced.
The percentage of Canaiolo in the vineyards was also
reduced. Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot and more recently
Syrah were planted for use in Chianti and IGT wines.
Barbieri and others tried to minimize the impact of the
reconstruction. Barbieri is proud to have been involved
throughout Tuscany during the second
reconstruction.

At the end of my interview,
Barbieri took me into the vineyards of Villa Branca where he
showed me the difference between the vineyards planted
during the 196Os and ‘7Os, those of the 199Os, and those
most recently planted. Villa Branca is in Mercatale Val di
Pesa in the northern part of Chianti Classico. The estate
contains about 6O hectares of vineyards. Its terrain is of
the sort commonly found in the San Casciano area. The soil
varies from place to place in its proportions of sand, lime
and clay, and is of roughly the same chemical and physical
composition as the soils in the alto Chianti, that part of
Chianti Classico to the south which has higher elevations
and rockier soils. The soils were founded during the
Pliocene period when this part of Chianti Classico was
underwater. Hence the albarese stone (a calcareous stone
that, when given a whack, splits along convex and concave
contours) has been rounded by centuries of movement. The
Alto Chianti soils were formed during the Miocene period.
The land since that time has been above sea level. Hence the
rocks have sharp edges due to erosive splitting. The
vineyards of Antinori abut those of Villa Branca and
Tignanello, the famous Antinori vineyard, is not far away.
Barbieri told me that although the Alto Chianti had growing
conditions ideal for Sangiovese, Antinori had showed
everyone that top-notch vineyard management could make wines
every bit as good, if not better, in the Mercatale area. The
reputation of the wines from the San Casciano and Mercatale
areas has suffered because viticultural expertise of others
lagged behind that of other areas of Chianti Classico. At
Villa Branca, Barbieri had been hired, upon Tachis’s advice
to the Branca family.

At the end of my tour of
the Villa Branca vineyards, I mentioned to Barbieri that
despite the great investments of the owners and the talent
of Barbieri and Tachis, the wines of Villa Branca were good,
not great. Barbieri conceded, “The wines of Villa Branca are
not yet great. It takes time – years – to improve the
vineyards to the point at which they can produce great
grapes. The new vineyards are only 3-years-old. In the next
few years, when the grapes of these vineyards end up in the
wine, you will see the improvement that viticulture has had
on the wine.”

The job of enologists is to
preserve the quality of the grapes that viticulturalists
bring to them. But the work of viticulturalists happens too
slowly for we journalists to notice. We take great notice
only of the “new”, and we write about the “news”. Despite
this tendency, when the first glasses of great Villa Branca
reach the lips of journalists and the public, I hope that
Valerio Barbieri will get some credit.