More marked by warmth there’s a certain chunkiness at the heart, under the elegance. It’s floral, with notes of roses, supple and silky, with herbs, a hint of strawberry to come good acidity backed by some chewy tannin. It’s a mini-me, sold at 35–37% of the price of Masseto, and containing 10–15% of Cabernet Franc. This is the estate’s second wine, of which the first vintage was 2017. Though I would hate to think that somebody could pinpoint when the new winery appeared.” “The new winery helps here, and I’m clear that if you can build a winery after you have experience of the wine, you have a clearer idea of what you want. That means less extraction, though not necessarily less maceration. “You have to be brave enough to get big rich fruit,” says Heinz, “but you have to stop in time to prevent it being overpowering and rustic.” Winemaking is about doing just enough to get optimum texture without rusticity. Now picking dates are more refined: “You normally have time to think about picking dates here, which is remarkable with Merlot, because it doesn’t normally give you much time.” The wine was a little chunkier before, a little less expressive. It was 2007 when he began to change the wine’s direction, point by point.

Masseto is of course firmly in the luxury-goods bracket, and one of my favorite quotes of all time is from a Napa grower who told me many years ago that “you don’t mess with luxury goods.” Heinz has been messing with Masseto, but in the most delicate of ways he arrived in 2005 to make Masseto and Ornellaia, and his changes have been aimed at greater precision and less intervention. “Masseto is a good way of learning to handle wild ferments,” he says. He likes wild ferments, clearly he just doesn’t want chaos. His position is that winemaking is not accidental, and his job is to guide the process. What of the idea that if plants cannot thrive without micro-fungi in the soil, if we cannot live without the micro-flora in our gut, if wine cannot be made without yeasts, then how can wine be only about the grape? He also doesn’t like the idea that flavor influence might come from anything other than the grape. Why? Well, he just finds it unconvincing it’s unproven, and his experience does not suggest that it’s true.

He’ll go on using wild yeasts “for as long as it works” and might go back to using them at Ornellaia, in the same controlled way.īut he’s skeptical of the idea that the yeast might be different in different vineyards and thus form part of the terroir. So far, says Heinz of the four years in which they have used wild yeasts, the dominant strain has been the same for three years and only different in the fourth. T he wine is fermented with natural yeasts, though they’re kept under supervision by the creation of a pied de cuve just before the harvest starts for real, just to make sure that the year’s yeasts aren’t going to go crazy.

Masseto wine price