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Can ‘rolling back’ counter climate change in Tuscan vineyards?

Louis Thomas discovers how one producer in Montalcino is using an increasingly popular canopy management technique to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Ferrini inspecting his Sangiovese.

Hosting the first London tasting of Giodo in six years, when the brand made its international debut, founder Carlo Ferrini did not begin with an ebullient celebration of the wines being presented, but rather a comment on how growing conditions have become increasingly challenging: “In the last years, climate change has been considerable.”

A consultant oenologist who had worked across the length and breadth of Italy, it was in 2000 that Ferrini first identified the parcel of land in the southwest of Montalcino where he would plant the Sangiovese for Giodo. He would purchase the plot in 2002, and today Giodo’s Montalcino vineyard covers six hectares.

“To find the best vineyards, we want to follow the vineyards in each part of the season, and find the right moment to harvest,” he noted. “It’s easy to say this, but in practice it’s truly difficult to do it in the vineyard.”

Ferrini noted that over the course of his long career in wine, he has not seen growing season extremes like those of today: “Not just in Tuscany, but in Italy and across Europe, there has been major climate change, both with temperature and rainfall, and it is hard to manage this change. It’s not easy to find a solution – sometimes there is no rain, and on some days there instead we have 50, 80, 100cm of rain.”

Indeed, sudden deluges have been a particular problem in Tuscany, with Bolgheri being battered with 200mm of rain, about a third of its total annual rainfall, in just a few hours in September.

Another particular climate-related concern is the loss of diurnal range, the temperature difference between day and night which, if sufficiently wide, can help grapes to retain acidity in even the warmest vintages.

If we take September 2020, around the time of harvesting, for example, when temperatures in the day were around 30°C, plummeting to 7°C at night, that is a range which gave the Sangiovese for Giodo’s Brunello di Montalcino a certain elegance.

However, Ferrini noted that the Tuscan nights are getting noticeably hotter, even compared to just a few years ago: “Last year we saw temperatures of 20°C at night and 30°C or more in the day!”

Such hot conditions during the night put the vines at a greater risk of being overly stressed, and, to crudely simplify it, cause the plants to prioritise their own survival over the production of fruit. Vines, like viticulturists, need rest.

Ferrini hastened to add that despite these “disasters”, Giodo’s 2024 harvest was “marvellous”.

Cutting your losses

“The solution is to reduce water loss through evaporation,” explained Ferrini.

One technique in the vineyard which Ferrini swears by is ‘accapannamento’, derived from ‘accapannare’ – an infinitive verb which defies a clean, direct translation in English, though loosely means ‘to weave the canopy’.

Comparable to the technique of ‘tressage’, accapannamento involves rolling back the shoots from the top of the canopy and effectively plaiting them around the wire. In theory, this method manages the canopy without the need to trim, reducing vegetative growth of the spurred cordon-trained Sangiovese vines, and keeping the foliage nice and neat.

Riccardo Ferrari, technical director and the partner of Ferrini’s daughter, estate manager Bianca Ferrini, said that the use of accapannamento was to avoid “wounding” the vine by cutting it.

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Tuscany’s increasingly irregular rainfall also makes accapannamento an attractive technique.

“Usually I cut when I’m in a region with a rainy season that is the same each year, because it will grow again,” revealed Carlo Ferrini. “But in Tuscany or the south of Italy, if the rainy season is not constant, if I cut, then it will stress the vine and the fruit won’t mature correctly.”

“Young leaves are fundamental for maturation – if I cut them, and they don’t grow again, it’s a problem and we don’t arrive at full ripeness,” Ferrini added.

Those leaves also provide shade to help further protect the bunches from the sun, though detractors of the technique argue that defoliation removes parts which the vine sinks ‘too much’ energy into.

As the below video of accapannamento being done in Giodo’s vineyard demonstrates, it is a fairly ‘hands on’ technique, meaning that it is not an option for every producer, especially given the labour shortages that many Tuscan wineries are encountering.

Giodo is not the only one in Tuscany to practice this technique. Fattoria Poggerino in Chianti Classico also uses accapannamento to control canopy growth.

Since 2016, Giodo has also cultivated Nerello Mascalese and Carricante on the north side of Sicily’s Mount Etna. These vines are also managed with accapannamento, though on albarello, or the low bush system. Albarello training is what gives Giodo’s single varietal Sicilian wine range its name: Alberelli di Giodo.

Vintage variation

Dry farming is the norm in Montalcino, with irrigation only permitted during exceptionally hot years – asked if Giodo is agitating for an extension of when additional water is allowed, Bianca Ferrini told db: “We are against irrigation – for the future, I don’t know, but now? No.”

“For the moment, we work the land during the winter so when the rain arrives the land can retain water, which is better for the summer,” she added, noting that the Montalcino vineyard is also cover cropped with legumes, a further measure which aids water retention. “We cover crop, we are organic, we are sustainable – we put manure in the vineyard every three years. We were organic in the vineyard from the beginning, and with the new cellar we built in 2020, so we were organic there from 2021.”

Giodo’s 2020 vintage of Brunello di Montalcino, due to be released early this year, was the wine chosen to cap off the tasting, following on from a vertical of the 2012 to 2019 vintages (excluding the 2014, a divisive year for Tuscany as a whole) and of the Alberelli di Giodo wines.

“2020 represents a monumental moment for us – a new cellar, a new harvest, and a new technical director, Riccardo,” opined Carlo Ferrini.

“I think 2020 was a beautiful vintage, because finally Giodo had its own home,” added Ferrari. “It could work 100% following the times of Giodo, we didn’t have to share space and equipment.”

By contrast, Ferrari said that he hoped to “never see another year like 2023”. Given that such extremes of summer heat are only going to become more common in Tuscany, the quality of vintages such as 2023, once they are eventually released, will be the true test of the effectiveness of what Giodo is doing in its vineyards.

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