Sant'Agnese. Vermentino L'Etrange

IGT Toscana
Grape  Vermentino

2018 - Spice, wild honey and rose aromas, deep and creamy with lush, rich aromatic fruit, mint, ginger and bitter peach. Expansive wine, generous and powerful.. 14%

Link to Sant'Agnese Producer page

Vermentino is a grape that is fast becoming the darling of Coastal Tuscany thanks to its relative immunity to heat and ability to produce fresh, characterful white wines, sometimes against all the odds.
Paolo has opted for two very particular Corsican clones which he feels gives a broader and more interesting spectrum of flavours. The choice was unusual and has paid off, the unforeseen bonus has been that whilst Vermentino makes excellent fresh, young, simple wines, it also has the potential to mature over a great many years, maintaining its freshness and developing an almost Riesling-like character. There is a limited pool of great white wine to call on in Tuscany and Paolo has taken a step towards rectifying this.
The vineyards are guyot trained, planted at a density of 5000 plants per hectare on the flatter part of the estate which is stony and has deeper clays. The harvest is manual, in the last week of September and start of October. Each individual grape for this wine was selected by Paolo and his father, they filled a single small cask. The grapes were chilled to 3°C, no sulphur added and the fermentation started spontaneously using only native yeasts with no temperature control. The wine remained in this cask, with the uncrushed grapes for 21 months. In May 2019 the wine was bottled without filtration or the addition of any sulphites.