Details
COLLECAPRETTA - LAUTIZIO 2019
TASTING NOTES
A natural wine from Umbria, Italy! Cherry grapes. A wine of great shelf life that combines a noble vinosity with a graceful and peasant bearing. The vinous tone of cherry and violet is flanked by an ancient cellar perfume. An all-round wine par excellence, served chilled, it never pulls back and gives that refined thirst-quenching sensation typical of the wines of the past.
VINTAGE 2019
ORIGIN Umbria, Italy
MAKER Collecapretta
GRAPES 100% Ciliegiolo
ABOUT
Red wine made from 100% Ciliegiolo from vineyards ranging from 15 to 50 years old. The must ferments for 10 days on the skins with indigenous yeasts in open conical trunk vats without temperature control; then it is drawn off and placed in cement tanks where it rests all winter. No sulphur is added at any stage, and there is no filtering or fining.
The Mattioli family has been in the tiny hamlet the Roman’s once called Collecapretta (hill of the goats) since the 1100’s. For generations the Mattioli have been cultivating the rugged hillsides of southern most Umbria. Located just outside of Spoleto, today’s farm is a scant 8 hectares in total; 2 planted to a mixture of local olives trees, 2 ha of farro and other ancient grains and ~ 4 ha of indigenous old vines. Vittorio Mattioli, his wife Anna and their daughter Annalisa live together with 3 generations of their family inside the tiny village overlooking the valley below with the high Apennine Mountains and Gran Sasso looming in the background. The elevation is some 500+ meters and the soils are a mixture of calcium and iron rich clay with outcroppings of tufo and travertine limestone. Though the total production of Collecapretta is only some 8000 bottles in a good year, the family chooses to vinify many different cuvee’s in hopes of expressing the vineyard and grape varieties at their best.
All the wines are made in much the same fashion: natural fermentation takes place in open-top cement containers without temperature control or sulphur additions. The wines then age for various amounts of time in glass-lined cement vats or fiberglass tank before bottling in synchrony with the waning lunar cycle. There is no sulphur used at any point in the winemaking process. All farming in the vineyards is completely natural, only composts made from their own animals are used to aid vine health.
