La Bella Toscana: Casse Basse di Soldera

In Italy, much like the U.S., sometimes in order to gain access to things, you gotta either know someone or you gotta pay somebody. There were a couple of wineries that we really wanted to visit, but we couldn't arrange visits on our own. For these, we arranged a tour with Cellar Tours, which is sort of a luxury tour service. Giancarlo, our driver, showed up to pick us up in the morning and we made our way to the first winery of the day: Casse Basse di Soldera. Pardon my "terribleness" with names, but we were lead around the estate by the daughter of Soldera. We started in the gardens, which are maintained by her mother. She explained that Soldera is a "natural" producer.

As a little lesson, in Europe, there is an abundance of wine that would be considered to be produced "organically" in the United States. Because of Europeans' belief in the importance of "terroir,"many producers have always been reluctant to add pesticides and other chemicals to the vines, believing that it doesn't allow for the natural expression of the grape that the "terroir" would produce. Daughter Soldera explained that they like their wine to be called "natural" instead of "organic" because "organic" is too new of a word to describe a process that is very historical. Anyhoo, "natural" wine production involves adding only minimal amounts of sulfur when necessary and sometimes means that no unnatural yeast is added during the fermentation process. Some of the must from the first fermentation is saved and can be added if necessary as "natural yeast."

The garden, she is explained, is therefore the most logical place to begin our tour. They purposely grow a variety of trees and flowers to attract different birds, insects and other of nature's creatures (except porcupines, she pointed out, because they dig holes and ruin the crops). They believe in a balanced ecosystem and work hard to give back to the environment what they take away from it.

We then moved to their production center, which was built in 2001. The basement was constructed such that it "breaths" and lets natural air in. We got to taste an '07 Brunello and an '04 Brunello straight from the cask. Soldera only produces Brunello (which is a riserva by virtue of its being aged 4-5 years in barrels (standards call for 3 years for a riserva)), but they don't call it a "riserva."