VERNACCIA AT MONTENIDOLI

Vernaccia: San Gimignano’s classic white wine. It’s an ancient, unique wine, with rich traditions and a distinct personality that sets it apart from the whites made with the vines currently in fashion. Indeed, many of San Gimignano’s winemakers have bowed to market pressures and added other grapes, altering and thus betraying Vernaccia’s true character.

The soil around the City of the Fair Towers consists of marine sediments and is highly calcareous; up to the shoreline, in other words to the ancient sea level, mid-way up the hills, it’s the perfect terrain for great white wines.

The climate of the Tuscan countryside is temperate, and dry in the summer. It’s a perfect climate for great red wines, and indeed our valleys are renowned for them. We have always considered Vernaccia to be the red of white wines: the grapes may not yield highly fruited bouquets, but the wines are vigorous and long-lived: mineral wines of great power and structure that profit from wood and display excellent aging capacity, with their bouquets gaining interesting secondary aromas with the passage of time in bottle.

Depending upon how the grapes are fermented and aged, different wines made from the same Vernaccia grapes offer very different flavors and sensations in the glass. Indeed, the three Vernaccia produced at Montenidoli are quite distinct, accompanying specific kinds of foods and being suited to specific occasions:

• Vernaccia Tradizionale:
  Fermented on the skins, it is traditional and ideal for olive oil-based Mediterranean cuisine.
• Vernaccia Fiore:
  Matured on the lees, it's refined and elegant, and perfect with haute cuisine.
• Vernaccia Carato:
  12 months in wood make it a meditation wine, in the manner of the great reds.