As we are all in the Chianti area, we’d have to forget the past of why we’re here with Chianti Classico in the Chianti area. I think we have to take it from here and go on. My advice to anybody making decisions in this area, they’re more political decisions than anything else, would be to throw the whole area into one and just make Chianti, because in America, or in England, or wherever you go, actually nobody really knows. They understand it as Chianti and not necessarily as Chianti Classico or Chianti Siena. I would just call the whole thing Chianti and then go to subzones. You’ll have Chianti from Loro Ciuffenna, Chianti from Gaiole, Chianti from Panzano, a Chianti from here. It’s a big area and you’d have much more marketing clout if everybody got together.

I’m sort of traditionalist with a foot in modernism, I suppose. It depends on what you call modernism. I’m taking winemaking probably more from a Burgundian art than from anywhere else. We’re at 500 meters, so I’m lucky to be able to have grapes with acidity when we’re picking, even in hot vintages like 2015. I’m just playing around with long macerations. If you call that modern, then that’s what I’m doing. I’m doing long macerations and adding whole bunches to the fermentation. That’s what they used to do hundreds of years ago. I suppose that’s modern now. I don’t know.

We’re looking at an area which is full of woods and olive groves. You don’t have a whole lot of contiguous areas, like you do elsewhere where you may get 20, 50, 60, 100 thousand hectares of vineyard all in one go. It’s all interspersed. The wonderful thing about Chianti is, if you go over a hill you’ve got a vineyard in a place which tastes totally different to the next hill.

We’re standing now at 480 to 500 meters. We have a vineyard at 700 meters up on a hill over there, here it’s limestone and clay. If you go 50 meters in that direction, it’s just limestone and galestro, which is a sandstone slate. Everything changes whether you go 100 meters or you go two kilometers. Unfortunately, two days ago we had a big thunderstorm and the next door village got totally destroyed. We’re fine so far. That’s what happens. In this area, everything is different. Each vineyard speaks for itself.