IL CABERLOT di CARNASCIALE

Podere Il Carnasciale is situated in the southern Chianti mountains in the Vald'Arno di Sopra region of Tuscany, thirty kilometers north of Siena and Arezzo and sixty kilometers south of Florence.

True to Wolf Rogosky’s idea and vision, the secluded hilltop estate is run today by Moritz Rogosky, together with his mother Bettina and daughter Carla-Elle, and the oenologist and technical director Marco Maffei.

The variety Caberlot was first identified in the late 1960´s in an abandoned vineyard near Padua by the agronomist Dr. Remigio Bordini. While the grape has the organoleptic characteristics of Cabernet Franc, its ampelographic profile is closer to that of Merlot, leading us to assume that the loose-cluster Caberlot is a natural, spontaneous crossing of the two varieties.

After hearing of this discovery Wolf met Bordini and the enologist Vittorio Fiore in the early 1980’s, and following the bitter frost of 1985 set out to produce a great wine of truly unique character. The first vineyard Carnasciale covering 0,3 hectares was planted in 1986 in high density, with 11.000 vines per hectare. The autochtonous terroir, rocky and on slope, had seen nothing but the culture of olive trees for over two hundred years. Two further plots were planted in 1999 and 2004, and Selva and Vincaie are now in production.

In order to broaden our knowledge of the Caberlot variety, the Perelli and Volpaie vineyards were planted in 2010 and 2013, for a total vineyard surface today of about 4,5 hectares.

Carnasciale: 0,3 ha planted in 1986 on sandstone and rock, limestone and clay, south-east facing slope, gobelet-trained

Selva: 0,8 ha planted in 1999 on Loess, cordon-trained

Vincaie: 1,0 ha planted in 2004 on shell-based sand and clay, south-west facing slope, cordon-trained

Perelli: 0,9 ha planted in 2010 on shell based sand and rock, south-west facing slobe, guyot-trained

Volpaie: 1,6 ha planted in 2013 on Loess, north-east facing slope

The Caberlot variety is cultivated exclusively at Podere Il Carnasciale and we are what one could call an ‘haute couture’ winery, where extreme care and craft go to detail, precision and quality. Our work in the vineyards is carried out with the utmost respect for the soil and the plants, entirely by hand. Pruning, budding and leaf-management are all done manually, and we do not use chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides. All eventual sanitary treatments are natural and organic, and the grounds are labored only when necessary, with partial greening.

Our harvest begins late in September with perfect phenolic ripeness of the grapes, lasts about 15-20 days and is done entirely by hand. A severe selection is carried out in the vineyard, grape by grape, with the motto ‘what you would not put into your mouth will not go into the wine’. The small baskets are cooled until they are brought to the cellar and our yields do not exceed 25-30hl per hectare.

The grapes are de-stemmed and gently fermented in small stainless steel vats (8-10hl) with temperatures kept below 28-29°C. The cap formed by the mash is broken twice daily, manually with a wooden cross, in order to favor the contact between the skins and the juice.

In the cantina we believe in minimally invasive, hands-off enology, allowing for the fruit, the vintage and the distinctive characteristics of each vineyard to play the leading roles. Elegance, aromatic precision, typicity and dynamic tension are what we look for in our wines.

The grapes from each vineyard and each day of harvest are fermented individually and the use of sulfites is kept to a strict minimum. The malolactic fermentations in barrel are followed by aging in carefully selected french fûts and barriques of which 50-60% are new, two-thirds Tronçais oak and one third Allier and Vosges, principally sourced in Burgundy. We raise the wines in wood for a period of 22 months, racking them only once.

A tasting of each barrel is conducted in May, prior to the bottling in September, to select the most complex, structured and aromatic wines for IL CABERLOT and the more immediate and approachable wines, to be labelled as CARNASCIALE.

IL CABERLOT is bottled unfined and unfiltered mainly in magnums, which mature for a further 16 months in our cellar prior to their release. The CARNASCIALE is a true second wine, having seen the same vinification and care as IL CABERLOT, and is released 6 months after having been filled in 0,75l bottles.

We produce about 3.500 magnums and since the 2013 vintage 1.500 demi-magnums 'SOMMELLERIA' of IL CABERLOT, all hand-numbered by Bettina, and 6-8.000 bottles of CARNASCIALE, with 1988 being the first vintage for the first wine and 2000 the first vintage for the second.

OTTANTADUE, a new wine produced from estate-grown Sangiovese grapes, was launched in 2016 and represents our take on the iconic grape of Tuscany in the context of the recently revived Vald'Arno di Sopra DOC, the first appellation to soon be certified 100% organic.

While Italy represents an important market for our wines, allocations of IL CABERLOT and CARNASCIALE go out to 25+ countries around the globe.