It is a method handed down by the founder Giuseppe Olivini, a work approach that focuses on the protection of the territory, of the land itself and consequently of its products.
Since 2018 Agricoltura Ragionata®, is a registered trademark, identifies our desire to intervene as little as possible with invasive practices: both in the countryside and in the cellar.
For almost twenty years now, the company has made a targeted use of plant protection products, avoiding chemicals or preservatives when not necessary and resorting instead to technology, recreating the perfect conditions for the preservation of the wine and its organoleptic qualities.
We firmly believe that the more nature is respected, the more it reacts to difficulties without excessive human intervention.
Here are some practical examples of how we act in the vineyard:
- The fight against a difficult parasite such as the grape moth is no longer a problem for us: we avoid oviposition in the vineyards by placing pheromones there in early spring which cause what is known in jargon as “sexual confusion”. The males of the moth are confused with the female pheromone in order to block its reproduction.
- Mowing is always done with tall grass and in alternate rows; by acting in this way we avoid the onset of primary infections by downy mildew, furthermore the tall grass acts as a refuge for all those “useful” insects because they predators of insects otherwise harmful to the vine.
- A very important practice that we implement in our vineyards is the cultivation of green manure, this ancient technique involves the contribution of organic matter to the soil in the most natural way possible, that is, by making the grass specially sown grow inside the row and then bury it obtaining a double effect of enriching the soil and aerating the roots, restoring the vineyard to a vegetative-productive balance.
- The fertilizations that are necessary for the production of the plants are made with organic fertilizer: above all manure of bovine origin which, in addition to providing the nutrients that the plant needs, revitalizes the microbiological profile of the soil.
- In the presence of particular atmospheric events (hailstorms, frosts, drought) it may happen that, despite the care dedicated to cultivation, the plants go into stress: in these cases we intervene with products derived from algae, these revitalize the vineyards avoiding the intervention with fertilizers chemists.
All these precautions and many others still allow us to keep our land alive and in full shape, which is increasingly populated by insects, earthworms, snails, and all those living beings that contribute to increasing the biodiversity of the vineyard ecosystem.
“A good winemaker should enter the vineyards on tiptoe, disturbing as little as possible everything that nature alone can give us.”
With Agricoltura Ragionata® we do not mean only the care we dedicate to the countryside, but also all those processes of the production cycle in the cellar that lead us to our final product:
- Already at the beginning of the vinification we have foreseen a 100 m2 cold room: this allows us to store the freshly harvested grapes at a temperature of 25-28 °C, to cool them before pressing them to avoid spontaneous fermentation deriving from the breaking of the berries and therefore to reach the tremoggia with the grapes at a temperate suitable for the procedure.
- We have foreseen a tube-in-tube exchanger between the destemmer and the press, in order to manage the temperature in an even more peculiar way, also because 20% of our product is then processed by cryomaceration, an operation which allows us an excellent extraction of the olfactory and gustatory properties of the variety in question.
- Our wine vessels, suitable for refining the product, include devices such as the cooling system, which allows us to better preserve the product and its properties.
- Then we have the presence on each steel barrel of a nitrogen system that allows us to blow it inside the barrel, eliminating the air, to avoid oxidation of the product or worse, the formation of mould.
- Another shrewdness that distinguishes us is that of supporting the natural conservation of the product: we decide to keep it inside the steel barrels in the presence of yeasts and lees that act as natural preservatives, we then proceed to mix the mass so that all the product benefits.
To conclude, with Agricoltura Ragionata® we intend to express the concept that agriculture is already in itself one of the human activities closest to nature, before intervening with any action of interference, man must carry out profound reasoning in order to interfere with the as little as possible and benefit from its cultivation, thus ensuring coexistence with the vineyard ecosystem of which it becomes a part.