A season of patience: why Marco waited eight days

By the last week of September, every other estate on our side of the valley had picked. We hadn't. The Sangiovese looked ready — colour was good, the birds had started paying attention — but the seeds still tasted green when we chewed them, and Marco doesn't trust a grape until the seeds agree with the skin.

So we waited. Eight days, to be exact, while the forecast wobbled between fine and worrying and half the team asked, gently, whether we were sure.

We were sure, mostly. Marco walked the rows every morning with a handful of grapes in his pocket, tasting as he went. What he was after wasn't sugar — the sugar had been fine for a week — but tannin ripeness, the thing that decides whether a wine feels rustic or complete.

On the eighth day, he came back from the ridge and just said "now." We picked through the night to beat a change in weather, and by dawn the press was full and the cellar smelled the way it only does for about three weeks a year.

It's a small decision that nobody outside the estate ever sees. But it's the difference between a wine that's merely good and one that tastes, eventually, like it was worth the wait.