Blending season: notes from the cellar

Blending week is the quietest, most exacting week in our cellar calendar. For seven days, Marco and a small tasting panel move barrel to barrel with a spit bucket and a notebook, trying to work out which lots deserve to become Rosso, which stay separate for a future single-vineyard idea, and which get set aside entirely.

There's no formula for it. Two barrels of the same Cabernet, from vines thirty metres apart, can taste different enough to change a blend's whole personality. One might bring structure, another perfume, another almost nothing on its own but everything once it's mixed in with the rest.

We taste blind whenever we can, numbering barrels rather than naming them, so a reputation from a good vintage doesn't quietly influence this year's decision. It slows things down, and it's saved us from a few decisions we'd have regretted.

By the end of the week there's a final blend on paper — usually five or six barrels' worth of proportions — and a strange kind of relief in the cellar. The wine still has a year of ageing ahead of it, but its shape, at least, has been decided.