Beautiful salmon color and with a pleasant aroma of wild strawberries, ripe apples, pink grapefruit and roses. Soft on the tongue with a crisp freshness.
2022 began with a mild winter without much rain. The first shoots popped out in early April, several days later than in 2021 due to lower temperatures. May brought plenty of warmth and sunshine, which accelerated the vines’ flowering in the second half of the month. The heat continued throughout the summer without large amounts of rain, although with a few significant rain showers in August, which allowed the grapes to ripen. The harvest began in the last week of August, earlier than in 2021.
Part of the harvested grapes were de-stemmed, crushed and very carefully pressed. The second part was de-stemmed, crushed and left to macerate for several hours in stainless steel tanks to best extract aromas from the grape skins. The resulting must was cooled to a temperature of 10 °C to promote natural clarification. After 48 hours, the wine was transferred to stainless steel vats, where alcoholic fermentation took place at a temperature not exceeding 15 °C. Giardino was aged in stainless steel tanks at a constant temperature of 10 °C to preserve the wine’s aroma.
About Antinori
Italian Marchesi Antinori is 26 generations of absolutely world-class wine history. 630 years is almost hard to understand when it comes to one and the same family of wine producers. But Antinori can trace its history all the way back to 1385, when Giovanni di Piero Antinori was admitted to the ‘Arte Fiorentina dei Vinattieri’, the order of winemakers in Florence. Today, Marchesi Antinori is a member of Primum Familiae Vini – an association of 12 of the most prestigious, family-owned wineries worldwide. It doesn’t get much bigger than this. Already in Renaissance Florence, the Marchesi Antinori was a very successful wine house, and Allesandro Antinori was one of the richest residents of the city, which was the center of the time’s great thinkers and artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and for writers such as Dante Alighieri, who wrote his Divine Comedy. Marchesi Antinori is to this day a family-owned company, where values such as enormous care, focus on even tiny details and the desire to constantly become more skilled lie under the skin. Through 26 generations, the family has shaped Italian winemaking with innovative and sometimes bold decisions, but always with a fundamental respect for tradition.
In 1974 Marchesi Antinori launched his first Tignanello on the market, one of the first so-called `Super Toscanes’. The wine shook up the Italian wine world and changed what could be done in the boot country. Created on a blend of Sangiovese and the then ‘forbidden’, foreign grape varieties Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, Piero Antinori was one of the great innovators in a brand new wave of super-Tuscans, which one dared to create without discriminating against old rules and standards. Today, Tignanello is considered to be one of the most important wines in the entire wine history of Italy. Antinori thus already has many more chapters in its history than the vast majority of wineries. But the final chapter is still far from being written.
You will be assured of this when you drive up in front of the distinguished winery. Here, everything is done tastefully, from the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Giovanni Della Robbia on display to the lighting in front of the elevator, which leads up to the small restaurant overlooking the vineyards. Although the old roots play a big role in the family’s daily work and in the visions for the house and each individual wine, it has never put an end to Antinori’s always innovative spirit, as the example of Tignanello shows. They research new local and international grape varieties and experiment with alternative cultivation methods, fields at varying heights, fermentation methods, different casks for barrel aging, etc. Today, Albiera Antinori is the director of Marchesi Antinori with the support of the sisters Allegra and Alessia. Their father, Marchese Piero Antinori, is Honorary President of the family business.
