Soldera

The history of the Soldera Case Basse® winery began in the early 1970s.
Gianfranco and Graziella Soldera nurtured a project to produce a high-quality natural wine and knew they could only achieve this if they found a terroir with certain essential features.

When they discovered Case Basse, they knew they had found what they were looking for: an enchanting estate, which lay uncultivated and abandoned at the time. Instinctively realising the potential of the place and bowled over by the beauty of the landscape, Gianfranco and Graziella decided to set up their winery here and planted the first vines between 1972 and 1973, carefully choosing the plots most suitable for growing Sangiovese.

It is thanks to the passion, dedication and care they devoted to this land that an extremely high-quality natural wine appreciated all over the world has been produced at Case Basse since the mid-1970s.

After Gianfranco Soldera passed away in February 2019, the family continued the business in full respect of the principles and founding values of Case Basse.

The excellence of the product according to nature, enhancing the ecosystem and garden, investments in studies and innovation and support for young researchers all make up the winery’s DNA.

Graziella Soldera, Monica and Paolo, Mauro and Valeria are strengthening this character today and will enhance it in future with renewed passion, each of them enriching it with their own personality.

The production philosophy that drove Gianfranco and Graziella Soldera’s project meant they could not forgo the search for a terroir with extraordinary characteristics, like the one they found at Case Basse: a hilly terrain, soil of volcanic origin, good drainage, rich in minerals but not very fertile; a dry climate with lots of sun; a pure and varied ecosystem.

From a production point of view, Soldera’s philosophy involved a completely natural approach to winegrowing.

At Case Basse the vines are tended to by hand without the use of weedkillers or any other chemical products. Also the harvest is done entirely by hand and the berries are selected one by one.

The winemaking process is completely natural and the wines age for long periods in large Slavonian oak barrels. This production method results in a very low annual production of extraordinary quality.

Case Basse’s natural context, combined with Gianfranco and Graziella Soldera’s great passion for vinegrowing and winemaking, enabled them to produce a unique wine, created for sociable moments, get-togethers and for the pleasure of drinking.

The land, the vineyards and the wines are subject to continuous study by the agriculture faculties of various universities. An electronic switchboard constantly monitors climate changes over the course of the year, reporting temperature, humidity and quantity of rain. Daily controls during the wine-making stage are performed by the microbiology department of the University of Florence. The same faculty studies and controls all phases of the production cycle, monitoring the wine’s disposition until the moment of consumption.

At Case Basse, the 10 hectares of vineyards are planted in a complex ecosystem, made up of a great variety of other plants, animals and insects. Agronomic management is based on maintaining biodiversity, through the skilful and balanced use of science, technology, culture and tradition.

Budbreak
From the beginning of April, when the first shoots appeared, we constantly monitored each vine together with experts in phytosanitary management of vineyards. The only plant protection products allowed are copper and sulphur, but only in the necessary quantities and respecting the vinegrowing ecosystem. Care, measure, devotion, consistency.

Shoot thinning and bunch thinning
Canopy management and bunch selection are essential operations for obtaining very high-quality grapes: this year shoot thinning and bunch thinning started early, during the first few days of May.

The shoots are never cut (“topped”) but sheaved above the plants on special frames. This practice has a dual function:

• to not alter the vine’s natural vigour;
• to create natural shade to protect the bunches, especially from excess heat during the hottest months.

Ripening
We also work on the precious bunches during the ripening stage, with a constant and well-thought-out selection to favour top fruit quality.

During the second half of August, we removed the basal leaves covering the bunches for better ventilation and lower stagnation of humidity: frequent rain could have encouraged fungal diseases.

And so, excess bunches were removed by hand, as well as those that were slightly damaged, and placed outside of the vine row to protect the healthy bunches.

Once bunches have been selected and hand-picked, they arrive at the cellar in small crates, the ideal container to prevent them from being crushed, and laid on the selection table, where they are selected by expert hands.

This is when the berries are separated from the stems. A conveyor belt carries the bunches to the vibrating destemmer, which gently detaches the berries and sorts them by size: unsuitable ones are discarded.

The intact berries are manually checked one last time on the selection belt. Specialised workers carry out the final selection, discarding unsuitable ones. Only the fruit that passes all these stages will go into the fermentation vat.

Our Sangiovese ferments in truncated-cone-shaped Slavonian oak vats of over 100 HL.

Spontaneous fermentation

This enables us to reduce human intervention on natural processes to a minimum:

• with spontaneous fermentation we don’t introduce any kind of commercial yeast to our environment;
• we constantly measure the temperature inside the vats using probes, without artificially interfering with the so-called “controlled temperature”.

Daily chemical and microbiological analyses, as well as monitoring the fermentation temperature, determine how and when to do pumping over.

Why is spontaneous fermentation important?
Spontaneous fermentation processes guarantee a high level of biological variety; it is the yeasts, in fact, that ferment sugars to produce alcohol, as well as all those molecules that form the sensory structure of a wine. The different species of yeasts that characterise spontaneous fermentation contribute to the chemical complexity of the wine. This is what takes place inside our vats.

Which yeasts and how many?
For the 2016 wine, the first stages of the spontaneous fermentation process were carried out by non-Saccharomyces yeasts (Kloeckera apiculata and Starmerella bacillaris), which reached about 3 million cells per millilitre. These yeasts are normally present on grapes and are high producers of glycerol, a substance that enhances the “body” of a wine, as well as esters which distinguish the bouquet.

From the fourth day of fermentation, the wine yeast par excellence, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, gained the upper hand (about 5% of alcohol in volume) and was able to complete fermentation of grape sugars. It reached a maximum population of about 90 million cells per millilitre.

The spontaneous fermentation process lasted about 2 weeks.

Turning malic acid, which is naturally present in wine, into lactic acid: it is with malolactic fermentation, carried out by lactic acid bacteria, that the wine takes on a softer taste and forms all those compounds that contribute to the natural maturation process of wine.

Malolactic fermentation of the 2016 wine began naturally, soon after devatting, and lasted for about 3 weeks. The dominant microbial species was Oenococcus oeni, the lactic acid bacteria that commonly carries out malolactic fermentation in wine.

Once the fermentation stage has come to an end, the wine is placed in large Slavonian oak barrels to age for about 45 months: it is a period of watchful waiting where we carried out chemical and microbiological analyses on a monthly basis and never observed any microbial activity or populations that might have led to irregularities.

Frequent controls significantly reduced human intervention: we only carried out racking and sulphiting when necessary, so as to keep our wine’s taste richness as intact as possible.

No chemicophysical pretreatment, no clarification and/or filtration when entering the bottle: in fact, the wine had stable values, both chemically and microbiologically.

Once bottled, it rested in the cellar for over 6 months before being marketed.

Some data at the time of bottling 

• Sulphite content about 30 mg/L of total SO2, much lower than the legal limit (maximum 150 mg/L);
• absence of glucose and fructose, the same for malic acid: a sign that alcoholic and malolactic fermentation were carried out perfectly – a guarantee of the excellent stability of the wine in the bottle;
• glycerol (which adds body and softness to the wine) with an average concentration of about 10 g/L: a high value;
• a marked ruby-red colour with garnet edges: perfectly consistent with what was expected from a wine made exclusively with Sangiovese grapes and aged for a long period of time.