A cellar built using only ancient construction techniques; from the relations among spatial dimensions, strictly following the Golden Ratio, to the use of natural clay bricks and a mortar made of lime. This building chases harmony and that’s given in return to the wine during its refining here for the first years of its life.
1:1,618033, this ratio is considered magical and has been used in architecture since 1500 BC, when Stonehenge was built. We can find it in the Athens’ Parthenon, as well as in Leonardo da Vinci’s art and even in the recent United Nations Secretariat Building in New York.
Furthermore, we can also find this ratio in the DNA molecules or in the shape of the spiral galaxies: I would say this a divine number and I consider it as a harmony bearer. That’s why I decided to build my cellar by meticulously following this model.
My son Ernesto Illy, who is an architect, realized the final project: it took 7 years for it to be designed and developed, and one more just for the authorization, since the jurisdiction in charge wanted to consult with the University of Florence to validate the cellar’s executive computations.
At a later stage, after 4 years, more than 750.000 bricks had been manually laid down only using a mortar made of lime, building without any contemporary design ideas; in other words, we wanted to avoid using cement because, in our humble opinion, it doesn’t “breathe” properly.
Moreover, we decided to avoid iron scaffolds not to create Faraday cages that, due to their electrical continuity, produce magnetic fields which would negatively influence the natural field of the soil on which the cellar has been built. Between the day in which we started thinking and imagining our cellar and 2015 (the year of its inauguration), 12 years have passed overall. It was totally worth it, because anybody who now enters this wine cathedral can strongly perceive the intense harmony that it radiates; and I know that even my wines can feel it.
It took almost one year to move the 15.000 square meters of dirt, where now our Bonsai vines are growing.
My childhood dreams of steering a dumper with six driving wheels and digging with a 30 tons’ Caterpillar became true. Hours and hours were spent in digging: I was having fun while saving on manpower.
In the end a big hammer was needed, because at 10 meters depth the soil is so compact that not even the brutal grab of the Caterpillar 300 could move it. Nevertheless, the authorities imposed on us a basement made of… reinforced concrete! Exactly what I wanted to avoid and that was not even necessary. “Seismic area”: that’s what they had been repeating to us.
At the same time, I was telling everybody: “Do you see all these castles around here? If this is really a seismic area, how many times should have they been rebuilt? They have been here since 1200 BC”.
However, before the law you can do nothing but being wrong, and I had to use reinforced concrete foundations.
Yet, we did not give up and we excogitated a trick to avoid the magnetic fields: we connected the iron wires of the reinforced concrete with some duct tape and plastic strapping, interrupting electrical continuity. Later on, we verified with a tester that no electrical fluxes were passing through a wire and the other.
Eureka!
Beppe Vargas hammered a pole in the centre of the clearing and pulled an iron wire 13 meters and 22 centimeters long: he named it “the compass”.
He poured the lime mortar on the concrete foundations and laid down the first brick.
Afterwards he measured the distance with the compass, so it was equal in both extremities of the brick: I will never forget it!
The cellar was finally being built. We started with the walls and then the centrings made of polystyrene, sustaining the vault.
Little by little the tunnel was being developed, one meter a day... when we were lucky.
When the walls reached the planned height, Beppe Vargas started walling up a 6 meters radius dome.
He came up with a stroke of genius I did not expect: he planted a 10m tall steel shaft again in the centre of the building.
At a later stage, using some ball bearings, he created another compass with the same bending radius of the dome. Imagine a thin curved pole, slightly touching the wall to be raised and reaching every single brick.
With this compass he could reach every single point and easily determine where every brick should be laid down.
There was a hidden beauty in seeing all those bricklayers pulling the compass for all the circumference of the dome, while six or seven of them were laying the bricks down in different areas.
Much harmony and a kind of magic spread clearly from the rhythm of the work and everyone could feel it.
With the harvest 2015 the cellar started to work: this was more than an exceptional year.
The weather was simply perfect. It was hot when needed and it rained the right amount of water when the soil became too dry. I welcomed this gift of Nature as a sign of good auspice for this new cellar.
The workers told me they worked very well there. On one hand, it seemed uncomfortable because it was downhill, but on the other hand it looked practical, as we had everything at our fingertips, and we could pour without using pumps. I feel they were happy to work in such a magical and harmonic environment.
Also our guests, joining numerously, feel this harmony almost by instinct. When reaching the Pantheon many of them remain enchanted by its shape and by its perfect acoustics. This is, in fact, a gift of Nature that we did not forecast while making the project.
One day Marco Geronimi and his son came into the Pantheon and they started singing a Baroque chant: their voice gave us goosebumps because it was reinforced by the echo inside the Pantheon
For this reason, I decided to call my friend Mauro Clementi, a specialist in sound systems. He creates loudspeakers of a fine quality: we also have a new project together.
I want a loudspeaker made by Mauro in the centre of the Pantheon, as to spread the finest Classical music. As the experiment made by Masaru Emoto demonstrates, water is sensible to music.
Wine, since it is made mostly by water, will then become even more harmonious.
Visiting ancient sites, also in this region, I observed always the same thing: the poorer the men, the more they used to gain in return in terms of time
And they dedicated this time to beautify things around, such as houses, churches and villages. If you pay attention to every token of the past, from the houses of the farmers to cathedrals, you will see that this concept repeats itself. I call it "the richness of the poverty", intending the capacity to invest time in creating beauty.
At Le Ripi we were lucky: in the first years, the investments made into the vineyards and the refurbishment had not permitted to invest into the cellar. We needed to wait. During this time span, 7 years long, we were able to examine the project in deep and we reached the final idea of a cathedral dedicated to wine. If the circumstances had been different, we probably would have had a cellar in reinforced concrete.
As we were forced to be thrifty, our choices had to be more accurate and this cellar has eventually costed slightly less than the same surface in cement.
This project can leave a proof for whoever wants to build in the future, and it represents a pretty simple teaching: a very slow and scrutinized preparation of a project permits to build in bio-architecture with limited costs. As a result, you obtain an outcome to be proud of.
Our pickers harvest only the best bunches... but some blemishes are less visible, and they can always be present.
In our estate, we decided to introduce the manual selection: six to ten people check every single bunch to get rid of the flaws. Some grapes are too ripe, others are unripe, others could show small blemishes: with more than twenty eyes sorting bunch by bunch, we can be sure that all the clusters reaching the destemmer will be perfect.
I learnt this from my father, who decided in 1968 to create a machine able to pinpoint every defect present in the green coffee, before it got toasted. He said: "You will never be able to create excellence, if you accept compromises with the perfection of your raw materials".
As for the coffee, so it is for the wine.
The fermentation at Le Ripi takes place in oak vats.
At the end of the sorting table there is a destemmer. We use a precise and delicate machine, imported from France.
Afterwards, the grapes, softly pressed, go into our fermentation vats, strictly made in oak with 35 or 40 Hl of capacity. Here we wait for the fermentation to start spontaneously by effect of the yeasts which are naturally present in the grapes.
These are called indigenous yeasts. Depending on the year, the grapes remain into the oak vats from eight to twenty-one days.
Soon thereafter, we proceed with the racking of the wine, separating the liquid part from skins, seeds and lees. Some vintages can reach six months of skin maceration: this is a method called by the winemakers “Piemontesina”, by which we can extract the most out of skins and seeds.
The wooden vats offer excellent temperature control for fermentation (we cannot explain precisely why), but in the more “virulent” years, temperatures can exceed 30/32°C. In this case we immerse some cooling plates in the vats because we want to avoid the temperature to overpass those values.
The ageing in oak can last over than 3 years.
This was my dream since the beginning and the experience gained during these years supports it.
Our wines are usually aged for more than 4 years in oak vats and casks. We use different capacities in order to diversify the masses and the vineyards.
Moreover, for our Sangiovese, we age part of the wine in tonneaux of 500 liters capacity, while Merlot and Syrah have a passage in the smaller barrique, of roughly 225 liters capacity.
The difference lays in the kind of environment the tuns are able to create.
As for the small barrels, they create an oxidative environment.
The staves of the barrel are thinner and there is less surface in contact with the liquid.
The anthocyanins, responsible for the colour of the wine, remain of a purple shade with blue shadows, typical of the grape. While the big casks create a reductive environment: less oxygen penetrates inside and therefore the colour tends towards a brick red or a burnt Sienna.
I believe that this has always been the typical nuance of the Brunello di Montalcino, traditionally aged for long in big casks. The name Brunello means in fact “dusky” probably related with its typical colour, recalling earthy shadows.
The last step, before the wine is sold on the market, is the refinement in the bottle, which can take up more than one and a half year.
When the wine is bottled, sometimes we say that it is “longing for the oak”.
The original harmony seems lost and the wine becomes rude and rough: you will never be able to recognise it, even if you had tried that same wine from the barrel just a week before.
I believe that the wine is a living entity: it needs to adapt to the loss of the freedom to move around it had inside the big casks, which is somehow shocking.
Sometimes it takes more than one year before we can say “this is exactly the moment in which I can start to label and sell the wine”.
Furthermore, the longer it stays in bottle, the more refined it will be.
Over time, thanks to the evolution of the tannins and the molecular bonds formed in the bottle, the wine will become rounder and velvetier in the palate. The aromas become ripe, the olfactory complexity increases and the body improves, getting finer and more elegant.