THE CELLARS
THE HEART OF RICASOLI
The cellars of Barone Ricasoli are at the foot of Brolio Castle, separated from the main body of the winery, and used exclusively for winemaking. The modernization of the old cellars was done by carefully restoring the aesthetics and functions of the original nineteenth century rooms, while organizing modern and technologically avant-garde spaces at the same time.
Each vineyard plot is harvested separately. Once gathered, the grapes are taken to the vat room in containers with a maximum capacity of 200 kg; vinification takes place in small steel vats, enabling careful regulation of the fermentation process and keeping the characteristics of every single vineyard plot separate.
Experimentation and a thorough knowledge of the land have led us to vinify separately even within the same plot, according to the morphological similarities of the subsoil. The structure of the winemaking cellar is devised so that the vats are filled by means of gravity, which allows a gentle punching down and extracts the most desirable substances from the skins.
At the end of the fermentation process the wines are transferred to barrels of various sizes and oak barriques in the barrel aging cellar. Frequent laboratory monitoring accompanies Ricasoli wines throughout their development right up to their long (sometimes very long) bottle aging in temperature-controlled rooms, before being sent off to their destinations in the four corners of the earth.
