Harvest begins

At Villa Venti, harvest time is always the most exciting period of the year. The entire family gets together—young and old, friends and relatives—and everybody, from grandparents to children, share what has taken the whole year to produce, and even if the work is hard, we are up to our elbows in joy and boundless energy. This year, the harvest arrived some two weeks early, after a winter with little rain and a summer with a lot of heat. So we had to start earlier than we expected, and the crop was down about 30%. In spite of our viticultural efforts to leave as many leaves and long shoots as possible to shade the clusters, we had to discard many sun-burnt berries, but the grapes that we were finally able to bring into the cellar give us good reason to hope that we will be able to produce wines fully line with our style and of great quality. In addition, this growing season revealed that the native grape varieties--famoso di Cesena, centesimino, sangiovese—coped much better than the internationals, since they were in better harmony with this terroir. Keep up-to-date! A full report on the 2017 harvest will be out shortly.