Lusenti
The Lusenti Winery is in Vicobarone, near Ziano Piacentino, in the Val Tidone. The history of the winery began at the beginning of the nineteen hundreds when Pietro bought the first farm for growing table grapes. In the 1960′s his son, Gaetano, bought other land and planted vineyards that still produce excellent wine grapes today. Ludovica is the youngest of three daughters and with her husband Giuseppe, decided to dedicate herself to looking after the vineyards.
It wasn’t an immediate decision but contact with nature, which speaks to you if you learn how to respect it and which teaches you the rhythm of life in the alternating of the seasons and the many friends that share the same passions helped to make the decision. Today the winery is ideally a junction between past and present, between the wines that make up tradition and the wines created from decisions made in the early 1990s. Lusenti produces only wines from local grape varieties: Bonarda, Malvasia di Candia aromatica and Ortrugo. It is the wealth of flavors and experience that the consumer has the chance to take away with them.
In the cellar Gaetana tries to enhance every single grape variety as much as possible, but above all trying never to alter what the vineyard gives , already healthy and ripe.
Therefore the processes for each style of wine are very different, respecting the characteristics of the variety and the vintage at the same time. Also in the cellar, as in the vineyard, man intervenes as little as possible on the grapes, without speeding up the natural processes of transforming grapes into wine.
The grapes for making sparkling wines usually come from quite young vineyards, starting from the sixth-seventh year of production, when the yield per hectare is around 9-10 tons. For wines made from non-aromatic white varieties, there is no maceration on skins, just gentle crushing and then the free-run juice is drawn off and fermented under temperature control. Second fermentation takes place in pressure tanks with selected yeasts. There is absolutely no use of concentrated must, only the naturally sweet free-run juice preserved at low temperatures.
Fermentation (both alcoholic and malolactic) of must for making sparkling reds, wines with considerable structure for this kind of style, is done in vats. After cold tartaric stabilization, which occurs naturally during winter, the wines undergo second fermentation in pressure tanks with the addition of free run juice from the same grapes.
Wines are not microfiltered and are bottled in the cellar. After bottling, there is further maturation in bottle which lasts for a few months.
Production of still red wines at the beginning of the 1980s when Gaetano bought some Slavonian oak barrels to age wines for short periods. When his daughter, Gaetana, started working in the winery, it was decided to work on the quality in the vineyard in order to obtain wines with more structure with respect to previous harvests as well as lengthening the maceration and the period of ageing in wood. In this way long-lived wines were obtained that were already interesting in the early years but more opulent and balanced after some time. As well as Gutturnio riserva, it was decided to aim at a mono-varietal wine from Bonarda grapes, given the extraordinary suite of aromas and phenolics of this grape variety. All of the red wine riservas mature in wood for more than a year. The choice of wood for maturation is not random, but depends on the vintage. Our aim in fact is to obtain structured wines while maintaining the characteristics of the variety.
Back
