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Masseto, a word that in Tuscan slang means “as hard as a rock.” This name is a reference to the clay soil that bakes hard in the summer sun, and certainly not to the wine, which, though powerful and structured, is as soft as velvet, as smooth as silk, as supple as a thick Florentine steak served rare, flavorsome and intense, with a few grains of rough salt and a drizzle of intense, throat-tickling, grassy-green olive oil.


Acquiring a unique identity The Masseto vineyard and winery are near the small village of Castagneto Carducci, ten minutes from the sea, near the town of Bolgheri, through the shadows of ancient cypress on a gentle slope behind the fabled Tenuto San Guido, where Sassicaia is made, the wine that first put Bolgheri on the map as an elite wine region, Italy’s latter-day Bordeaux. But whereas Sassicaia, the original “Super-Tuscan” created by Lodovico Antinori’s uncle, the Marchese Incisa della Rocchetta, is Cabernet Sauvignon with a dash of Cabernet Franc, Masseto is (or at least was, until 2020) pure Merlot. Legend has it that the famed Russian émigré enologist André Tchelistcheff, who acted as a consultant for Lodovico


66 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023


Antinori, lay down flat on the virgin soil that had been used by the family as hunting grounds, put his ear to the earth, listened, and pronounced that it should be planted to Merlot. We are told that Tchelistcheff was inspired by Masseto’s blue clay soils, similar to those that characterize certain storied vineyards in Pomerol. Tchelistcheff convinced Lodovico Antinori to plant this particular 17-acre (7ha) plot of rare blue clay with the Merlot needed for a Bordeaux blend. According to the current estate director, Axel Heinz, if there had been the kind of “proper soil analysis” that would be performed today, the decision to plant Merlot there would not have been taken. But “Intuition can sometimes lead you to a perfect result,” says Heinz: “One of the limitations of science is that it creates a formula. It leads you to miss the exceptional.” In the meantime, Merlot somehow


became embroiled in the complicated relationship of a certain cinematic anti-hero and his ex-wife. When Merlot was planted at Masseto, it was the most popular and the most planted wine grape variety in the world. After the hit movie Sideways (2004), Merlot lost its pre- eminence, although it is still second in the world at 657,000 acres (266,000ha),


behind Cabernet Sauvignon at 843,000 acres (341,000ha). Other factors have dented Merlot’s reputation in the intervening years, such as the declining reputation of Bordeaux in general since the heady 1980s and ’90s, when Robert Parker inspired a newly enthusiastic generation of wine drinkers to chase after whatever was “hedonistic,” “mind-blowing,” “saturated,” and “luscious”—descriptors that, as it happens, are all perfect for Masseto. The after-effect of that famous film, coinciding with the waning influence of Robert Parker, has had a colossal effect in the real world. It may seem hard to believe, but there are more than a few influential wine experts who seem to have picked up their beliefs about Merlot from a dour, frustrated, accident-prone, fictional wine nerd, and who still cling to his convoluted, self-contradictory opinions—despite the hidden punchline of that film being that, yes, the greatest wine of them all includes… you guessed it… a good proportion of Merlot. There is an all-too-widespread belief


that Merlot as a grape variety is less complex and less “serious” than Cabernet


Above: A bushvine in a parcel by the winery. Axel Heinz leading the recent special tasting.


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