50 Act II / Poggio al Tesoro, Nature and the Elements 51 Act II / Poggio al Tesoro, Nature and the Elements We shall now attempt to describe and explain these soils in terms of their origin and as well, the use that cultivators of grapes make of them. We shall do so attempting, as far as possible, to avoid the technical language of geologists, who are extremely able in describing things in a way only they can understand. At times precision and a few details may be missing, but the overall sense, as we will see, will be clearly legible. We must go far back in time, when the Italian peninsula collided with Europe and, after provoking the lifting up of the Alpine chain, continued to push northwards, giving rise to a more southerly second chain which has been given the name of Alloctono Ligure. These mountainous reliefs, which still today constitute the Apennines of the Liguria region of Italy’s northwest, have extended southwards in a discontinuous and less imposing (in terms of altitude) way as far as the Colline Metallifere, the metal-rich hills in the center-west of Tuscany and to the soils of the so-called Tuscan Series near the city of Piombino. All of this occurred in the upper Cenozoic age, between the Miocene and Pliocene epochs which, in plainer terms, means between twenty and two million years ago. From that moment, so to speak, sediments of various origin have begun to be deposited on these soils and at times have buried, at other times stirred up, the soils from Liguria, which from sea level, mount onto hillsides which rise as high as two hundred meters (650 feet) above sea level. Positioned with our backs to the sea, the landscape which we can observe is constituted by a hillside area dominated by the outcroppings of Ligurian soil and by two distinctive surfaces at a lower altitude composed principally of sediment from the more recent Pliocene epoch. Their higher surfaces, between 35 and 130 meters (115-430 feet) of altitude, prevalently covered by vineyards, olive groves, and, occasionally, woods , are formed by what are called Bolgheri conglomerates, soils of fluvial origin, deeply eroded and molded first by the accumulation of red sands from the Gori valley, and therefore of continental origin, and shaped by winds which constantly blew during the Pliocene epoch. Lower-lying areas, between 20 and 35 meters above sea level, principally occupied by vineyards, but also by olive groves and grain fields, is constituted by mixed sediments of colluvial origin, i.e. formed by climatic factors, including cataclysms, glaciers, and floods, and as well by winds and waters which had stagnated after flooding. Together they form the Sand of the Donoratico area, reddish-orange in color and, in certain zones, by sharp or, when shaped by continuous washing from rivers or streams rounded gravel. Along the coastal strip, the accumulation of sand continued until the successive period known as the Holocene, and at this point we are talking about less than a million years ago. Homo Erectus had become Homo Sapiens, and winds, along with both ordinary and unusual climatic phases, had continuously formed dunes near the sea, flattened enormous terraces, and pushed up step-like rises and banks while the slow but constant erosion from the hillsides brought grains of clay to lower-lying areas and raised up sand and clay formations of PaleoceneEocene origin from the sub-surface. To talk about Bolgheri soils, therefore, means to express a very vague concept, one which instead is diversified and variable, which the recent zoning of the appellation has attempted to describe and circumscribe in numerous Landscape Units. Each with its own specific characteristics which make them more suitable for certain grape varieties rather than others so that every capable cultivator can know what kind of soil he will be working in order to be able to plan a vineyard with a high-level quality potential, a character and personality derived from that interaction between variety and environment: what is normally called terroir. The Allegrini family, first of all Walter Allegrini, had to reckon with this data in order to discover what was advisable to do, where they were to plant and what they had to grow in order to obtain maximum quality results. Accordingly, let us seek to understand, vineyard by vineyard, the soil which lies beneath their feet and what they needed to plant and cultivate above it. The first nucleus belonging to Poggio al Tesoro is constituted by two vineyards located to the east of the Bolgherese road; the first, to the north, takes its name from the road and the second is called Le Grottine. The soils are very similar as they are virtually contiguous, and are composed of the reddish-orange sands of Donoratico with gravel form the upper Pliocene epoch along with the reddish sands of the Gori valley. They are the so-caked finesse soils, which benefit more powerful and muscular varieties, adding elegance, grace, and class. Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and a good percentage of Petit Verdot have found
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