After drought, disease, and now COVID, old-world winemakers adapt as only ancient businesses can

Franco, the grandson of Ferruccio, the man who “invented” the Brunello appellation in 1888, famously helped his father hide old reserves behind a fake wall when the Nazis retreated north through Tuscany in 1944. He took over the estate in 1970, and guided it until 2013 when he died at the age of 91, a few months into the vinification process for the 2012 Riserva.

Biondi Santi long planned to release the wine as a special homage to Franco, vowing to let the bottles age in the family cellars until they were at the start of what is likely to be a long peak for drinking.

The challenge? By the time the bottles were ready, the world was in the middle of a pandemic.

Barbara Alper—Getty Images

An ancient trade forced to adapt

As in most wine-producing countries, Italy’s wine industry has been turned on its head by the global coronavirus outbreak. 

Travel restrictions made it difficult for seasonal workers—many of whom live in Eastern Europe—to return to Italy for the 2020 grape harvest, for example. Now, winemakers are pushing to have workers vaccinated quicker so they can work closer together in the cellar.

With restaurants and bars mostly closed across Italy and in most of the rest of Europe, attention turned to non-traditional export markets where the virus has been under control—most notably in Asia. 

Online wine sales have also boomed. Nomisma, an Italian consultancy, reported in February that more than 8 million new customer accounts had been created with online sellers in the previous year. Internet searches in Italy for the term “vino online” doubled in a year, Nomisma said. 

According to Gianni Gagliardo, owner of the well-regarded and eponymous Barolo-producing wine estate in Piedmont, some of the changes the industry is experiencing will be long-lasting. The labor situation, he said, will return to normal. But the emphasis on Asian export markets is here to stay.

“Other major markets are mature, but in Asia, there is the potential for hundreds of millions of new wine drinkers,” Gagliardo, who has been selling wine in China for more than 20 years, told Fortune. “The pandemic has only accelerated a process.”

Small batch, big return

Gagliardo also believes that online wine sales will continue to dominate. However, he noted, the current situation may blur the lines between sales to restaurants and sales direct to consumers.

“Online sales are much faster than regular restaurant distribution,” he said. “Before, a restaurant would monitor where it was running low in its cellar and order, say, 60 or 80 bottles that would arrive in a week or ten days. Now sales are lower, and if a restaurant starts to run low on a particular wine, they can place an online order and get five or six replacement bottles that afternoon.

“After the pandemic, the volumes will go up,” he said. “But I don’t see wine distribution going back to the way it used to be.”

Nor will professional wine tastings. Before the pandemic, a tasting conducted for wine critics, distributors, and high-end collectors would either be hosted by the producer—with parties flying in for the event—or with representatives of the winery setting up shop at a posh hotel in New York, London, Hong Kong, Dubai, or some other metropolis. 

Neither was an option for the release of Biondi Santi’s 2012 Brunello Riserva—so the company went virtual.

It was more complicated than it sounds: each participant was mailed a bottle of the wine that came with specific instructions for achieving the proper serving-temperature. The same instructions called for the bottle to be opened four hours prior to the tasting, and it even insisted on the size and shape of the wine goblet to be used—all designed to assure that everyone was tasting wine with the same characteristics. A degree or two difference or the wrong-sized wine glass can make a noticeable difference with top wines.

My box containing the ’12 Riserva showed up two days before the tasting, and I took the rules seriously—immediately placing it in my EuroCave wine cooler, and measuring all my mismatched wine glasses to find the right sized one. I even used the digital thermometer I bought for the coronavirus to double-check the temperature of the bottle.

Tancredi Biondi Santi, Franco’s grandson, hosted the event. A group of Italian wine writers joined us. They were effusive in their praise. I heard the words “superb” and “optimal” more than a few times. One participant even declared he would “never forget” his first sip. 

Personally, I recognized the wine’s austere complexity and balance, but it still seemed closed even after being uncorked for several hours. I’m a fan of mature wines, and I thought to myself I would have preferred to open it after it’d been in my cellar for a few more years.

Tancredi later implied that my thinking was out of date; he spoke about Biondi Santi’s evolving release strategy, which includes advocating for wines to be drunk on the younger end.

“The Brunello Riserva is seen as a wine that can be aged for a very long time, and that’s true,” he said. “But I also think people can exaggerate how long a wine needs to age. This is something we’re trying to change.”

Eric J. Lyman

After the tasting, I spoke to Lene Bucelli, Biondi Santi’s head of communications, who predicted that much of the efforts Tancredi spoke about would increasingly take place via online hookup, like our tasting. It’s not the same as an in-person tasting, she said, but it did offer some advantages, including cost, even after figuring in the not-insignificant cost of the bottles of wine—nearly €500 each in the case of the Biondi Santi Riserva—sent to each participant. But that is balanced out by eliminating travel costs, Bucelli said, while also expanding the reach of an event.

“This isn’t the way we imagined doing this big release,” she told me. “But it went well, and I think that doing things this way will remain part of how we do things even after the crisis is over.”