Modern wineries are technological places. Yet they're also - perhaps above all - a means of communication, a sort of 'pre-label' that tunes the mind to the sensations the wine has to offer and makes a statement about the land it comes from. So says Mario Busso, editor of the Vini Buoni d’Italia guide. And today, the associated tour (which has awarded prizes to labels from the best 415 labels of 2017, selected after tasting no less than 26,000 Italian wines) ended at Auditorium 1919 in Sacmi Imola.
The backdrop to the prize-giving was “The future of wine making” conference, organised by Defranceschi. The latter, a Sacmi company for two years now, is a long-standing provider of technology to high-end wineries and is now pivotal to the Group's development prospects in the wine&spirits sector. “Sacmi has three fundamental pillars”, stated the President of Sacmi Imola, Paolo Mongardi, as he opened the meeting: "internationalisation, innovation and that vital ingredient called customer care”.
His audience included over 70 producers (current and potential customers of the Group, which has been in the wine-making sector since the early 2000s) interested in attending this last stage of the Vini Buoni d’Italia tour to get a closer look at Sacmi and its wine-making technology. “Sacmi's goal is to provide not just individual machines but true 'turnkey' wineries that cover everything from grape processing to bottling”, explained Defranceschi's General Manager, Daniele Marastoni. “It aims to do so by fielding the innovation wine-makers have sought for years, an innovation that goes far beyond bottling”.
Ground-breaking diaphragm presses, optical grape sorting systems, labellers and end-of-line solutions form just a part of the all-round innovation Sacmi-Defranceschi offers the industry. “Wineries need to give their products an identity”, added Marastoni, “which comes not just from the bottle and its contents but the winery itself; right from initial planning, wineries need to be thought of as experience and design hubs”.
Design, then, and wine-making science. And when the two merge, Italian wine-making excellence can, as explained by Donato Lanati, renowned international oenologist and founder of Enosis, trounce the competition “thanks to the enormous variety of indigenous vines and the uniqueness of the territories they grow in”.
Endless varieties, so many unique growing areas. However, to take advantage of this combination, points out Lanati (recently appointed to the Accademia dei Georgofili, crowning an internationally successful 35-year career), one needs knowledge. “Today, quality can be measured”, he cautioned, as he spoke to the award-winning producers, “and we need modern wine-making tools and technology to grasp the secrets that put the land into the grapes and the grapes into the bottle”. Technology and sustainability then, should be seen as synonymous with healthy wine, even allowing us to define, once and for all, scientifically, the concept of organic wine, “through serious research into rootstocks, diversification of pressing according to the vine and monitoring of bio-climatic parameters”.
Sacmi–Defranceschi, then, aims to place the best available technology (drawn from both Defranceschi's prior experience and the know-how developed by other Group companies in filling, packaging and labelling) at the service of design, and vice versa. At today’s meeting, such matters were examined by Olivier Chadebost, architect and designer of internationally famous wineries. A Frenchman from the Bordeaux region, Chadebost pointed out that our transalpine cousins are, in one key area at least, ahead of us: for 10-20 years now they've embraced new consumption trends that see wine not just as a product but a lifestyle.
“With its craftsmanship, wine is the luxury product par excellence. Always unique, it even continues to evolve after it is sold”, observed Chadebost. “In a way, the identity of a wine always remains elusive because we never get to know the stories of the men and women who make it, the climate that influences it. Such factors lead us to field a precise process, one that encompasses the creation of logo and brand and the design of the winery, all of which play a role in transmitting the unique DNA of the wine and its territory”.
In the eyes of the French architect and designer, technology and a clear understanding of it can generate huge potential. “Yet modernity still needs to pay homage to beauty, and technology needs to be as aesthetic as it is practical”. The result? A 'holistic' vision of the winery, where everything makes a statement about the wine; designer vats, presses, even the lights and the tasting tables. This special day at Sacmi (which ended with a guided tour of the Defranceschi plant in Mordano, already running at full capacity in readiness for the 2018 vintage) has, then, shown a future in which such an approach will cultivate the best Italian wine-making tradition and its more than 2,000 inimitable indigenous varieties.