Year three of a Block Commission: what changes when you've made three vintages at the same block

I commissioned Block F-3 at Casa Brunello in the spring of 2023. It is four-tenths of a hectare on the southern slope, planted in 1989, mostly Sangiovese grosso with a little Colorino my block manager Alessandra inherited and has never quite decided to pull out. The block makes about twelve hundred bottles of Brunello in a good year and maybe nine hundred in a bad one. I have now had three vintages off it. I can tell you with some confidence that the first vintage was the tourist vintage, the second was a job, and the third is the one where the block started telling me things.

Year one

Year one, you are in the photographs. Alessandra took me through the block with a clipboard in April 2023 and told me about soil depth and the grandfather who planted the Colorino and the summer of 1985 and the neighbour she did not like. I listened the way you listen on a vineyard tour. I nodded when she pointed at things. I took pictures of rows that would have looked the same to me if she had pointed at different ones. When the first harvest came in September, I watched the pick on a video link from my kitchen in London. The finished wine arrived two years later. I drank it at Christmas. It was, to my palate, fine. I did not understand why it was fine.

Year two

Year two is a job. Alessandra asked me things. Did I want to drop the second crop on the Colorino or keep it this year. Did I want a longer maceration on the 2024 or the same as 2023. Did I want the single-barrel selection to go into the estate wine or into a separate bottling under my name. These are not the questions I had been prepared for. I did not know the answers. I asked my block manager what she would do. She told me what she would do. I said yes to all of it. The 2024 wine is now in the botti — the big Slavonian casks Casa Brunello uses for long-aging Brunello — and it will not be bottled until 2027. I have not tasted it in eighteen months.

Year three

Year three is different. Alessandra sent me a voice note in March. She was walking the block. The background sound was boots on gravel and a tractor somewhere. She said: Priya, the 2026 is going to have more structure than last year. I can feel it in the canes. The new growth is tighter. Do you want to push the harvest date back a week to get more phenolic ripeness, or hold to the traditional window like last year.

I listened to the voice note three times. Then I did something I did not think I would ever do. I had an opinion.

I wrote back: I want to hold the window. The 2024 is already more structured than the 2023 and I am nervous that a longer hang on the 2026 will tip the wine into a register that is not Casa Brunello. I want the house style. I do not want to chase scores.

Alessandra replied within the hour. She agreed. She said the reason she had asked was that she wanted to see whether I would have a view. She had decided already. She had just wanted to know if I was ready.

What year three teaches you

You do not become a winemaker. That is not what a Block Commission is. You become a reader. You start to understand the block the way you understand a difficult book on a third read. You know which sentence is about the weather and which sentence is about the soil. You know when the wine is going to be a little soft because April was wet, and when it is going to be tight because a July heat wave closed the canopy for a week. You read the vintage report from Alessandra the way I used to read the sports page as a kid — already knowing who played, mostly looking for the writer's opinion.

The first-year commissioner is a tourist with money. The second-year commissioner is a client with questions. The third-year commissioner is a quieter thing. You pick up the phone when the winemaker calls. You ask about her mother. You know the names of the people on the pick crew. When the finished wine arrives, you drink it slowly, alone, on a weeknight, because you know what is in it and you do not want to waste that knowing on a party.

I am now committed through the 2028 vintage. That will be five vintages, a short lifetime in Brunello terms but a long one in my own. I do not know what year four will teach me. I have given up trying to predict. I know the block now. It will tell me when it is ready.