Love, Math, and Brunello di Montalcino
Published in Gastronomica, Summer 2021
By Maria Finn
Under a cloudless cerulean sky, grids of Sangiovese grape vines grow between rocks that pock the red clay ground. This is the view — vineyards and sky — from the Ruffino winery where their Brunello di Montalcino is grown and barreled. Travelers to the town of Montalcino, Italy and the area that surrounds it don’t come for religion or art; they make the pilgrimage for the rarified Brunello wine.
The vineyard manager states that this wine’s appeal starts in the field. “To be certified DOCG [Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita — the strictest regulation possible in Italy], Brunello must be made of 100 percent Sangiovese grapes,” he says. “They have to be dry-farmed rather than irrigated, as excess water can bloat grapes and dilute their characteristics.” He goes on to explain that when roots have to grow deeper into the earth to seek water, they pass through soil strata with a wider range of complex minerals and microbes. DOCG certification also requires that grapes are hand-harvested, as this is gentler on the fruit than machines, which can bruise. “If you are caught cutting corners, your vintage must be labeled ‘table wine’ instead of Brunello,” he notes. “And that is worth far less.”
The complex communities of microorganisms — fungi, yeast, and bacteria — that the grapes accumulate from the soil, wind, and hands that picked them add to the process of fermentation, which is the magic where grape juice transforms into wine. Then, DOCG-certified Brunello spends at minimum thirty months in the barrel to further integrate and mature the grapes.
Hence, the pilgrims. Bottles of Brunello often range from $60 to $250 in the United States, according to the website Wine-Searcher (2019). And yet the roots of food and wine in this part of Italy come from poverty. The glorious olive oils, pastas, and porcini that we swoon over have evolved through the travails of survival.
Wealthy merchants from Florence and Siena owned large parcels of land that farmers sharecropped. The farmers practiced coltura promiscua, “a form of intercropping with rows of vine-supporting trees alternating with rows of grain, olive trees, fruit trees — including mulberry for silk — and herbaceous plants such as legumes” (Nesto and Di Savino 2016, 39). The sharecroppers kept 50 percent of what they produced and the landowner received the other half. Under this mezzadria system that lasted until the mid-twentieth century, there was little agricultural innovation and farmers merely subsisted. During this time, some of the landed gentry worked to create a brand of wine that could be exported internationally, but for the farmers working the land, it was sustenance — part of the calories they needed to make it through the workday (Nesto and Di Savino 2016, 41).
The wine had other health benefits. Red wine is high in anti-oxidants and has resveratrol, a compound with anti-inflammatory properties. Fermentation means there are probiotics, or a plethora of diverse bacteria that are good for digestion. Over time, though, more sulfites and other additives have been put into the juice for shelf stabilization and to prevent oxidation, which has killed off the good bacteria along with the bad (Lonvaud and Bisson 2019, 16–18) — somewhat like herbicides and pesticides do with soil.
Between 1955 and 1975, the use of pesticides and herbicides in Italy exploded. According to an article by Gigi Berardi (1983, 502–6) published in BioScience, there was a 500 percent increase in the application rate of these chemicals across all sectors of Italian agriculture. This allowed a consolidation and mechanization of agriculture, so fewer farmers worked the land, and those who remained had higher yields and more profits.
At the Ruffino Brunello vineyard, we are invited inside a stone building and walk between barrels in a cool, dark room. Each barrel has an airlock on top — two interlocking glass chambers that help avoid oxidation and allow carbon dioxide from fermentation to escape. The winemaker points out how large and heavy the barrels are and that no one could possibly move them. They are far greater in size and volume than standard French oak barrels, so the wood doesn’t overwhelm the grapes in the thirty or more months they spend there. The winemaker nudges a barrel with his shoulder to demonstrate how sturdy it is. Then he gently palms the barrel, and we watch the wine bubble a bit in the airlock. “See,” he says. “It feels my pulse. Wine is alive.”
We begin to sample it straight from the barrels, vintage by vintage. We taste the drought and late rain, the limestone rock, minerals from the long-evaporated sea, and that something else — the symphonic experience that takes place within good wine. This is my first time tasting Brunello. Through it, I experience the clay that made the bricks that built the towns, the clouds that gathered overhead, the lost loves that played out in the olive tree grove, and the thousands of sips of wine at Communion, a million amens to immortality, to transubstantiation, to our alchemical abilities to change and transform, to be great and tragic. I want to stop this moment in time, to forever remember this dark, cool room, the taste of both new and ancient, sacred and profane, on my tongue.
Just a few weeks earlier, I had been drinking wine on the other side of the Atlantic with Ed Frenkel, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. I was chef-in-residence at Stochastic Labs in Berkeley, a hub for artists, scientists, and tech engineers. We hosted weekly dinner parties so that people in different fields could find common ground through discussions, and possibly even collaborate. That night, the theme had been “randomness,” with guests in the fields of music and math. I served a Moroccan-influenced pulse stew, as that seemed to me both musical and random. A physicist designed a math problem so that each guest switched tables between courses, which meant a random seating throughout the evening.
After dinner, I sat and had a glass of wine with Ed and a few other guests. Ed explained that the main message of his book is that math is a universal language, as elegant as music, and the source code of the universe. “Math is the only universal language,” he said. But he went on to explain that math is not alive, and love is alive, and he began to categorize things as Math or Love. I took out a sheet of paper and made two columns. In the Math category, he said to include an unread book, control, deterministic beliefs, and Albert Einstein, because Einstein believed that every math problem had a solution. Under Love, he said to list a read book, trust/surrender, uncertainty, and wine, as it expressed terroir or the unique expression of place. When I placed the pen down, Ed took it up and scribbled “Heisenberg” in the Love column. Frenkel said, “He’s the physicist who believed that not every problem had a solution. Randomness is not only possible, but inevitable.”
In those sips of various vintages of Brunello, I wonder about randomness. Despite coming from grapes of the same vines, wines from each of the different harvests seem to have their own personality — a little more depth in one, a little livelier fruit in another. They were pure and unique expressions of place. While many winemakers strive for this, some winemakers know what they want their wine to taste like and control its outcome with additives; there are up to sixty ingredients they can use to shape their wine, from yeast to sugar to gelatin and wood chips, or even dyes to deepen color. They create consistency for consumers, so when you grab a familiar bottle off the shelf to buy, you know what you are getting.
Yet an international movement for natural wines, or wines with no additives, is expanding. For natural wines, the winemaker has far less control. They must cultivate grapes without pesticides or herbicides and use naturally occurring yeast and sulfites. The results can be unpredictable — they’re often cloudy and have sediment from a lack of filtering, but fans argue the wines taste alive and are unique expressions of time and place.
In 2014, Tuscany’s regional government told wine producers that pesticides and fertilizers were running off and polluting groundwater. As well, biodiversity was becoming an issue; as grapes were the most profitable crop to be grown, vineyards were replacing forests and farms, with soil erosion and landslides emerging as threats. A passionate yet bloodless “wine war” began over this (Pianigiani 2014). Wine producers argued that their industry created jobs and tourism for the region and that the concerns were overblown.
Then the controversial herbicide glyphosate, which has been used heavily on nonorganic farms and vineyards, began to come under fire. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said glyphosate is a “probable carcinogenic substance to humans” (Bini 2019, para. 10; IARC 2017). Tuscany set out plans to be a “glyphosate free region” by 2021 (Bini 2019, para. 1).
Along with local health and environmental concerns, the market is starting to demand more sustainable wines. Although organically grown wines only account for 3–4 percent of the overall international market, the market for organic and biodynamically grown grapes has almost doubled, from 349 million bottles to 676 million bottles, between 2012 and 2017 and is set to top one billion bottles annually by 2022 (de La Hamaide and Denis 2018).
“Organic” has never been a label that carried much marketing power in viticulture. Wine grapes can be grown organically, but sulfites are often added, so wines can’t be branded as “organic” in the United States. If there aren’t sulfites stabilizing it, wines could oxidize and taste bad, so “organic” was not a selling point. But “natural wines,” sometimes called “raw” or “naked,” are increasingly in demand. They are made from grapes that haven’t been treated with herbicides and pesticides. They are handpicked, and only their natural yeast is used for fermentation. Often sulfites are not added, and if they are, it is done in much lower doses. The result can be a far less predictable bottle, one with sediment or a cloudy color. French natural wine expert Isabelle Legeron writes in her book Natural Wine: An Introduction to Organic and Biodynamic Wines Made Naturally:
Given that the microbiological life of the vineyard is what enables both successful fermentations in the cellar and the creation of wine that is able to survive without a technological crutch, sustaining a healthy habitat in the vineyard for these microbes is fundamental for the natural wine grower. This microbiological life follows the grapes into the cellar, transforms the juice and even makes its way into the final wine in the bottle. Natural wine is therefore, literally, living wine from living soil. (2014, 92)
Increasing concern about public and environmental health is driving the regulation of pesticides and herbicides; this, combined with consumer demand for natural wines, means the industry will have no choice but to adapt and evolve back to more sustainable methods. The antidote for problems caused by nature most often lies with nature.
The manager at the Ruffino Brunello vineyards I am visiting explains the scourge of the Tignoletta moth. The females lay eggs on the vines and the larvae can pierce the skin, creating ruptures that can lead to fungus such as botrytis, causing the grapes to rot. This fungus spreads from cluster to cluster, and as Sangiovese grapes grow in tight clusters, the moths can easily wipe out entire vineyards. For years, the vineyard used pesticides to eradicate the moths. Now they use sexual confusion.
Ruffino employs a mating disruption technique specifically to confuse the male moths. Female Tignoletta pheromones are dispersed throughout the vineyards, confusing the males as they try to find real female mates. Because they are now confused and unable to find the females, no larvae will hatch and damage the grapes. As the vineyard manager finishes explaining this, he holds up a large, flat leaf. The sky is so clear and the air so still, it feels like experiencing déjà vu; the leaf doesn’t flutter. It has no moth holes. Sexual confusion has been successfully employed.
After the visit of Ruffino, I bring a few bottles of Brunello back to California. They are memories of the windless, blue sky, cool barrel room, and the spectacular experience of tasting different expressions of the same beautiful wine — the variance of a living, changing liquid. These bottles are little gems I bury underneath the everyday, local wines. I love our California wines — the taste of the Russian River, the boulder-strewn Sonoma Coast, the volcanic slopes of the Mayacamas Mountains, the dappled vineyards that meet the forest in the Anderson Valley. The Brunello I carry home is a memory, a brief Tuscan dream, still changing, still alive. One day it will be a different wine. And I too am changing — my cells both aging and regenerating, my truths becoming unfixed and reforming, my ideas emerging and evolving. The wines serve as reminders for me to embrace uncertainty and randomness that is constantly shifting and reshaping around me. In ten years, I may not recognize the wine from that barrel room, and even the self who visited Montalcino might seem unfamiliar to me. But I will remember that the wine is alive, like a good book you’ve become immersed in, like falling in love.
Berardi, Gigi. 1983. “Pesticide Use in Italian Food Production.” BioScience 33(8): 502–6.
Bini, Chiara. 2019. “Sustainability: Tuscany ‘Glyphosate Free’ in 2021.” RossoRubino, October 31. www.rossorubino.tv/en/sostenibilita-toscana-glifosate-free-nel-2021/.
de La Hamaide, Sybille., and Pascale, Denis. 2018. “Organic Wine Market Growing Fast but to Remain Niche: Study.” Reuters, November 23. www.reuters.com/article/us-wine-organic/organic-wine-market-growing-fast-but-to-remain-niche-study-idUSKCN1NS149.
Frenkel, Ed. 2013. Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. New York: Basic Books.
IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer). 2017. “Some Organophosphate Insecticides and Herbicides.” Vol. 112 of IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France. https://monographs.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/mono112.pdf.
Legeron, Isabelle. 2014. Natural Wine: An Introduction to Organic and Biodynamic Wines Made Naturally. New York: Cico Books.
Lonvaud, Aline., and Linda. F. Bisson, eds. 2019. Understanding Wine Microbiota: Challenges and Opportunities. Lausanne, Switz.: Frontiers Media.
Nesto, Bill., and Frances Di Savino. 2016. Chianti Classico: The Search for Tuscany’s Noblest Wine. Oakland: University of California Press.
