Mario will tell you he is not a philosopher. He is a farmer and a winemaker, and the distinction matters to him, the first comes before the second, and both come before anything you might say about the wine in the glass.
But thirty years in a cellar with a single grape will make a philosopher of anyone, and Sangiovese, of all grapes, is the one that asks the most questions.
Lesson one: altitude is not a number
The first time I asked Mario why Terralsole's fruit tastes the way it does, I expected elevation, soil type, exposure, the vocabulary a wine magazine taught me. He gave me all of it, in two sentences, and then said: _but altitude is not a number. Altitude is what the vine does at night._
It took me a season to understand. At six hundred meters above Montalcino, the diurnal swing is twelve to fifteen degrees. The vine works in the heat, rests in the cool, and the grape accumulates sugar more slowly than its cousins in the valley. The skin thickens. The tannins settle. The aromatics have time to find themselves.
Altitude, in Mario's sense, is time. It is the grape's chance to become what it is, rather than what the summer is trying to make it.
