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If wine is poetry, let’s respect its sensitivity.

An environment is perfect when its presence is imperceptible.

Our elders did not have cement to throw or iron to strengthen.  Only bricks and mortar.  But their buildings are beautiful, long-living and irradiate a very pleasant harmony for everyone.   
This is why we decided to build “in the old way” and my son, Ernesto Illy drew up a plan in bioarchitecture for a new wing of the wood ageing cellar.
Stone gabions to hold back the thrust of the hillside in which the cellar is buried, construction walls and brick arches full of terracotta, wooden  

beams and chestnut flanges and terracotta bricks are the building materials used. Just a little cement, only where absolutely indispensable such as in the edge beams and zero iron so as to avoid those Faraday cages which, with static electricity, always end up creating spiteful magnetic fields.

The wine has to stay here for four years and if the environment is so harmonic as to become imperceptible, then we are sure our wines will be ok and will become even better.

he new Mastrojanni wine cellar.

Choosing concrete tanks.

Mastrojanni is still highly interested in making use of concrete tanks for the fermentation and the storage of wine. The choice of using a mix of glazed tanks, which are mostly made of brushed concrete, ties back to the desire to preserve the old traditions (Glazed concrete tanks: 1,601 hl; brushed concrete tanks: 1,882 hl).

The aim is to implement control over the vinification process, maintaining lower and steadier fermentation temperatures, and optimising the accurate extraction of colour, tannins and structure, based on the shape of the tanks.

During fermentation, brushed concrete tanks are also subject to micro-oxygenation processes, which are responsible for the acidic and tannic balance of Mastrojanni's Sangiovese wines.

The glazed concrete tanks, with a more reductive nature, are specifically used for grapes with a greater structure and advanced stages of ripening. According to Mastrojanni's philosophy, the work of man plays a fundamental role in the whole process.

The cellar capacity is of 3,588 hl (grape capacity: 280 tons)

The selection of the best grapes

Since 2008 all grape clusters undergo a further selection on a selection belt, where between six and eight people choose cluster by cluster eliminating those final defects which might have gone unnoticed during the harvest.
In this way the certainty of only making

wine from healthy and perfectly ripe Sangiovese grapes is ensured and guaranteed: the absence of defects guarantees that the resulting wine is free from a whole series of negative organoleptic overtones which typically come from less than perfect grapes.