Chianti Classico Gran Selezione a year from its launch: great success, greater ambition
More than a year has passed since, in the impressive Salone dei Cinquecento at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, 35 vintners presented, for the very first time in the world, their Gran Selezione wines, a new type of Chianti Classico at the summit of the Black Rooster denomination’s quality pyramid.
Gran Selezione signified a true trend reversal. For the first time in the history of Italian wine denominations, the Chianti Classico Wine Consortium created a new type of wine, positioned at the summit of the quality pyramid and not at its base. Chianti Classico Gran Selezion
e is a wine that responds solely and exclusively to criteria for high-range placement and it was immediately projected into a well-defined market space.Its main features:
SELECTED VINEYARDS. Gran Selezione is a wine made exclusively from a winery’s own grapes grown in its finest vineyards and according to strict regulations, making it a truly premium product, a new point of reference in the international wine world.
REFINEMENT. In addition to the chemical and organoleptic characteristics required from great wines, Gran Selezione can be marketed only after minimum maturation of 30 months and a mandatory period of bottle refinement.
SENSORIAL CHARACTERISTICS. Gran Selezione also has the merit of enhancing the different characters of a broad and multi-faceted territory, covering nine communes with different climates and soils but united by the unmistakable Sangiovese “signature”.
Gran Selezione characteristics (as per production regulations)
* Color: deep ruby red tending to garnet with aging
* Fragrance: spicy and persistent
* Taste: dry, persistent, balanced
* Total minimum alcohol content: 13% vol.
* Total minimum acidity: 4.5 g/l
* Minimum non-reducing extract: 16 g/l
15 months from its launch, Gran Selezione is being produced throughout Chianti Classico territory in all of its communes, with 84 wineries that were already certified in 2014 and first months of 2015, for one or more vintages, for a total of 89 labels of Chianti Classico Gran Selezione. The broad temporal spectrum of certified production is further confirmation that reorganizing the denomination was the right response to needs that the territory had been showing for some time.
Today Gran Selezione accounts for 4% of Chianti Classico sales, with the rest divided into year’s vintage (Annata, 73%) and Riserva (23%), a typology that in any case is still gaining ground (up 1% from 2013). In terms of sales, Gran Selezione in 2014 has had revenue of about 35 million euros for nearly a million and a half bottles produced.
“Both in Italy and abroad, the value of this product”, says Sergio Zingarelli, president of the Chianti Classico Wine Consortium, “has succeeded in further consolidating the fame and prestige of a premium brand, distinguished by the historic Black Rooster trademark: a jewel of the “Made in Italy” production not be replicated elsewhere”.
To promote Gran Selezione in 2015 the Chianti Classico Wine Consortium is concentrating its efforts on an international tour that takes Black Rooster vintners around the world, from the USA to Canada, China, Germany and other markets.
