Organic for duty

When our father Mauro Bendinelli left us Fattoria Santo Stefano, he also transferred to us children a great responsibility: that of respecting, preserving and keeping our land and its fruits healthy.

We are organic! We therefore have an eye on the environment, the protection of resources and the maintenance of soil fertility but also the recycling of waste, and the maintenance of biodiversity. To do this we try to use agronomic practices that respect the environment, aimed at keeping the soil alive and rich in nutrients such as rotations, mechanical weeding, green manuring. For our vineyards and our olive groves we only use organic fertilizers of animal and vegetable origin (such as compost), mixed with other vegetable components such as algae.

In fact, we think that producing wine in a natural way is not a technique, but a way of approaching life with the awareness that the territory must not be used but must be lived.

This period of the year (February) is a very important time for us, we are in fact engaged in the pruning of our vines, we use a mixed system of Tuscan arch and spurred cordon.

We use the spurred cordon in the Lago, Chiesa, Querceto, Frutteto and Sobole vineyards.It is a type of training that requires more time to set up, as it is necessary to form a robust and long permanent structure. In practice, the cord is the extension of the stump of the vine, which is placed on the supporting wire in a horizontal line and on whose back the spurs are inserted. Its height from the ground is usually 90-100 cm. The grapes produced by this type of farming are used for the production of our most important wines such as the Riserva il Drugo and the Gran Selezione.

In our vineyards we also use the Tuscan arch or overturned, a training system similar to the Guyot from which it differs in the arched curvature of the shoots, which can be more or less pronounced. We use this pruning in the vineyards called Fonte, Pino and Cantina, this allows us to identify three phases or cuts: past, present and future. These are conventional definitions to describe what was left on the plant in the past year; the one on which the present pruning will have to be carried out and the one that will be left on the plant for the future.