IL SOFFIO

Il Soffio — Breathe — is the most distinctive wine in the Brandolini Winery portfolio: a 100% Croatian red from one of Oltrepò Pavese's rarest indigenous varieties, produced through an uncommonly extended skin maceration of approximately forty days that extracts the full potential of a grape that rewards patience and commitment with a wine of genuine individuality. The Croatian grape — known in Oltrepò Pavese as Croatina, a variety of the same ancient Lombard lineage as the better-known Barbera and Bonarda — has been cultivated in the Brandolini family's vineyards around San Damiano al Colle since the estate's founding in 1873.

The forty-day skin contact is the defining winemaking decision for Il Soffio — a period four to five times longer than most red wine production protocols, during which the wine develops the colour saturation, tannin structure, and aromatic depth that only extended maceration can produce from this specific variety on the Brandolini estate's specific soils. The resulting wine ages for twelve months in steel tanks, with five percent of the production spending twelve months in French oak barriques — a small but significant proportion whose contribution integrates the wine's natural power with a gentle wood complexity.

The aromatic profile is one of the most complex in the Brandolini range: strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, and currants arrive in a bouquet of fruit intensity that reflects the forty days of skin contact's thorough extraction of the Croatian grape's aromatic potential. With good acidity and tannicity, Il Soffio is definitively a full-bodied wine — the estate's own characterisation of a production that combines the grape's natural generosity with the structural depth that the extended maceration and careful ageing produce.

Since 1873, the Brandolini family has made wine from nine hectares across three municipalities. Il Soffio is their most individual and most committed statement.

Available through UniqueWines.