Satèn

Monzio Compagnoni is a Franciacorta house in Adro, in the hills between Brescia and Lake Iseo. Marcello Monzio Compagnoni bought the old Loneto farmhouse, a 1400s building near the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Neve, in 1995 and enlarged it following his own architectural studies, as a cellar for ageing Franciacorta. The estate works with the consulting oenologist Donato Lanati alongside its in-house oenologist Stefano Graffi and the agronomist Luigi Reghenzi. Ten hectares of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Blanc surround the cellar, with a further 27 hectares spread over Adro, Cologne, Cazzago San Martino and Cortefranca; the producer says the vines average around 15 to 20 years old and that drawing on several zones of Franciacorta, with different soils and microclimates, is what gives its wines their complexity. Bunches are selected in the vineyard, musts are kept separate by origin until assembly, and after the second fermentation in bottle the house rule is at least 24 months on the lees for non-vintage cuvees, at least 40 months for vintage wines, and at least 84 months for the riservas.

The Satèn Brut Millesimato is 100 percent Chardonnay and, by the producer's own account, the only Franciacorta in the range made without Pinot Noir. The estate describes it as a deliberately bold reading of a category usually defined by softness: it says it is "not the classic Saten". Annual production is about 30,000 bottles, bottled at 12.5 percent alcohol. As a millesimato it falls under the house's 40-month minimum on the lees. This bottle, from the 2020 vintage, carries a 2024 disgorgement on the back label (lot L243A); the importer's sticker gives 13 August 2024 as the date of filling and 9.5 g/l residual sugar, while the producer's current data sheet, which describes the 2021 release, quotes a dosage of around 6 g/l. The two figures may simply reflect different vintages, but they do not agree, and the sticker is the one that describes the bottle in hand.

The Consorzio's harvest record for 2020 describes budburst in the first ten days of April under sunny, dry weather, a mild May with scant, if more frequent, rain that kept downy mildew pressure low, a June that was for the most part the coolest of the previous five years because of repeated storms in its first twenty days, and then a dry, windy July with a wide day-night temperature range. Harvest began on 10 August, and the Consorzio's quantity rating for the crop was 4 1/2, on the scale where the generous 2018 scored 5.