September is still a hot month on the Tuscan coast. The weather in August and September is fundamental for a vintage year.
The winemaker reads the signs of the weather to understand how he will have to carry out his work.
Apart from disasters, where all or part of the grapes may be lost (fortunately rare), differences from year to year are not necessarily negative.
The great fascination of wine lies in the fact that it is a living product, which, in the glass, recounts its own tale, the lands it is from, the hand that made it, and the vintage year to which it belongs.
A wine that is always the same, perfect each year, is a dead wine, fruit of the Law of the Single Flavour and the uniformity of the market.
Everybody is waiting.
The winemaker evaluates, tastes, analyses, thinks and … finally, the off! The harvest can begin. The expert pickers select the bunches on the vine. The harvest goes on in leaps and bounds, it stops, starts up again, then it has to speed up to harvest a larger area, stopping again to wait, and so it continues. Each grape type has a different moment of ripening, as indeed have the same types growing in different rows. 
The work of an entire year can come to nothing if the fruit is picked too early or too late. As soon as they are picked, the grapes are taken to the cellars and processed.
The winemaker, now playing the role of oenologist, knows that each lot of grapes has to be followed according to its individual characteristics. There is no preordained recipe – he has to know how to interpret the year’s vintage using his sensitivity and experience, accompanying the grape to the fulfilment of its destiny, going along with that project that Nature had already started in the vineyard. When the must has become wine, it passes from tanks to barrels for refining.
The harvest is over, but the work continues. Whilst in the barrel the wine must be mixed, filled, decanted and monitored. At the end of October some wines are bottled and others, from previous years and ready for sale, are labelled and packaged.
