The skin fermented “orange” Dry Moscato and the barrel fermented whole bunch Barbera chilled out, literally, over the Winter. When we got there in late January there was snow on the ground and the vineyards were looking quite spectacular.
Tasting the wines was also pretty special. The Moscato has dropped a little of it’s golden hew and looks a little more “normal”, but still lives up to it’s original promise. Similarly the Barbera is terribly easy to drink, but not just a purely good juice way: there is some great complexity in its joyfulness.
We ran the wines through the lab to get final technical analysis which yielded good and better news. The Alcohol levels are lower than expected and certainly lower than many wines from Italy in 2018 The sulphite levels on the Moscato had to be slightly topped up to 30mg/l (of an allowable 220mg/l in Europe, and 70mg/l for Raw Wine classification). The Barbera has a naturally occurring level of 28 mg/l so we made no addition.
After these minor revelations it was a matter of squirting it all into bottles. Really the only high-tech part of the whole wine making process, and quite Balletic to boot. The bottles come from a very environmentally aware factory and have a proportion of recycled glass and are as light as possible: which is a win all round (unless you like those bottles you can lose your hand in the bottom of). The clear glass has in-built UV protection, which means that light strike is not the massive issue it would be normally with colourless glass.
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