Dr. Matthew Horkey and Charine Tan were in Italy recently and went along to the Polenzo Tasting in Piemonte. They have highlighted just 13 wines for special mention. One from good friends at De Marie in Barbaresco https://demarie.com/?lang=en and a Piemonte Barbera D.O.P with a rather lovely label from Vanessa Stone http://www.vanessastoneartist.com/
To quote them about The English winemaker Barbera:
” This wine is made with 25% whole cluster fermentation and indigenous yeasts. No additional sulfur is added. There are notes of stems, ripe red fruit, and pepper. This is a hardcore natural wine with gorgeous fruit. Score: 90/100 “
Beautiful Moscato grapes are in from the vineyard and fermentation is off and away. We selected a portion of the cleanest fruit, well it was all clean to be fair, to use for the whole bunch element and the rest went in de-stemmed. Started off smelling like really verdant grape juice but by the next morning it is was Acacia honey and stem ginger. Amazing stuff.
The rest of the crop is a little tardy this year so hanging fire on the Barbera and Field Blend for a minute or two yet.
The temperature difference between England and Italy is enormous from the get go this year. 8 degrees at Stansted, 32 in Milan and it was 10 degrees cooler there than it had been the previous week! If the weather in Italy stays as good as this we will be looking at a very early vintage indeed.
The first order of business was to visit Tenute Sella in Lessona, up in the Alto Piemonte. We are working on a collaborative project this year that sees a separate set of ferments being done The English Winemaker way with 100% Nebbiolo. This is a long term project that won’t see any wines being released until late 2021 at the earliest.
Stage 2 was to confirm the wines at Villa Giada. The easy bit was to get the dry Moscato “Mascot” and the Barbera green lit as they are going down so well from the 2018 vintage we’re more or less doublingproduction in 2019. The trickier bit was having another pitch for the vetoed Field Blend from last year. Andrea being the extraordinary man he is has agreed to give it a go this time, we’ll take a harvest snapshot from across his vineyards, picking just what is ripe on the day and co-ferment them. The Barbera will definitely not be ripe enough but we’ll be looking at Moscato, Sauvignon Blanc, Cortese, Chardonnay, Merlot and Dolcetto. I think we’ll end up with a pretty crunchy chillable red, but we”ll see what comes out!
Excerpt from the Moscato review ” Cloudy pale yellow in colour, it has a floral, grapey nose with some rose petal prettiness. The palate is fresh and bright with a lovely dry quality, showing notes of grapefruit pith, green tea and table grapes. Lovely wine with nice acidity. Very moreish, showing subtle medicinal notes on the finish. 92/100 “
And from the Barbera “beautifully pure and focused with a berry fruits nose and a touch of chocolatey richness. The palate is ripe and full but incredibly elegant and quite pure, with a sleek, silky texture and an attractive sour cherry bite. Lots of raspberry, black cherry and damson fruit. Refined and fresh. 92/100 “
Great Food Club and The Olive Branch are presenting The English Winemaker and friends. I will be showing my wines alongside those of a couple of friends (who won’t make it on the night!): Theo Coles of The Hermit Ram in New Zealand and Andrea Faccio of Villa Giada in Piedmont.
7 courses and six wines, Thursday 25th of April 2019, get in touch with The Olive Branch to book.
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.
September continued to be glorious in stark contrast to the wretched conditions of late July and early August. Not quite as great as the contrast with leaving Stansted airport at 8 in the morning with rain and 8 degrees C for company and landing in Milan it it apparently still being Summer: 33 degrees and a pure azure sky!
The fruit for The Red was selected from the vineyard plot that provides the fruit for “La Quercia”, this is a high South facing slope on Limestone. I took the decision to harvest slightly earlier due to the rapidly rising sugar levels and not wanting an overly alcoholic wine. A first pass through the vineyard selected the fruit perfect for using as whole bunch with the second pass for the de-stemmed portion.
The whole bunch fruit was then hand sorted and divided equally between 5 year old barrels (previously used for aging Barbera). The barrels were topped up with de-stemmed fruit. It’s worked out to be the same ratio whole bunch as the Moscato.
Monferrato vineyards
Old Vine Barbera
Whole bunch Barbera
Open barrel fermentation
The Moscato has been ticking away quite perfectly. The mass of the skins has helped maintain a more even temperature and only need a gentle hand plunge to keep the cap wet and active. By late September the juice had fermented out to dry and was sealed up, still on its skins, to get to know itself for a few weeks. We naturally had to have a final taste before it was locked away and it is looking amazing: obviously full of solids still but the bright golden yellow colour is extraordinary, on the nose there was tangerine pith and acacia honey, the palate had not only that essence of grape but a touch of clove and all zinging off a nervy vein of salinity. Very exciting to taste.
Dry Moscato
The morning after processing the Barbera fermentation had already started spontaneously (just like the Moscato) which is a great sign!
It was a bit of a funny old growing season, started off wet then got rather warm. Vigour was our biggest problem so mowing and haircutting the vines were the major jobs. Then it rained and we all got rather worried, then it all dried out and it was all okay again.
The original forecast was to start picking the Moscato on the 20th of August, we actually picked in early September: beautiful fruit it was too. Perfect ripeness, no rot, no wasp, no dilution, just a little bit of sunburn here and there. Lovely stuff.
Moscato in Piemonte is a bit of a religion and the rules are super strict about what you can do with it and still call it Moscato. Essentially it has to be sweet, fizzy and low alcohol. Mine is going to none of those things!
All the wines this year are going to be in very small quantities of around about 600 bottles. The Moscato is a good proportion whole bunch and fermenting on it’s skins. How long it spends on the skins post fermentation is yet to be decided but we are looking at at least 28 days.
