Tag: piedmont

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Italian vintage recap

The 2019 vintage in Northern Italy is now complete and the wines are safely wrapped up in tank.

  • First pressing of Field Blend
  • Free run Barbera
  • Racked Moscato

The fruit for the dry Moscato “Mascot” was the very first fruit picked the season. This had the potential for the fermentation to start slowly, but actually kicked in and was merrily bubbling away within 24 hours. I slightly increased the volume of whole bunch fruit and cut back on the cap plunging but more or less the same procedure as the 2018 wine. Fewer days on skins post fermentation has led to a wine with a fine texture and a really elegant palate .

The Barbera has been fermented in the same two old tonneaux 500 litre barrels as last year. The minor finesses have been an earlier picking and fewer punch downs but otherwise a carbon copy of the successful 2018 wine. The major change for the 2019 will be that I am de-classifying out of the Italian DOC/DOP system completely. I will have significantly less paperwork to deal with, but I won’t be able to say “Barbera” on the label. Current working title is “Both Barrels” for reasons that are apparent.

New for 2019 is the Field Blend. I harvested only indigenous Piemontese varietals in roughly the proportions that they are grown in the vineyard and co-fermented them in one old tonneaux. It’s not exact, but we have roughly 35% Moscato which was all fermented as whole bunch, 35% Barbera, 10% Nebbiolo, 10% Dolcetto and 10% Gamba di Pernice (you might have to look that one up). In my head I thought I might end up with a light, chillable, smashable Summer red. It’s not even remotely turned out like that; deeply aromatic on the nose but super savoury and dense on the palate with a cobweb of superfine tannins holding it altogether. I love it and I’m slightly over excited by it considering the tiny volume made.

The intention is to release the Moscato and Field Blend in the late Spring of 2020 and the Barbera in the early Autumn of 2020. Anticipated volumes are not more than 80 cases of Moscato and Barbera and in the region of 25 cases of the Field Blend.

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Vintage 2019: Start your engines!

And we’re off!

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.

  • Freshly picked Moscato
  • Whole bunch into the vat
  • Topped up with de-stemmed
  • Morning commute
  • Not quite ripe Barbera
  • End of of a busy day
  • Merchants for Winemakers
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And so to bottle

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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