Most of the Dolcetto was brought in while I was away, but it seems I am back just in time to heave crates of grapes into the destemmer/crusher, get completely covered in sticky juice, and help get the must into the tanks. I get cleaning duty that afternoon. Andrea tells me that it took two years of training to get to a point where he was allowed to clean the destemmer without supervision. My first try, I miss one tiny spot – Andrea is speechless. Surprise, surprise, surprise … the Swiss cleaning gene comes out and finally there is something at the winery for which I have a natural aptitude. Later on, I’m sent out to one of the vineyards, near Novello, to help bring in the last of the Dolcetto fruit. It’s on a steep, east-facing site.
We work through the rows, Luca driving the tractor with Christian and Ivan heaving the full crates of fruit on to the tiny trailer. Luca is a very interesting cat – he is in charge of all the vineyard management (Sandrone owns 70% of its vineyards and has long-term leases on the balance) and is a talented viticulturalist. I’ve always maintained that a winemaker’s skill emerges not in great vintages (anyone can make a great wine then) but in the worst vintages. Luca’s job is to make sure the fruit coming in to the winery is the absolute best possible for that particular vintage, vine type and vineyard site. As I’ve mentioned before, this will not be a great vintage – but the fruit coming into the winery looks pretty darn good to me. Luca explains that between the green harvests, removing foliage, picking and sorting operations, each bunch of fruit is examined at least 4-5 times before it goes on the sorting table. Bad bunches are lopped off green before they rob the plant of energy. Individual berries, if damaged, are removed during picking. Any fruit or bunches showing imperfect blossom, growth, and ripening effects are discarded. The fruit, when it arrives on the back of trailers to the winery, looks really good. Several people working at other wineries have told me that the early fruit coming in looked “like shit,” but I can’t share that assessment. Other than a little bit of shriveling, which Luciano does not mind one bit, the grapes look, smell and taste really good.
Luca is always wearing shorts – one of the few Italians I’ve known to do so. I follow his lead. (Even in the hottests days of summer, I rarely see Italians, or any Europeans for that matter, wearing shorts. I'd brought shorts but wore old jeans the first few days so as to better fit in. the first morning he sees me in shorts, Luca gives me shit.) Another funny thing I realized about Luca – he looooooves his tractors. He’s like a little boy with them. Also, his voice is distinctive – I realized, while in the vineyard where his voice would float over from a few rows away, that he has the exact same gravelly but liquid intonations of Sean Connery. The resemblance of their voices is, well, uncanny. I resist the urge to ask him to introduce himself as "Sandrone. Luca Sandrone." Or spout something out of Highlander.
While the unloading and sorting continues upstairs, Luciano and I are in the fermentation room, getting the must of partially crushed grapes into the tanks. 250 crates of fruit fills one 60hl tank. It descends through a pipe that gently warms the must.
Luciano bubbles lots of CO2 though the must to drive out the oxygen and keep the fermentation from starting too soon. The CO2 makes a wicked cool cloud effect in the tanks.
As the week progresses, I am really feeling my way out in the winery. I learn the difference between rimontaggio, delestage and svinatura as Luciano takes me through each process. I see that the process itself is not all that complicated – it’s just that there are loads of decisions to make and there are lots of places for things to go wrong. We start taking the first wines off the skins as the extraction levels get to the ideal points, and let the wine finish fermenting in different tanks. I continue to scrub everything in sight. I learn to clean everything.
Inside the fermentation room I am always out of breath. I hits me that there’s simply not enough oxygen in here to go around, what with gazillions of yeast cells eating up sugar to produce alcohol and CO2 – it generally feels like I am at 25,000 feet in really, really, really thin air. I joke about it with Andrea and Luciano, who tell me that this is completely normal, and that it’s necessary to take “breathing breaks” when working in the fermentation room. The ventilation here is not great as the room is kept buttoned up for temperature.
Wednesday afternoon I am issued the standard Italian laborer’s blue apron, and I feel like I’ve made my bones.
Later that afternoon, Luca takes Christina and I out for berry gathering for analysis – we hear across the Tannero river into the Roero, where Sandrone has vineyards that make up the Valmaggiore Nebbiolo bottling. This area is beautiful, warmer than the Barolo, and the soils are mostly sandy, making the resulting wine more fruity and light than Barolo. The vineyards here are steep – and the wasps are incredible, attracted by the sugar. Compared to Dolcetto, the Nebbiolo fruit is much more compact and densely packed together.
We gather samples in the late-afternoon sunshine and drop them off to a lab on the way back.
Comments