3.2.10. Tuesday dawns beautiful – the first morning without sleet or rain since Saturday morning in Bolzano. We head out of Monforte for the 45-minute drive to Castiglione Tinella, north and east of the Barbaresco zone. This is serious Barbera and Moscato country – hillsides are packed with vines and the steeply undulating landscape opens and closes as we twist and turn up into the northwestern edge of the Langhe.
Moscato d’Asti can be the most delightfully peachy, appley, minerally lightly fizzy wine; it can also be absolute plonk. After years of tasting, I’m down to one producer occupying the qualitative summit: Paolo Saracco. There are other acceptable, even quite good producers, but none has the insane freshness, delight and vibrancy of Saracco’s bottling.
Castiglione Tinella is a picturesque town at the top of a ridge; in the distance, you can see the Alps, Asti, the valleys of the Tanaro and the Po, and toward Santo Stefano Belbo, the site of a gorgeous Relais & Chateaux property, the Relais San Maurizio, in an ancient abbey.
Paolo is out this day, but his friend Elvio, who had accompanied us last year with Paolo (when we all went to the Relais San Maurizio for lunch; photo of Paolo at the place – at right - is from March 2009), is here to lead us around for the short tour. Moscato is a wine that is really easy to enjoy, but the process by which it is made is incredible – and Paolo has applied a textbook just-in-time inventory system to better manage the production of a fragile and perishable product. One really must see the winery to believe it – it is a radical departure from the way wine is traditionally made.
Elvio (at left) is a character. Genial, funny, with a million stories (most of them probably true) and deep experience in the wine business, he shows us around. This is a tiny winery for the production, so the tour takes just a few minutes. How can a winery that produces close to a half-million bottles just have a medium-sized fermentation room and no inventory warehouse?
A good question. The secret, and Paolo’s great insight into the conflicting needs of winemaking and winedrinking, at least where Moscato is concerned, are at the heart of this. Winemaking is a process that is a result of surplus: how does one preserve for consumption fruit that would otherwise spoil before it could be consumed? (Jam is another great example of this impulse, as are products like cheese, salami, jerky, pickling, etc.) Winemaking, traditionally, is a once-a-year affair: the grapes come in, wine is produced, bottled and sold over the next year. Wine-drinking, Moscato in particular, wants the wine to be as fresh and unaged as possible ... so do we only drink it the moment it is made, the second it hits our local wine shop? Many Moscato are tired and have already lost a good part of their charm by the time the next vintage is released. (Moscato can be sold and consumed right after bottling.) Some producers store their Moscato in refrigerated cellars to keep them fresh as long as possible, and another producer vinifies twice a year, with a fall release and a spring release. Paolo decided that to do it right, to make the best possible wine, he would have to vinify continuously - essentially, he uses a just-in-time inventory system, where the value added-process (the winemaking) is not completed until the product is needed by his customers.
Most growers are paid by weight, so the temptation to exceed the permitted maximum of 10,000 kilos per hectare can be unavoidable. Overcropping is the primary reason that most Moscato is innocuous. There’s just not enough stuffing there. Saracco’s vineyards are either estate-owned or under long-term contract and Paolo oversees the vineyard management. Yield are kept to a reasonable 7,000 kilos per hectare. Additionally, Paolo did things that no Moscato producer had seriously contemplated doing at a large scale. When he started doing green harvest his neighbors thought he had gone off the deep end. Remember the rule about how great wine is made in the vineyards? It applies for Moscato d’Asti just the same as it applies for grand cru burgundy. In 1983, when Paolo took over from his father, there were 6 hectares, now grown to 47 – this is a winery that has taken the fruits of its success and re-invested them in the business. His winery is now a globally recognized brand that provides incredible value in the bottle. I always have a few bottles of this in my fridge!
Vinification process: As soon as grapes are picked, they are brought to the winery pronto – all the vineyards are relatively close to the winery to keep transport times short. Grapes begin oxidation (the enemy of freshness) as soon as they are picked. All grapes are pressed as soon as they reach the winery – and here is the totally frickin’ amazing part – they are not vinified. The press runs continuously at harvest time; as soon as a load of grapes arrives, in they go. (Remember, white wines are pressed before fermentation - the liquids and solids are separated before they go in the tank, unlike red wines.) The white Moscato juice is stored in enormous stainless steel tanks at -2 degrees centigrade under essentially anaerobic conditions. (Pic above right, of the insulated chilling tanks).
Elvio draws a sample from a tiny spigot on the side of a huge tank: the juice is fresh and delicious. It is from grapes picked the previous September … amazing. The juice is stored in these giant tanks until it is ready to be vinified – meaning, until there are sufficient orders to use a full tank of near-frozen juice. On my first visit a year ago, a storage tank had just been emptied that morning. There was still a crust of ice and frost around the access door that had been opened once the pressure of the liquid was relieved. There was a deposit of grape solids in the bottom – smelling incredibly fragrant and attracting the first insects of a warm spring day.
(Pic at right: Paolo, myself, Mark Robson, March 2009)
What does all this mean? Paolo can vinify and bottle (a process that takes about 2 weeks) when sufficient orders come in. This means the wine is fresh, fresh, fresh even when it is made 10 months after the harvest. There is no need for a warehouse: there might be a few stacks of boxes floating around for local customers, but that’s it. When Paolo has sufficient orders, he vinifies a tank (more on the process later), bottles and ships it. Each bottle has a stamp on the label with the fill date: If you are in a store and see this wine, you can check exactly when the wine was put in bottle. Ours this day says “L 19 02 10” meaning February 19th, 2010. Wicked cool – we are drinking something made less that three weeks ago.
Moscato d’Asti is a wine that is vinified under pressure: it uses sealed vinification tanks that do not allow the CO2 to escape – rather the gas is absorbed into the wine, which gives it the characteristic fizz. It is not a spumante – wines labeled spumante are over 2 bars of pressure, and Moscato is less. When a tank is vinified, fermentation occurs at about 17C under pressure. As the yeast turns the sugars to CO2 and alcohol, the must is carefully monitored: when the pressure inside the tank builds to 2 bar, fermentation is stopped by chilling the must, thereby killing the yeast. The liquid is filtered through bentonite clay (pic at right) to remove the dead years cells (still under pressure, a complex process) and goes directly into bottle. At 5-6% alcohol, the wine will have residual sugar of 150g/l and acidity of 6-7ml/l. The wine is fresh, vibrant, redolent of white fruits and flowers, and absolutely delicious. This is reference point Moscato d’Asti.
2009 Moscato d’Asti. Very green-gold color, lots of white peach, mineral, citrus flowers, white flowers, lovely acidity, bright, crisp fresh and clean on the palate. Lovely mousse, delicate aromas, very fresh and lively on the tongue. Simply delicious. On the finish, very honeyed and sweet fruit, white melon, the acidity keeps it very fresh and there is good length. Moscato can never be a particularly complex wine but this succeeds in what it is meant to be – purely enjoyable. Lovely. Drink young. 3.0-
Saracco also makes miniscule quantities of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Riesling. I’ve tasted the Chard and Pinot Noir – both are worth seeking out.
We head back to Alba for lunch, stopping along the way for pics of the Alps over the vineyards. In Alba, in the Piazza del Duomo, we enjoy the sun.
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