2020: Apocalypse’s year or Mother Earth’s one?

2020 surely will not be remembered as one of the best year in mankind’s history.

Devastating fires, giant hornets, earthquakes, steroids close to Earth and to end in style, a global pandemic that kept us home for almost a year, restricting and changing all our normal activities.

Inside this unusual and unexpected scenario, Earth’s vital cycle didn’t stop, silently following its rhythms and seasons and as every year gave us its fruits.

 

Winter was mild and the snow, that this year appeared faint and rarefied, left the scene to the sun that distributed its rays from north to south. Sweet rains in May and June refreshed the vines, giving enough water to avoid the summer stress and to guarantee a great reserve for the warm months  July and August. The whole climatic cycle was therefore perfect and lead us with confidence to the most awaited days in the vineyards: the Harvest!

 

5^th September here at Cà del Baio, under the warm summer sun, the Harvest 2020 started with Chardonnay grapes.

Ph values, acidity and sugar levels were very balanced.

The activities in the vineyards continued with the harvest of Moscato, Dolcetto and Riesling grapes.

The temperature range between day and night was really prodigious to get the perfect polyphenolic ripening of our red grapes: that is why Barbera and Nebbiolo grapes had to wait a couple more days before being picked.

We began to harvest Barbera grapes on 22th September and Nebbiolo grapes on 29^th,starting with Asili cru in Barbaresco.

The harvest ended on 8^th October with the picking of grapes in our Vallegrande cru in Treiso.

A day filled with joy, even if this year we couldn’t celebrate the end of vineyard activities as tradition because of Covid restrictions.

The happiness in our hearts was anyway huge for a year of work that ended with a great Harvest.

 

After a lot of work in the vineyards, grapes arrived in the winery where they had to be transformed into wine without big interventions, following the different features of every grape variety and looking to take out the best of them.

As far as winemaking notes are concerned, we will focus on Nebbiolo, our most representative grape variety.

The fermentation started with natural yeasts through the “pied de cuve” in steel vats and went on for four weeks in the meantime as the maceration.

The malolactic fermentation ended for all the parcels of Nebbiolo vinified during the last half of November.

 

Of course it is still early to give a definitive evaluation but we expect the wines of this vintage, so profoundly unforgettable, to have a good complexity showing all the varietal’s features and to have elegance and balance.

 

Surely Humanity will always remember 2020 as a troubled period, but at least it will have given to mother earth a 7% drop in CO2 emissions and a great vintage for wine!