This is a low intervention!

“Maybe we should warm it”, Mario said coming out of the winery. It was three days after we harvested our Grignolino and one tank had not started fermenting yet. Mario was worried that the chilly Piedmontese nights were too cold for the fermentation to start spontaneously.

I knew this was a risk. After all, this Nova Radix Drop was the first time Mario let Grignolino (or any grape) ferment spontaneously in his winery. We had no clue how it would turn out, but I figured if we could do it in a garage in Mendoza, we could do it in a real cantina in Piemonte (this type of hybris underlies much of the world’s winemaking). To de-risk our experiment, we split the grapes in two batches.

One part of our harvest we destemmed, meaning we took the grapes off their stems and only the actual grapes went into a tank. We hoped the juice and grapes in that tank would start fermenting spontaneously. Every morning we tested the sugar content and put our ears to a sample glass hoping to hear the comforting bubbles of fermentation. But the tank remained silent and the grapes unfermented. The more days passed, the greater the risk invaders would colonize the juice: bacteria, crazy yeast strains, enzymes and other volatile elements. Mario and I grew nervous.

The other part of our harvest, the most beautiful big compact bunches, we left whole and put in a separate tank, flushing them with CO2. We hoped the whole bunch tank would start an intracellular fermentation, (aka carbonic maceration). When no oxygen is left in the tank, the grapes start fermenting from the inside. Sugars are converted to alcohol, malic acid is broken down, and tannins and anthocyanins from the skins are absorbed by the grape flesh. At about 2% alcohol, the berries start to burst, releasing their juice. At that point, the native yeasts jump in and finish the fermentation. We helped the yeasts a little bit, because after a couple of days in a sealed tank, we got in and gently crushed the top of the tank with our feet. All went swimmingly in that tank – and it helped Mario had done a harvest with Philippe Pacalet in Burgundy (a master in semi-carbonic fermentation).

“Perhaps we add some nutrients to the destemmed tank”, Mario suggested. I resisted. Spontaneous fermentation, without adding yeasts or nutrients, is one of the hallmarks of Nova Radix wines. Compromising on that point was a dangerously slippery slope into making conventional wines (ewww!).

The thing with intervening in the winery is that it is very difficult to know when to stop. This is precisely what all too often happened to Grignolino. Because Grignolino is naturally low in color and alcohol, high in tannins (grippy) and acidity (zippy), yet delicate in aromas that are more on the savory side than the candied/fruity side, winemakers in Monferrato had an urge to do something to make it more palatable for the masses (think: juicy, dark and alcoholic). To give Grignolino more color, they let the skins in the tank for a long period and they moved the juice aggressively to get all the color out of the skins. This heavy extraction meant that even more tannins got into the wine – so they looked for ways to soften the tannins. One way of doing that, was letting the wine rest for years in oak. But oak leaves even more tannins in the wine, and the smoky, chocolate and vanilla aromas of oak totally overpower the delicate aromas of Grignolino. The result is a wine that shouts instead of sings.

And so it happened that a native grape once again held a powerful personal message. Just like humans, Grignolino is best when it comes as it is, and it certainly does not need to be reverse engineered into something it simply is not.

We wanted to make a Grignolino that sang. Thank god our bet paid off though. The fermentation in our destemmed tank started four days after harvest – with zero intervention and zero invaders.