Today we would be visiting the Araldica winery down in the valley where Alexander Wines gets many of its cracking Italian wines from, including the Ancora Monferrato Chiaretto, Piedmont Cortese and Piedmont Barbera.
As we arrived we could tell it was going to be another beautiful, sunny day with clear blues skies. We met Claudio (who had taken us out for dinner on Monday) and we began our tour of the winery. This was a completely different set up to the two previous wineries we had visited. Araldica make a lot of wine, and in order to do this they have had to gradually change the way they function.
Their wines are fermented in massive stainless steel tanks to retain the fresh and pure flavours of the wines and then transferred either over to huge Slavonian oak barrels for ageing or filtered and bottled quickly ready for despatch. Most of their operations are now mechanised and controlled by very sophisticated computers. This ensures that every bottle is checked and scanned to make sure it is perfect.
Claudio then took us over to the old building and explained that they get a lot of their grapes from individual co-operatives who have small plots of land in the vineyards surrounding the area. It is a very clever system as they have to instruct all the individual growers to pick and bring the grapes to the winery so that they can be pressed and made into wine at the perfect time. They send a memo out to all the local bars and town halls where the growers are given a time to pick and get their grapes to the winery.
He said on these days, the roads are queued all the way up the hillside with each individual grower with his trailer full of grapes to be taken to the hopper at the winery. When they reach the winery, there are 4 loading/ hopper bays where the grapes are weighed and quickly assessed of its quality. The grapes are then tipped into the hopper, crushed and directed down one of 3 different routes - one route for premium grapes, one route for good grapes and one route for poor grapes which are not used. The price of the growers grapes are calculated on a scale (1 being perfect to 10 being unacceptable) with the weight and they are given a cheque for their grapes.
The grapes are then picked up by a tanker and driven over the road to the winery where they are made into delicious wines. You may be wondering why they don't just build a tunnel to pass the crushed grapes through to the winery, btu they can't ensure that the tunnel would always be at optimum cleanliness so they use the sterile tanks on the tankers to ensure optimum quality. This is probably the easiest trunk drivers job in the world!
Vickie and Paul with Claudio - yup, snow in the background!
As we left, Claudio said that this weather was unusually warm for this time of year and that the growers were starting to get concerned as the vines may start to bud too early. He had his fingers crossed for a cold snap to arrive soon or it could be disastrous for this years vintage.
Catch up tomorrow where we head back to Il Cascinone to take a tour around this tiny estate.
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