feature / on the vine / Ca’del Bosco
While I had seen a few producers plunge bunches into a barrel of increasingly murky looking water, only Maurizio Zanella could dream up, let alone devise, a fully automated system to wash and dry an entire crop of a substantially sized wine estate. It was a wake-up call. It made me think, “Why aren’t all grapes washed before the winemaking process?”
financial partner could possibly be. There are always discussions to be had between major shareholders in any business, but for all intents and purposes, the Marzotto family has left Maurizio to run Ca’del Bosco as he sees fit. Why mess about with a winning formula? Why expend energy and time trying to micromanage something so iconic than they have bought into it? As for Maurizio, he still does what he does. Life is no different
for him, although, without 100 percent of the financial burden, it is perhaps a little easier. He is much richer today, owning just 40 percent of Ca’del Bosco, than he would have been had he resisted a partnership back in 1994. In some years, the Ca’del Bosco partnership spends more in investments than it turns over in sales. If he had tried that on his own, he would have gone bust. No, Maurizio has the best of both worlds, and that has enabled him to drive his iconic brand to greater heights.
What makes Ca’del Bosco different? All of Ca’del Bosco’s vineyards are now certified organic. The vineyards of any wine estate represent 100 percent of the wine’s potential, just as its grapes, when picked, represent 100 percent of the wine’s potential quality. The terroir determines its potential, but that includes the varieties of vine chosen, how they are planted, how old they are, how they are trained, pruned, cared for, and harvested, but no winemaker ever gets close to achieving 100 percent of a vineyard’s potential. While the grapes when harvested will always fall short of the vineyard’s potential, however hard its owner might try, each grape at the time of picking has its own intrinsic potential. As Johnny Hugel used to say, the moment a grape is picked, its potential is 100 percent and dropping as the clock begins ticking. The winemaker can never improve on that 100 percent, he or she can only hope to preserve as much of it as possible, and each step taken from here will play a hugely significant part in this respect. Not everything Ca’del Bosco does is unique, but a lot of what
I call its basic qualitative steps are rarely found in other wineries. Certainly not the complete list. In addition to this, there are procedures that are proprietary, and it is these that make Ca’del Bosco truly unique.
All grapes are picked by hand and transported in stackable 35lb (16kg) crates.
Each crate is bar-coded in the vineyard and this coding is used to trace the origin of every grape through the winemaking process.
The grapes go straight to cold rooms, to stop any oxidation. When the grapes have cooled, the automated pallets travel
144 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023
to Ca’del Bosco’s “Berry Spa” where robotic arms gently empty them onto a conveyer belt.
The “Berry Spa” consists of four separate lanes, enabling Ca’del Bosco to wash and dry four different grape varieties or four different locations of the same variety.
Initially, there is a manual sorting to remove the easily observable foreign material, such as leaves, bad fruit, and creepy-crawlies, but much can still get through at this stage, hidden under or inside bunches.
The bunches continue by conveyor belt to three water baths and one drier. • Bath #1 is pure clean water at 54º
F (12º C) through which
bubbles are generated to clean by gentle agitation. As the grapes exit the bath, they are softly sprayed with pure clean water to rinse away the bath water. • Bath #2 is pure clean water at 54º
F to which citric acid has
been added for its antioxidant, antiseptic, and antifungal properties. As the grapes exit the bath, they are softly sprayed with pure clean water to rinse away the bath water. • Bath #3 is again pure clean water at 54º
F to provide a
thorough rinse and once more as the grapes exit the bath, they are softly sprayed to rinse away the bath water.
• The bunches move onto a pair of cold-air blow-driers designed by the salad industry to dry tender plants without bruising.
• The chilled, washed, and dried grapes for sparkling wine go straight by conveyor belt to one of the 11 Wilmes pneumatic nitrogen-flushed presses (still wine grapes arrive here via a destemmer).
From pressing to bottling, the entire Ca’del Bosco winery is gravity-fed, even to the point that when wines have to be moved from one tank to another, such as in blending a final cuvée, there are two giant lifts into which the vats can moved and, to avoid disturbing the wine, the vats are lifted upwards at a snail’s pace.
The final point of difference in the sparkling wine- production process comes at the point of disgorgement and corking, which takes place in a nitrogen-filled chamber on the bottling line: • As it is essential to have entry and an exit flaps, the nitrogen-filled chamber maintains a positive over- pressure, to prevent O2 leaking in.
• At the point of disgorgement, the TPO is non-existent. • The headspace is drip-fed with nitrogen prior to corking, almost entirely eliminating the oxidative shock of disgorgement (not complete elimination as the cork itself will release between 2.5mg and 3mg of O2
per bottle, but this is closer to micro-oxygenation than oxidative shock).
There are other factors, but essentially it is the combination of washing the grape and disgorging-dosage-corking under nitrogen that enables Ca’del Bosco to add no SO2
to most
of its wines, although a very small amount is added to the longest-aging cuvées such as Cuvée Annamaria Clementi
The “Berry Spa”
When I first saw this in 2014, I was blown away, and there were only two lanes then, whereas there are an even more impressive four lanes now. While I had seen the odd few organic and biodynamic producers plunge bunches into a barrel of increasingly murky looking water prior to fermentation, only
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