Maurizio Zanella, the founder of Ca’del Bosco, 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?” We wash any freshly grown ingredient before eating or cooking, so why don’t winemakers wash grapes before fermenting? Some might say that it is unnecessary because anti-bacterial agents such as SO2
will cleanse the must… but
cooking sterilizes ingredients, yet does not stop us from washing fresh ingredients. It is a precaution. As for wine, there are a lot of bugs, creepy-crawlies, leaves, and other extraneous matter that even the most fastidious manual sorting will not remove—especially the tiniest life forms roaming around inside bunches. Then there is the chemical and inorganic residue from spraying grapes. While there might be more of this found on conventionally grown grapes, even certified organic producers are allowed to spray their crops with copper sulfate. Since 2008 and, particularly, 2014, Ca’del Bosco’s wines have had a greater purity. It is not simply a matter of less SO2
,
thanks to washing the grapes and disgorging under nitrogen. It is also the absence of certain organic and inorganic material that is foreign to both the fruit and its terroir, thanks to the washing alone. How that absence imprints itself on the fermentation process gives the wine more precision and is, by definition, more authentic and expressive of place and grape. When both Maurizio and I are long gone, every winery will
wash its grapes and consumers everywhere will take it for granted, like washing hands before the preparation of food. Why wouldn’t they?
Disgorging and corking under nitrogen Nitrogen chamber corking system is composed of a corker [1], preceded by a carrousel [2] aimed at injecting N2
in the neck
Above: Some of Ca’del Bosco’s organic vineyards overlooking Lake Iseo. Right: Ca'del Bosco's innovative disgorgement and corking system.
THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023 | 145
space of each bottle, to replace the existing air, collect it, and bleed it outside. Both turrets are fitted in a sealed chamber [3], to keep the concentration of O2
at a steady value; such
through the ducts [5] and [7]. To reduce the flow of the gas mixture between inside and outside as much as possible, gas curtains [6] are placed at the entry and exit of the chamber and use the flow exiting the injection carrousel. [8] and [9]: Nitrogen detectors. Patented by Ca’del Bosco in 2005, disgorging, dosaging, and corking inside nitrogen is probably the Betamax to Jetting’s VHS. This was the year that Moët began trialing the beer industry’s continuous stream form of Jetting (see “Jet-Age Fizz,” WFW 48, 2015, p.62), following the ground-breaking paper that was published by the CIVC in 2003 quantifying oxygen ingress between disgorgement and corking. The beer industry’s jetting lacked the precision required for Champagne and it was not to be until 2009 that LBM Industries in Reims patented a nitrogen- based pulse-Jetting technology. In theory, Ca’del Bosco had a
concentration is controlled by the detector [4] and adjusted by feeding N2
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