The Making of a Great Wine by Edward Steinberg

I first heard of Angelo Gaja in the Introduction to Viticulture and Enology, the prerequisite for the UC Davis online certification course in winemaking. On the DVDs that were provided, Prof. Carole Meredith took us on a tour of the wine regions of the world. When she got to Italy, she mentioned Angelo Gaja and how he went outside of Italian tradition and grew Cabernet sauvignon. She mentioned that his father was so ashamed of what Angelo had done that he called his son's enterprise, "Darmagi", and this is the name that Angelo Gaja used on his bottlings of Cabernet sauvignon. In this book, after a brief introduction, Edward Steinberg begins at the end of the 1988 harvest. It recapitulated in my mind, many of the lessons that I learned in the online course.
This is the story of how world class wine is made in northwestern Italy, in Sori San Lorenzo in Barbaresco. The first order of business is the selection of the appropriate site to plant Nebbiolo, an Italian Vitis vinifera. Soil tests, vine balance, green manure, phylloxera and rootstocks selections are explained. I didn't know until reading this book that AXR1, the rootstock used in California is actually a cross between Aramon, a vinifera and rupestris and it was the Aramon parentage that made AXR1 susceptible to phylloxera biotype B in California.
Steinberg is there in 1988 during the winter pruning season. The vineyard manager relates a story about a trip he took to California where he saw Nebbiolo being cordon trained and spur pruned. The result was a lot of foliage but very little fruit because in Nebbiolo, the first two nodes are not fruitful. The inverse relationship between yield and quality is discussed. There is a big jump from the chapter on pruning to the chapter on budbreak, May, 1989. In Sori San Lorenzo, they do not till or use weedkillers because they harm the soil. There is a cautionary tale about the new spray used against peronospora and the feeding habit of the red spider. When the new spray was used, the red spider which fed on trees and bushes began attacking the vineyard. Harvest began during the last week of September into the first week of October. Intimate knowledge of yeast strains, using the hydrometer, paper chromatography, sulfur dioxide and pH relationships are all part of making a quality wine. I read about the differences between sawn oak and split oak as well as kiln dried and air-dried oak staves. The book explains the steps Angelo Gaja takes in order to make his world class wines from Sori San Lorenzo. (And what was the fate of the 1989 vintage? I recalled that in Ferenc Máté's book A Vineyard in Tuscany Angelo Gaja gives him a bottle of wine. It was the 1989 Sori San Lorenzo. When the book was published in 2008 the wine was selling for $400.00!)