Vintage 2020: Our Barbera is Wine

This is our first attempt at making Barbera from the limited harvest that we had. How did our Barbera turn into wine? Here is a short recap: We harvested our Barbera on October 28, 2020 and meticulously destemmed the grapes by hand over three days. The cold maceration of the Barbera lasted from Friday, October 30 to Wednesday, November 4, 2020 after that we inoculated the must with the yeast F83. We routinely did punch downs of the Barbera.

On November 14, we took a sample to do a hydrometer reading to test if the fermentation was over. The -0.4 specific gravity reading indicated that our juice had turned into wine. We took a sample of the juice to taste.

We put the glass of wine that we retrieved into our refrigerator. The wine separated out into a layer of dark, purple wine with a bottom layer of lees.
We had a "real" Barbera opened so we did a side by side tasting. The real Barbera is on the left hand side, a 2018 Damilano Barbera d'Asti and our Barbera is pictured on the right. The color of our Barbera measured up to the Damilano and our Barbera did indeed taste like Barbera!

Our next step is to rack the Barbera and squeeze the wine from the grapes and put it into a stainless steel keg for a bit of aging.