Ancestral studies
MUSIC TO LISTEN TO: Where is My Mind? – Pixies
RECOMMENDED READING: Il Diavolo sulle colline – Cesare Pavese
READING TIME: 5 min.
There are several terms to define the effervescence of a wine, for example: “Sparkling” or “Spumante” that we all know, “moved, crunchy” which alludes to the cheerful and witty character of certain capricious wines, “Petillant”, which in the “naturel” version define themselves as “pet-nat” much appreciated by Austrians and Germans. The most intriguing term of all is without a doubt: “Ancestral”.
The determining characteristic of this product is its “Essentiality”. For some years now I have been experimenting with the vinification of these bizarre wines, with ephemeral scents, difficult to define but fully shareable in taste. I started as a game pushed by “creative souls” that are difficult to resist to try alternative and a little crazy paths. Then from the game was born the interest, the curiosity that something unique could arise. Many wines are born from a chat at the table, between a cigarette and a joke. So it was that “the rama” and I had some fun. A little levity was needed, the 2021 harvest had just ended and the threat of Covid was still around the corner.
How is an ancestral born?
It is among the first and oldest sparkling techniques in the world, probably born in France in Champagne or perhaps in the AOP Blanquette de Limoux. The master vintners of those parts, at the end of the tumultuous alcoholic fermentation, bottled the wine, which had just a slight residual sugar, capturing every perfume, every bubble of that ferment, like catching children playing together to pick up a ball rolling in the mud, in fact, like them, these wines are dirty, cloudy, imperfect, but this doesn’t matter.
Thinking about it, I too drank many ancestral drinks as a child without knowing it. The home-made wines, the so-called “farmer’s wines”, often had a sweet and even a little sour aftertaste if tasted on the occasion of the feast of San Martino. The eagerness to consume them early for the Christmas holidays drove them to be bottled after the first “transmuta”, or the pouring into the classic liter bottle which often bore the initials of a well-known brand of mineral water, how can we forget this nice detail! A miracle to think that that water had turned into wine!
Then, in the spring, something started to move inside these “miraculous” bowls, it was enough to uncork them to realize that there was gas, a light “Petillant naturel” as the French would elegantly say. The miracle was done, the wine was sparkling!
The ancestral method developed thanks to this “pleasant inconvenience”.
What can arise from such a technique?
Only a patient waiting in the bottle can reveal the surprise; the residual sugars still present ferment so as to keep the wines agitated. Time is crucial to calm the agitation, to settle the dust on the bottom. We uncorked bottles that bubbled like geysers before we convinced ourselves that we just had to stall. Brewmasters would say: too much “gushing” is not good. It takes time!
But I don’t like waiting too long.
How many opportunities do we have to make these wines? Few, I envy the master brewers, they ferment and create all year round, while we only have three months to think about and implement an idea to be bottled. There’s little we can do, these wines take time and this time we’ll make a bet. Of the very few bottles produced, some we will leave closed in a “cage”, to mature, to reflect, others we will unleash free to explode, to cause damage like kids without rules. Like Oreste, Pieretto and Poli, the characters of the “devil on the hills” that Cesare Pavese portrays as bold young men who hurriedly enter adult life with all the joys, fears and insecurities of their age, the end of light-heartedness and the inevitable arrival of adulthood. Basically this is the ancestral, like childish naivety, the illusion of dreams dragged by the intoxication of thoughts moved like foamy waves in the sea that incite you to fly.
