2001 La Famiglia  Barbera

Winemaker's Notes
"This is the finest Barbera we've produced," said La Famiglia winemaker, Scott Kelley. "We selected the Barbera grapes predominantly from our Wappo Hill Vineyard in Napa Valley's Stags Leap District. We worked extensively with the vines throughout the growing season to get the finest fruit. The wine's bright ripe plum and blackberry character, with nuances of spice, bacon and earth, come from the synergy between Barbera vines, the Wappo Hill terroir, and our cultivation techniques. It's a great food wine - with fleshy texture, supple tannins and excellent acid structure - especially with cheese-rich dishes such as eggplant parmesan and risotto with squab or porcini mushrooms. I also love it with simply grilled meats, such as pork tenderloin rubbed with garlic and herbs."

Varietal blend: 91% Barbera, 8% Syrah, 1% Teroldego

Vintage
The 2001 vintage was incredible for Barbera. The growing season gave us one of the longest bloom-to-harvest periods in recent history. This long "hang-time" on the vine resulted in exceptional flavors and balance in the grapes. We had predicted an early harvest since budbreak, bloom and veraison were ahead of normal, and indeed, harvest began as one of the earliest in the last 20 years. We feared that all the grapes would ripen simultaneously, but then the weather cooled and slowed ripening, making harvest one of the longest in duration. We harvested the grapes for this wine in early October.

Grapes: (Average) 25.2º Brix with 0.81% initial acid and 3.25pH

Vineyard
Barbera vies with Sangiovese as the most widely planted red grape in Italy. Our 2001 Barbera shows this grape variety's affinity to the soils and climate of southern Napa Valley. We harvested the majority of the Barbera grapes from Robert Mondavi Wappo Hill Vineyard in the Stags Leap District American Viticultural Area (AVA) with the balance from a vineyard in Mendocino County. All of the Syrah was selected from the Robert Mondavi To Kalon Vineyard in Napa Valley's Oakville AVA. We chose the handful of Teroldego grapes in the blend from a vineyard in the San Ysidro AVA. Barbera can be very vigorous so we slowed vine development in our Wappo Hill Vineyard with cover crops through the spring. We also removed excess shoots, leaves and clusters for optimum sun exposure and ripening. "Not a cluster was touching another cluster on the vines," said Kelly. "We thinned the crop four times to gain flavor concentration, which shows in the wine's intense, well-developed flavors. Our efforts definitely paid off."

86% Napa Valley (including 78% Robert Mondavi Wappo Hill Vineyard in the Stags Leap District AVA and 8% Robert Mondavi To Kalon Vineyard in the Oakville AVA), balance Mendocino County and San Ysidro AVAs

Fermentation & Aging
To accentuate the spicy fruit character of Barbera, we gently destemmed the hand-harvested clusters to retain a large number of whole berries for fermentation. We fermented the must-with a combination of cultured Italian yeast and native strains to add layers of complexity--in small, open-top oak fermenters for optimum skin-to-juice contact. We gave the wine an average of three to four weeks extended maceration (skin contact) to develop varietal character and richness on the palate. After pressing, we gently transferred the wine into a combination of French oak barrels (30% new), casks and puncheons to undergo a long malolactic fermentation and 13 months of oak aging. To capture the wine's exceptionally vibrant character, we bottled it without fining or filtration.

Wine analysis: 0.72% total acid, 3.4 pH, 0.05% residual sugar (dry), 14.5% alcohol, by volume