Alessandra Bera talks about how Moscato d'Asti is produced by her family in Piedmont, Italy at Vittorio Bera & Figli. The process from vine to bottle for making this sparkling wine is explained. Alessandra sat with Ask a Winemaker at Red and White in Chicago in 2013.
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So the grape arrives in the winery in a small "cassette", boxes of 25 kilos, directly from the vineyard. We don't put all the grapes together because otherwise it can be rotten a little bit, it can lose a little bit of its atoms. The grape is pressed right away so you separate the juice from the skin with a soft pressure.
It's a big machine that makes pressure automatic.. with pneumatic pressure. Then you have obtained the must. You clarify this must. And we still use very traditional way that is a static clarification so we don't use enzymes and other chemical to do that but just we let the "dirty" that is in the grape to go down and so a static clarification, Then the must that is completely clear, we keep that in a fridge, in a big fridge. The fermentation starts ... so you take off the must from from the cellar from this fridge and we let to start the fermentation and completely natural fermentation, spontaneous fermentation, with no selective least until five point five. (Degrees of alcohol). The maximum for the for the the appellation is a six degrees of alcohol, so around five and six degrees you chill down the cuve (tank) to stop the fermentation. So we don't use sulfur to to stop the fermentation or other things just by chilling down. So, after that you leave on the lees. It takes from two weeks until one month on the less, always at zero degrees of temperature to let it calm down and then you have to filter. The filtration is made with a "filter a plaque" (sheet filter) And all these filtration is made under pressure, so you keep the the bubbles the gas that was produced during the fermentation, you keep it. And when you put in bottle is already with its own gas that was producing during the fermentation. It's quite complicated. We used to do a fermentation in the bottle until end of the 1970s but that is not possible to do that for the Appellation Moscato d'Asti because otherwise you can't control the level of alcohol and and becomes quite difficult. We would like to do some of that but then you can't call it Moscato d'Asti
