Discovering the New wine (in Italian Vino Novello)
As every year in Italy, the New wine can be sold form 30th October. Excellent wine to sip with chestnuts or paired with dried fruit desserts and castagnaccio. It is a quaffable wine, not so balanced and with low tannins. What is the New wine and how is it produced?
How to produce New wine
New wine is produced with a particular winemaking technique, used also for the famous French wine Beaujolais. We mean the Carbonic maceration, which produces a wine not so balanced, and, for this reason, it has to be drink within few months because its preservation time is pretty short.
The production technique, as we said, is the carbonic maceration. With this technique the bunch of grapes ferment with the stalks for a variable period of time (from few hours to many days) in a tank full of carbon dioxide and hermetically closed to avoid any external contact. This environment allows the natural alcoholic fermentation of the sugars, caused by the lack of oxygen, thus defined anaerobic. The grape become must and the fermentation starts also without oxygen and yeasts.
During this process the sugars become alcohol and the grape transformation begins. It is closed inside close tanks closed and full of carbon dioxide for some days (minimum 10) at 30-35°C where the maceration slowly occurs: the peels begin to break, the grape becomes flabby and it is possible to se a former liquid; then a machine ended the process treading the grapes.
The characteristics of the New Wine
The result is the so-called New wine (Novello), with fresh and fruity aromas and a small quantity of tannin. The colour is a purple-red lively and bright. A great New wine, in compliance with the code of conduct, has to have an alcoholic volume of at least 11° and a fermentation not below 10 deys. However, about the wine percentage obtained from the carbonic fermentation (minimum 40%) in the final product, the Italian low leave a great percent gap and a certain freedom to the companies. It is certain that the greater the quantity is, the better the New wine will be.
The fruity and fresh aroma, its quaffable and sweet characteristics and the perfumes make it perfect to be paired with dried fruit and seasonal desserts, a must? Pair it with the roasted chestnuts, chestnuts cakes of bread stuffed with cold cuts.
