To think the season started off well.
The vines potentially had a lot of grapes and budded splendidly, green and vigorous. The climate was the best, not too hot and really dry.
Then, on the 20th of May, the catastrophe began - a continuous month of rain, sometimes hard, sometimes light, but daily; a month of continuous cold with dark clouds in the sky. It was the kind of thing no one remembered seeing for at least 100 years. The delicate moment of flowering was compromised, most of all for the late ripening varieties; under the constant wet, the little flowers closed up, rotted and fell off. All that remained of the bunch was a sad twig.
The vineyards soon became a disaster, the growth of the grass was unstoppable and it became high, without any way to eliminate it. The mildew started and attacked the leaves in a very harsh way. Not being able to go between the rows with a tractor, I couldn't do anything but try to control by doing treatments of powder with a sprayer on my back. This was somewhat homeopathic, but tiring, because every day it rained and every other day I had to repeat the treatment. Then the rain stopped and from one day to the next it broke out in a heat: a humid heat, intense and harmful. The vineyard looked like it had become a jungle, and on top of the mildew came oidium (or powdery mildew), could this year get any worse!. Everybody was using a ton of poison, but we stayed with organic treatments and our crops were no worse than the others.
Everything came to a head at the end of July in a week of madness. I needed to bottle some Moscato and I could not go into the vineyard. My father was cutting the grass with a tractor so the daily treatment of sulfur against the oidium was left off for a day. Within the week the malady had become unstoppable despite the interventions that were done after. As far as there remained any grapes, they were dried out.
After a windy and hot August, the harvest began for us on the 8th of September. It was a strange a depressing harvest. There were very few grapes: 50% less than normal on the Moscato, 60% less on the other white grapes and 70% less of Dolcetto and Barbera: a true disaster. The quality? It was best for the Moscato, since luckily we are situated in the best vineyard sites in the region and could pick later. It's fair quality for the reds; they suffered at the end of the season so the ripening was not perfect. It was the same for the white grapes (Arneis, Cortese and Favorita); the grapes were very healthy but not completely ripe. Qualitatively, in complexity it's a good year; quantitatively, it's the worst in the last 100 years.
For now, there is a sufficient amount of Moscato; with the reds on the other hand I am thinking of making a single wine, which should yield about 6,000 bottles as a souvenir of the most difficult and agonizing vintage of my life!