Fletcher Cantina della Stazione Dolcetto D’Alba DOC 2023

“Coming from the 60 year old vineyard I own in Alba in San Rocco. High altitude, this is one of the most classical places for me for where Dolcetto has always existed in the region. It’s not home to Nebbiolo, there’s not a lot of Nebbiolo planted around that zone. It’s really just Barbera & Dolcetto.”

It’s bony white calcareous soil but at a higher altitude so what you get from Barbera here is elegance and structure. We see alot of Dolcetto on the market that tend to be rounder, softer, drinkable. The wines coming from this region are historically aged longer due to their structure.

100% open fermented, no wholebunch with plunging as the tool for manipulating the skins during ferment I do like a low extraction. I don’t really change my management across any of the reds. There’s no temperature control on any of the tanks so I really focus on picking in the morning when I’ve got cool grapes and getting them into tank cool enough to be able to go through the processes of a long lag phase with a wine just sits there, the juice sits with the skins and it builds up its steam and its temperature and its fermentation strength over many days. The length of fermentation is because their natural ferment is around anywhere from two to three weeks, Whereas most inoculated ferments will be done in five days on Dolcetto.

All the Reds are aged in seasoned barrel. ‘m still using barrels which is, I guess is getting unique. But the fact is my quantities are so small and the way I do my picking in vineyards is derived around tasting the fruit and doing subsections so keeping the ferment separate, keeping the aging separate. So I have batches of wine that comes 300 liters that one barrel and I can’t see the benefit of making early decisions to blend these things up and throw them in a big Botti. So just for me right now I will continue doing what is working and the old barrels are working for me on my size and my scale. The barrels that I’m buying and 10 year old barrels before I used them” – David