Why is everybody scared by spontaneous fermentation? Winemaking tip of the day: management of indigenous yeast

The story of how Ammàno came to be: a special wine made entirely by hand, without modern technology, from the grapes to the label

Where does the color of wine come from? What is white and red winemaking? What does "orange wine" mean? 
These are the most asked questions during this summer's visits at Cantine Barbera. 

Orange wines are made from white grapes and are very different from “modern” white wines, starting with their deep and intense color

Anyone who’s known me for a while knows how much my wines have changed over the past few years. The thing is, change is never easy, especially when it has nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with much deeper questions

How I started doing what I still do today

The title might sound a bit over the top, but honestly, there really is a before Ammàno and an after Ammàno in my life as a winemaker.
And tonight, as I am finished with my twelfth vintage, I think I finally realise just how much this wine has changed me.

The first vintage of Ammàno was 2013, a hot, dry year that seemed exceptional back then - today, it feels almost like the norm. I’d planted this little patch of Zibibbo, but the young vines were slow to take off. They barely grew and produced almost nothing, just a few bunches of grapes to eat. Many of the young vines kept sending out shoots below the graft, and I stubbornly kept grafting them again and filling in the gaps.

In 2013, I finally managed to harvest about 500 kilos of beautiful grapes: fragrant, sweet, crunchy, and completely unfazed by the scorching heat that August.

So, what was I going to do with such a tiny amount of grapes? They’d have disappeared in the press.

Easy. I’d make the wine separately, put it in a little tub, and see what happened. If I ended up throwing it away, so what? It was just an experiment.

I left the grapes in their crates and destemmed them by hand, a little at a time. Some bits of stem were left behind. Never mind. Fermentation started on its own. The skins were tough, the cap was compact, and I had to throw my whole 54 kilos into punching it down. Every time I finished, my arms were killing me and there was half a metre of foam on top. But the smell! Oh, that smell.

Fermentation was over almost as quickly as it had started. Well, it was 30°C in the cellar, and that little tub wasn’t refrigerated.

Now I had to get the skins out somehow.

My father had an old wooden press that could handle about 20 kilos at a time. He’d used it back when we were still working out of the garage. I dug it out, sanitised it, and used it to press the Zibibbo skins. I racked the wine with a rubber hose and a bagnèra. As if I was going to set up a pump for less than four hectolitres!

A couple of months later, I tasted it.

Back then, I NEVER tasted wine before it had finished doing whatever it needed to do on its own. It made me anxious. The wine seemed strange, and it tasted of things I couldn’t make sense of. Then I grew up a bit, too. I realised that young wine is like a little kid: it screams, runs around, gets dirty playing in the garden, picks its nose, and drives you absolutely mad. These days, I know what young wine is like. And most of the time, I can handle it without getting anxious.

So I tasted it. And what I tasted was something I’d never tasted before.

Energy. Sea. Sicily. Menfi.

The feeling of sunburnt skin after a day at the beach, salt from the Mediterranean, the golden light of sunset. Wild mint, seashells, the hot scirocco wind. And then, month after month, the wine kept changing. First came the broom flowers, then the black bees honey.

It took me a while to understand that it wasn’t just the grapes giving me all this. It was also everything I hadn’t done: no press, no pumps, no fridge, no filtration, no oenological additives, no electricity. No need to control every little thing. It wasn’t me trying to make wine, but the wine finding its own way.

Fast-forward to today, 2024.

Over these ten years, Ammàno has taught me to take a step back. To stop trying to tell the wine what to do and let it set the pace instead. To pay attention to the vineyard, to understand the grapes, how tough and stubborn they are, how determined they are to survive and do the best they can, even in the hardest years.

I owe this wine so much of the winemaker I’ve become: my choice to farm more gently and with greater respect for the land, my journey into biodynamics, and my stubborn determination to keep going down a road that’s incredibly hard work, but also immensely rewarding.

Today, Ammàno is a wine I can count on. First of all, I know what it means to me. But it means something to plenty of other people, too.

It’s one of the wines that has brought me some of the recognition I care about most, including the Chiocciola from Slow Wine. That one really matters to me.

But the thing that matters most is knowing that Ammàno means something to the people who drink it, too.

And honestly, there’s no better recognition than that.