Grape Varietal – Tasting – Barbera

Grape Varietal – Tasting – Barbera

The wine that I choose to taste for this grape was the Barbera d’Alba Vigna Martina. It was a bottle my mother actually had sitting around. The vintage of the grape was 2001 . The region that this grape comes from is the piemonte region and also the sub-region of Barbera D’alba. The bottle price was $33.95 and the bottle was purchased from a Wine and Spirits store in Pennsylvania. I would suggest that this wine is paired with heavy pasta with a heavy cream sauce, lasagna, anything Italian, or anything very flavorful to mask how strong/intense this wine is.

The color of this wine was very dark and bold. It was a very dark red, so dark that it was almost purple. The aroma of the wine was very strong and pungent. The aroma was so intense that I could almost taste the wine through its smell. After swirling the glass a couple times the wine opened up a bit more and became less intense, but it was still overwhelming. The first taste was very overpowering. I did not like the first taste of this wine and didn’t want to continue drinking to give it a better taste. My first overall impression of this wine was that it was too strong for my immature palate and I didn’t want to drink it.

The aroma was somewhat sweet and tart at the same time. My nose stung with every sniff. The scents that I could detect were very rich and dark fruits, such as jammy strawberries and blackberries, but I also detected a lot of spices and pepper. The taste was overwhelming spices and very strong on the sides of the tongue. The only fruit I could detect was cherries. After my tongue calmed down the after taste was somewhat pleasant.

The astringency of the wine was very rough in my opinion and I did not appreciate really anything going on with this particular wine. There seemed to be no real sugar-acid balance in the wine because all I could really taste was acid. If there had been more to the wine for me to taste flavor wise, maybe I wouldn’t have been so overwhelmed with the acidity level. There could have definitely been a stronger sweet component added to the wine. The alcohol content of the wine was not particularly noticeable, but I wasn’t noticing anything past the acid.

I found the wine to be very bitter and unpleasant. The bitterness of the wine stung my tongue and jaw, made me clench my mouth hard, and then clung there for a few moments until it eventually dissipated.

The other dominate varieties of this region are Nebbiolo and Dolcetto. The major climate constraints for this particular wine is a soil type to be moderately loose-packed, slightly sandy and limestone-based. The wines are planted south-facing and 380 meters above sea level.

The harvest period for this particular wine is the end of September and beginning of October and they perform a manual harvest. The fermentation for this wine lasts approximately 12-15 days in stainless steel tanks, and once that is complete the wine is racked into half-new and half-one year old French oak barriques for 12 months to reach their mature point. The wine is then bottled and before release the wine stays in a cellar for at least 8 more months.