The grape-drying technique (appassimento) in Puglia

Pronounced sweetness and intense aromas. Thanks to these qualities, wines made from dried grapes are more and more popular with wine lovers. Appassimento is a winemaking technique that dehydrates the grapes to give the wine a greater concentration of colour, aroma and flavour than grapes vinified straight after the harvest can reach.

It concentrates the juice inside the berries through the slow evaporation of the water they contain, so the grapes reach a higher sugar content. Drying can also encourage noble rot, Botrytis cinerea, and the development of polyalcohols, which give the wine its softness.

There are several ways of drying grapes to make sweet passito wines. Appassimento can happen on the vine, naturally or in a forced way.

Our method of controlled drying

At Cantina Albea we are always looking for new winemaking techniques to improve the quality of our wines. We have introduced a new approach to grape drying: controlled appassimento, based on controlled maturation in a drying room. It uses moderate temperatures (22-24 °C), strong and constant ventilation (a continuous system) and low, carefully controlled relative humidity (55-60%). Thanks to this process our wines keep their freshness and aromatic fragrance while gaining intensity and complexity.

Our team of winemakers ran trials on Uva di Troia and Primitivo di Gioia grapes and found that the pH of the musts has to be managed to preserve length, fragrance and longevity.

9cento, our Negroamaro made with dried grapes

One of the wines made with this technique is our 9cento, a Negroamaro IGP made with dried grapes: 100% Negroamaro, 30% of it dried, from the vineyards of the Albea Land project.

Once ripe, the grapes are picked by hand. Part of them is destemmed and crushed as quickly as possible, while about 30% is selected and laid on racks for controlled drying in the drying room. Fermentation starts at controlled temperatures (24/25 °C) in 150 hl steel tanks, while the dried portion ferments in 50 hl tanks. At the end of fermentation the blended wines go into barriques for malolactic fermentation.

9cento is a red of extraordinary structure and body, with an intense, clean texture on the palate. With its varietal fruity and spicy notes, it stands out for its great aromatic richness. It shows its best when served at 16-18 °C. Buy it online in our e-shop.