Favaro. Erbaluce di Caluso Tredicimesi '13'

Erbaluce di Caluso DOCG
Grape: Erbaluce

This Erbaluce is far from extrovert; the fleshy, white peach, grapefruit and apricot fruit is checked by a steely, mineral core.  A quietly intense and focused wine, beautifully thoughtful and flawlessly executed. 13%

Favaro producer page

The name of this wine simply comes from the thirteen months that it spends in ‘egg’, which is an egg-shaped vat made of concrete, lined with an inert resin.
The wine is made from the local grape Erbaluce. Grown on the tiny south facing Vigna Cavaina vineyard (a third of a hectare) which is at an altitude of four hundred meters. The soils are morainic with a high proportion of stones, the vines are trained using a traditional Trentino-style Pergola system.
The Erbaluce is hand-picked, soft-pressed and the must is cold-soaked* for 24 hours before a temperature-controlled fermentation using selected yeasts. The wine is then decanted into ‘eggs’ where it goes through malolactic conversion*.
The early years saw jumps in the quality of this wine, now it is a fine tuning exercise. There has been a run of great vintages: 2018 was almost perfect; 2019, magnificent, but, the yield, for no apparent reason, was well down and then there is 2020, an absolute classic.