Posted on 09/30/2018
The technique of Batonnage involves “stirring” the fine sediment of lees with the main body of wine as it ages in the barrel, an act which endows a wine with richer olfactory complexity and greater palatal intensity. It is a particularly important process for white wines such as Bianca di Valguarnera and certain reds, including Duca Enrico and Nawàri, which in the early months mature in contact with their own yeasts. Traditionally this is carried out manually with a tool or stick whose movement stirs the wine, sending the lees deposited on the bottom of the container floating upwards, but in the Duca di Salaparuta winery cellars it is performed using the Stop & Roll system. Thanks to this innovative technique, for the first three months of the wine’s life company personnel can easily rotate the barrels by hand every two or three days, sending the yeasts back into action. This procedure also proves useful for reducing the need to top-up reduced wine volume inside barrique casks. Even if the cask is fully capped, in fact, the wine is subject to minimal evaporation and therefore needs to be topped up from time to time.