For every harvest, Coca i Fitó makes a selection of the best yeasts found in the vineyards. The yeast, among other factors, gives tipicity to the vintage by conveying the year’s weather and climate conditions: drought, wet, windy, hours of sunlight, etc. These parameters determine which types of yeast will establish themselves on the grapes. This is the reason why it is so important to foster these native yeasts every harvest. Even though we produce the same wines year after year, it is the yeasts that play a major role in distinguishing vintage variation.
How we select the most suitable yeasts from the vineyards:
A few days before harvest begins, we take 150 samples of grapes from our Carignan, Grenache and Syrah vineyards.
Each sample consists of 100 grams, which are collected using sterilized materials, are placed in hermetic bags in order to avoid contamination from external bacteria or microbes.
The grapes within the bags are crushed to promote the fermentation process.
Grape-based alcohol of 10% by volume is added to each bag in order to filter out those yeasts that are unable to ferment in higher alcoholic environments.
The hermetically-sealed bags are stored between 1-2 weeks.
Of the 150 bags, only 3-5 will undergo a proper fermentation because most yeasts will not tolerate the higher alcoholic solutions.
We conduct a sensorial analysis on each of the bags where a proper fermentation is taking place.
Those ferments that provide a pleasant aromatic profile will be placed under a microscope to see the morphology of the yeast and to determine if they are ideal to carry out the fermentation for all wines made during that particular vintage.
The selected yeasts will be inoculated on a large scale in order to carry out the fermentations for each of our wines.
This process guarantees that only the best yeasts will carry out the transformation from must to our family of wines that convey the unique characteristics of each and every vintage.
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