New Wine in Really Old Bottles – Part 2
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Natural Approach: Ales Kristancic of the Movia estate in Slovenia. |
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"The French soldiers stayed here, married beautiful women and zak zak," said Mr. Kristancic, employing a phrase he uses frequently to indicate the natural order of events.
Today some of Italy's best white wines, clean, crisp and fragrant, come from Friuli-Venezia Giulia, from winemakers like Schiopetto in the Collio wine district, Lis Neris and Vie di Romans in Friuli Isonzo, Scarbolo in Friuli Grave, and Livio Felluga and Bastianich in Colli Orientali del Friuli. Reds, too, can be striking, although the aggressively herbal style of Merlot, for example, that is favored in the region is far from the chocolate-covered-cherry style embraced by much of the world.
Yet it is the visionaries who give the region its special character, its touch of greatness. To hear Mr. Kristancic speak of why wine from a young vineyard cannot have the character of that from an old vineyard is to understand that making great wines is not something that can be done by hiring the right consultants or reading the right books. And to taste a bottle of 1963 Movia Merlot, full of laserlike fruit flavors, is to understand that graceful yet intense Merlot is not restricted to Pomerol.
Mr. Kristancic walks a path traveled by his ancestors, but Mr. Gravner is blazing his own trail. He seems the placid type, but when he speaks, it's with a quiet, philosophical intensity, the sort that attracts followers because of its idealism but can drive them away by its single-mindedness.
"The problem wasn't that the consumers didn't like the wine anymore," he said, explaining the quest that led him to the amphorae. "I didn't like the wine anymore."
Mr. Gravner began experimenting with amphorae in 1997 and made the leap with the 2001 vintage. "As soon as industry invents something new, the last thing isn't good anymore," he said. "I was looking for a way to make wine where I didn't have to change something all the time."
Of course you can't just drive down to the local supply house for 3,500-liter containers made in the ancient style. Mr. Gravner acquires them from the Caucasus mountains in Georgia, where such traditional winemaking is still practiced, and has the fragile vessels carefully trucked to a special stone-walled cellar he constructed just for them.
Thirty-one of the amphorae are currently buried there. He ferments the wine in them and then, just as unconventionally, leaves it to macerate with the skins, seeds and pulp for six to seven months before transferring it to large barrels of close-grained Slovenian oak.
It's a technique that requires exquisite care in the vineyard. "You can't correct the wine once it's in the amphorae," Mr. Gravner said. "Whatever is good or bad will be amplified."
So far the results have been spectacular. A 2001 Ribolla Gialla, which will be released in September, is so vibrant it practically leaps out of the glass, while an '01 Breg, a blend of several white varietals, has a concentrated floral, honeyed flavor yet is profoundly dry.
Like all the Gravner wines, the amphora wines can be disconcertingly cloudy. Mr. Gravner shrugs.
"The color of a wine is like the color of a man," he said. "What matters is what's underneath."
Others have followed Mr. Gravner, but have not pushed the boundaries as far as he. Castello di Lispida in the Veneto makes an amphora wine, but not with the prolonged aging Mr. Gravner gives his. In the Collio Damijan Podversic, who began making wine in 1998, says he hopes to use amphorae but cannot yet afford them. Nicolò Bensa, who with his brother, Giorgio, owns La Castellada in Oslavia, has adopted some of Mr. Gravner's vineyard management techniques but has hesitated at adopting longer maceration times.
"The public resists the deep color," he said.
Perhaps none of Mr. Gravner's admirers have gone as far down an individual path as Stanislao Radikon. Like Mr. Gravner, Mr. Radikon has replanted vineyards and discarded chemical pesticides, steel tanks and small oak barrels, and though he has not adopted amphorae, he has his own radical notions. He wants to do away with conventional 750-milliliter bottles and instead sell the wines in half-liter bottles (for one person) and one-liter (for two). And he has stopped using sulfur dioxide as a stabilizer, which makes it risky to ship his wines unless they are very carefully handled.
Tasted at his small family winery, the Radikon wines are alive with fruit. An '03 Ribolla Gialla, aging in a large wooden barrel, had the flavor of ripe strawberries. "We're working on a very dangerous border," Mr. Radikon said. "But it's a maximum expression of nature."
As an experiment, a 2002 Chardonnay had been left to sit in a demijohn for two years, as his great-grandfather might have done. Would it travel? Who knew, but it had the lovely fragrance of meadow flowers and lemon compote.
"Why shouldn't we discover these things?" he asked. "When you make wines like these, it's hard to like others."
| Originally published on The New York Times – ©2005 The New York Times |
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