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| Risk taker: Josko Gravner
ferments his wine in terra-cotta amphorae in the Friuli region of
Italy. |
New Wine in Really Old Bottles
By ERIC ASIMOV
Published: May 25, 2005
OSLAVIA, Italy
JOSKO GRAVNER has thrown it all away, more than once. When he started
making wine 30 years ago outside this small town in the Friuli-Venezia
Giulia region of northeastern Italy, he produced crisp, aromatic white
wines in a popular style, using the latest technology.
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| Natural Approach: Ales Kristancic
of the Movia estate in Slovenia. |
But he was not satisfied making wines like everybody else. He replaced his
temperature-controlled steel tanks with small barrels of French oak, and he
won acclaim for white wines of uncommon richness. But not even that was
sufficient, and Mr. Gravner began to experiment with techniques considered
radical by the winemaking establishment. The hazy, ciderish hue of the
resulting white wines, so different from the usual clear yellow-gold,
persuaded some that the wines were spoiled. But one taste showed they were
fresh and alive, with a sheer, lip-smacking texture.
Was he happy? Please.
Rejecting the modern trappings of the cellar, Mr. Gravner has reached back
5,000 years. He now ferments his wines in huge terra-cotta
amphorae that he lines with
beeswax and buries in the earth up to their great, gaping lips. Ancient Greeks
and Romans would be right at home with him, yet his 2001 wines, his first
vintage from the amphorae, which he is planning to release in September, are
more vivacious and idiosyncratic than ever.
"With every change, I had clients who lost faith in me," Mr. Gravner said.
"The cantina was in a crisis. Now I'm out of crisis, but the rest of the world
is in crisis."
Perhaps it's something in the air, or in the wine, but few places on earth
have such a concentration of determined, individualistic winemakers as
Friuli-Venezia Giulia, particularly in the low rolling hills that stretch
across the border with Slovenia. To their fans they make deeply personal,
almost artistic wines. To detractors they are fanatical eccentrics.
There's Edi Kante, who in the mid-1980's tunneled deep into the limestone
in the Carso region near Trieste to create a spectacular cavernous cellar and
then trucked in earth to construct a vineyard, layer by layer, right over the
top. There's Stanislao Radikon, who, in the latest incarnation of his
relentless experimentation, is determined to do without sulfur dioxide, a
stabilizer considered essential by most winemakers for shipping wines.
And then there's Ales Kristancic of Movia, an estate just over the border
in Slovenia with vineyards that straddle the line. Mr. Kristancic, whose
family has farmed the estate since 1820, is so adamantly rational in his
natural approach to grape-growing and winemaking, so steeped in the wisdom of
eight generations spent among the vines and in the cellar, that everyone else
thinks he is insane. That is, of course, until they taste his wines, which are
astoundingly fresh and soulful.
"Great winemaking is a risk," said Mr. Kristancic, a lean, charismatic man
who seems to know the personality of every vine in his 50 acres of vineyard.
"You have to walk on the border."
The border here is as important literally as it is figuratively. The
vineyards surrounding Oslavia have been the sites of countless battles and
savage violence. The Habsburg empire ruled the region for centuries, Napoleon
for considerably less time. More than 100,000 people died on battlefields here
in World War I. Then came World War II, and famine afterward. An earthquake
leveled many towns in 1976. In the 1990's wars in the Balkans threatened to
spill over into Slovenia, then a part of Yugoslavia but tied to this region by
the vineyards that stretch across the border regardless of political lines.
Now the land is peaceful, the vineyards replanted, but the turmoil remains
under the surface.
"At the core of all this is the fact that these people are all about
identity and not about ideology," said Fred Plotkin, author of "La Terra
Fortunata: The Splendid Food and Wine of Friuli-Venezia Giulia" (Broadway
Books, 2001). "You find your identity in the soil, in what you produce from
the soil and in what it says about you."
Few areas in Italy embody so many paradoxes. From its southern extreme, the
regional capital of Trieste, on the Adriatic, Friuli-Venezia Giulia stretches
north through snow-capped Alps to Austria. The region itself is actually the
combination of two areas: Friuli, which accounts for much of the land, and
Venezia Giulia, in the extreme southeast.
More than any other region, Friuli-Venezia Giulia continues to make wines
from indigenous grapes, among them ribolla gialla, a beautifully floral white;
tocai Friulano, which can be crisp, refreshing and minerally; and refosco,
which produces dark, fruity reds. Yet many wines carry familiar names like
merlot, cabernet franc, sauvignon blanc, pinot grigio and chardonnay, French
grapes that were introduced 200 years ago by Napoleon's army.
"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."
Source:
- © New York Times, Dining, May 25, 2005
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/25/dining/25pour.html?ei=5070&en=a5b7f086c3c31420&ex=1173844800&pagewanted=all
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