WINE NEWS /
Article on Friuli from Eric Asimov
This article written by Eric Asimov of the New York Times
is one of the best we have seen on the wines of Friuli and its great
white
wine makers. The original article appears on the New York Times website,
click
here to read it!
New wine in really old bottles
by Eric Asimov
The New York Times
May. 28, 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.
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 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, 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," 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-1980s 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. 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 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 1990s wars in the Balkans threatened to spill over into
Slovenia, which became independent of Yugoslavia in 1991 but has
long been 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 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 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.
Kristancic walks a path traveled by his ancestors, but 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."
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. 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," 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. 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 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 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. Nicolo Bensa, who
with his brother, Giorgio, owns La Castellada in Oslavia, has adopted
some of Gravner's vineyard management techniques but has hesitated
at adopting longer maceration times.
"The public resists the deep color," he said.
Perhaps none of Gravner's admirers have gone as far down an individual
path as Stanislao Radikon. Like Gravner, 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," 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."
Related Wines and Links: Bastianich,
Damijan, Gravner,
Jermann, Kante,
La Castellada, Lis
Neris, Meroi, Miani,
Movia, Schiopetto,
Vie di Romans.
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