Following the trail of the recently reviewed amphora wine, here’s another roughly in the same style. This time from Slovenia: Čotar Kras Malvazija 2003. The economic situation of Slovenian wine is of course vastly different from that of Georgia. This increasingly affluent country bordering Italy and Austria has one of the highest wine consumption per capita figures in the world and so finds no difficulty selling its produce. The jump in quality since the political change of 1991 has been dramatic and there are many wines, white and red, that can rival any Western equivalent.
More importantly there many terroir-oriented producers that are making some of the most individual wines in Europe today. This originates in a happy combination of soil, climate, indigenous varieties and more or less ‘natural’ winemaking. People like Edi Simčič, Marjan Simčič, Movia, Santomas, Rojac and Jakončič are now offering stunningly powerful and multilayered white wines oozing with minerality and ageworthy structure.
Primus inter pares might well be Branko Čotar from the spectacular limestoney vineyards of the Kras appellation. His red wines can sing with earthy sap and red fruit freshness given sufficient bottle age (they’re quite extracted) while the white Sauvignon and wild indigenous Vitovska regularly pack in enormous fruit concentration and reverberate with mineral flavours.
My favourite wine from Čotar, however, is the Malvazija. There’s something in this classic north Adriatic variety that lends itself well to the idiosyncratic winemaking here: Malvazija is a touch oxidative but its skins hold a lot of mineral and citrus fruit treasures, and so skin contact and a long ageing reveal plenty of the grape’s natural complexity and dimension (it’s a bit the opposite of Sauvignon, where the same technique effectively removes all varietal character). Čotar’s Malvazija can be surprisingly long-lasting, too, and I was amazed by how fresh this 2003 is tasting. Whites wines from the ‘ devil’s vintage’ should have been drunk up since long, and even the reds are fading. Čotar’s Malvazija seems to be only entering a long plateau of drinkability. The full orange, cloudy colour announces that this is no ordinary cold-fermented white wine, and the intensity of flavour is just remarkable. So is the complexity, too. There a wide panorama of flavours ranging from fresh peach and apricot to baked bread, but the most intense impression is one of saltiness. This is one of the saltiest wine I’ve tasted, and so its minerality is really very direct.
There are wines which aren’t easy to put into words but whose flavour is unique and unforgettable. This is one of them.
Source of wine: own purchase.
