Wojciech Bońkowski
Master of Wine

Best natural picks

My best picks out of 150 natural wines tasted in Zurich.

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Natural European Wines 2011

Natural wine: what it is and why it matters. Summary of the 2011 Natural European Wines conference and tasting in Zurich.

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Čotar Malvazija 2003

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. 
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Telavi Wine Cellar 10 Kvevri 2007

Today’s wine, one of the most engaging I’ve had of late, comes from Georgia. A country with a longer tradition of vine growing than anybody else, that is now trying to establish itself on the global wine market.
Apart from its unparalleled library of indigenous local grape varieties, one of Georgia’s major assets lies in its traditional production methods. White wines – which are more important here than reds, historically – are routinely fermented on skins, and often in large clay amphorae, called kvevri, which are buried in the ground and provide the best temperature control ever achieved in winemaking. The wine is racked off the skins after several months, taking on a deep amber colour and a very idiosyncratic bouquet of fallen apples, spices and warm yeastiness. As antiquated as this sounds, the amphora vinification is currently being pursued by several natural wine producers in Western and Central Europe, including Sepp Muster in Austria and the famous Joško Gravner in Italy. 
Quality inspection in an amphorae room, Kakheti, Georgia.
The large Telavi Wine Cellar is one of Georgia’s leading wineries and as everybody here, is experimenting with amphora fermentation and ageing. When I visited in 2005, the amphorae were just being installed in a special fermentation room. The red Satrapezo Saperavi was first made in 2004 and integrated amphorae from the subsequent vintage. 2007 was the first vintage of the white wine I’m tasting here, the Satrapezo 10 Kvevri, made of 100% Rkatsiteli, Georgia’s flagship white variety.

This wine is presenting all the characteristics of an amphora white in high intensity: the colour is a deep orange-amber, there is little direct fresh fruitiness on the nose but a lot of complexity and intensity: apple skins, dried apricots, quince and peach preserve, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, vanilla, and a lot of raisins. What is really interesting here is how this distinguishes itself from other amphora whites: instead of rustic phenolic oxidativeness it is showing very balanced and actually elegant, with a silky, even texture and satisfactory freshness (not easy to achieve in the style), clean, juicy and mildly mineral where many similar wines are rough, fruitless and alcoholic. This wine is not a curiosity but a fully valid bottle – surely made in an ‘alternative’ style but without sacrificing drinkability and a sense of linearity. I’m a big fan of Georgian wines, and I love to try an amphora white when I have the occasion. This might be one of the best wines I’ve had in both departments. 

Grape harvest underway in Kakheti, Georgia (September 2005).

This post also appears in Hungarian on A Művelt Alkoholista.

Source of wine: sample provided by the Polish importer for a WINO Magazine tasting.
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No-sulphur wine

Paradise lost

I’ve been quite overloaded with samples lately, many unsolicited, which meant having to make my way through a stash of partly unexciting commercial staff. More or less belonging to this category, some bottles by Piedmontese producer Teo Costa. It’s a largish estate with a confusing dual-branded range of too many wines (although some are quite fine – I was pleasantly surprised with the Barolo Monroj 2004, classic, elegant and very good value).

Two wines that caught my attention, though, are a white and a red made fully without the addition of sulphur. There is currently a (justified) fashion towards organic and biodynamic wines, but even biodynamics is not necessarily synonymous with no sulphur addition. Sulphur (usually in the form of sulphur dioxide; hence the Contains sulphites mention on wine bottles now obligatory in the EU) is considered a ‘traditional’ additive to wine, and has been used for centuries to protect from bacteria and oxidation. These two factors make no-sulphur-added wines (there is always a bit of sulphur naturally produced during fermentation) a challenge. With low SO2, your wine is prone to all sorts of bacteria including acetic bacteria that change wine into vinegar (with no SO2, this is handled by extreme hygiene in the cellar, and keeping wine at low temperatures throughout – not always easy for shops and consumers) and is likely to oxidise if exposed to air for too long (which is why you are usually advised to drink a no-sulphur wine in one session and avoid decanting, though there are some exceptions).

You will find a growing range of interesting low- or no-sulphur wines from Alsace, Beaujolais, the Loire, but very few from Italy, where the concept has been establishing itself more slowly. That’s the background of my interest in trying these wines. Both are from 2008 and are classified in the umbrella DOC Langhe.

The white Di Vin Natura 2008, a blend of Sauvignon Blanc with local Arneis, is forgettable: showing a good saline intensity of terroir in mouth, it just lacks fruit, and the nose is fairly chaotic, reminiscent of of home-made ‘wine’ with all sorts of yeasty, microbial aromas. The red Di Vin Natura 2008 (blended from Nebbiolo, Barbera, Cabernet and Melot), on the other hand, is really interesting. It too displays a rustic just-finished-fermentation nose (aroma is rarely a biodynamic wine’s strength) but on the palate there is a moment of blissful fruit intensity of the kind you almost never encounter in a ‘normal’ wine.

Sulphur puts a wine in order: it is like packing a porcelain vase for shipping. It stabilises, immobilises, and to an extent, standardises. But it does so by putting a layer of matt varnish over the fruit. We get a lot from sulphur – a vast majority of our wines would be undrinkable without – but need to give up something in exchange: this unadulterated, tangible, pulsating presence of fruit flesh. If you’re feeling nostalgic about this loss, no-sulphur wines are for you.

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