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| This Wednesday’s evening, we are delighted to have importer Eric Danch in the shop to pour and discuss a selection of wines from his import portfolio. Eric’s focus is on bringing the wines of central and eastern Europe to our shores, and when we discussed what he’d pour for our tasting I initially squealed with delight and clasped my hands together when he proposed a tasting of what is arguably the crown jewel of eastern European white grape varieties, furmint, because furmint. However, whenever we host a tasting of all white wine attendance drops precipitously. So, we chose instead to do a producer-focused tasting of the Serbian winegrower, Oszkár Maurer, because Maurer’s wines are peculiar, precise, and particularly pleasing. And honestly, when was the last time you had the opportunity to taste five Serbian natural wines from the same producer?
Like all Eastern European countries, Serbia has a winemaking history dating to Roman antiquity, hitting a particularly rough patch during the Soviet central planning era. Until recently, most post-Soviet Serbian farmers sold off their production as anonymous bulk wine, but over the past twenty years there has been a return to grape varieties and winemaking techniques not seen for decades. Maurer’s focus is on both reviving this history while also walking down his own experimental road less travelled. There is a Serbian tradition of mixed co-plantation/co-fermentation winegrowing like Viennese gemischter satz, and indeed three of the wines that Eric’s pouring on Wednesday reflect this tradition, featuring no less than nine different Serbian varieties with names that, to this untutored ear, sound as otherworldly as a Klingon drinking song. Maurer’s easy drinking weekday night “Crazy Lud” contains three varieties, while his Babba contains six different varieties. The winemaking for Babba is complex and long, with the base wine of olaszrizling (aka our old friend welschriesling) and bakator (a thick-skinned, pink variety neither red nor white) aged in old barrel and, the following year, reinforced with additions of late harvest grapes, affected by noble rot, and finally reinforced again with an intensely aromatic variety. This is a wine you need to put in your mouth. Oh, and we are also tasting a kadarka from the oldest plantation of this grape variety, with vines planted at the end of the 19th century. Maurer “Crazy Lud” White Subotičko/Serbia 2021 $23/btl olaszrizling, bakator, slánkamenka |