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| Montanar Rosé di Refosco Friuli Venezia Giulia 2021 Montanar “Uis Blancis” Borc Dodon Friuli Venezia Giulia 2019 Montanar “Scodovacca” Verduzzo Friuli Venezia Giulia 2013 Montanar Refosco Borc Dodon Friuli Venezia Giulia 2015 |
| This Wednesday we are pleased to host Friulian winemaker Carlo Montanar at the shop. Friuli is all the way east in Italy and is adjacent to the Slovenian border, with the Adriatic to the south. Culturally it is very much a crossroads between two worlds. Driving east on the autostrada you will notice that the signs, at a certain point, are bilingual Italian and Slovenian, and you know you are not in Kansas any longer. Arriving at Denis (Carlo’s father) Montanar’s home, located on a coastal plain dedicated to farming, there is a jumble of buildings including one with a frasca hanging above the door, the Friulian harvest sheaf that advertises a rustic, informal place to drink and have a snack. Inside, there are old folks drinking from small glasses and playing cards; Carlos surmises that one of the older gents was likely his grandfather. Soon, Denis appears and his appearance is a bit deceptive: he looks like a gruff soccer hooligan, but is actually a thoughtful, soulful fellow buzzing with ideas, perceptions, and opinions about farming, polyculture, and Friulian grape varieties, one of which is verduzzo, of which we will be tasting two different manifestations of. Verduzzo is an extraordinarily compelling old grape variety that as a varietal wine was mostly used to make delicious (and alas impossible to sell) Ramondolo, a type of late-harvest sweet wine, but only seems to now be finding its footing as a dry wine—and yet, there are only a handful of folks working with it in this way, so perhaps this is wishful thinking on my part.
Denis practices Fukuoka, no-till farming, which from the outside sounds anarchistic, anything goes hippie agriculture, but, as he is quick to point out, it is not, and that it takes considerable work to make Fukuoka farming work. He invited me to take my shoes off in the vineyard (I have never been invited to do this), and once I do, I understand why: it feels like you are walking on a pleasant, slightly springy, living rug. Denis bends down and commands, “look!” To my eye, it is just a pile of straw, mown herbs, and grasses, but then he shoves back a bit of the carpet, revealing mulch that is decomposing into compost beneath, “that’s last year!” And then he digs further down and reveals a layer of living soil created and fed by his regenerative agriculture. He farms not only grapes, but also a range of grains and legumes and I hope to convince his importer to bring in the delicious farro piccolo he grows one day. This week, we’re tasting Denis’s rose of refosco, a grape with complex and confusing genetics—here, the biotype is referred to as refosco del peduncolo rosso (red-tailed refosco, named so due to the cluster’s red stems), two different verduzzo-based wines, both of which see a few days of maceration on the skins (one is a blend), and finishing with a startling vibrant, eight-year-old refosco rosso. |