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| Stadlmann Rotgipfler “Anning” Thermenregion/Austria 2021 Paterianakis “Melissokipos” Crete 2022 Caparsa Chianti Classico 2021 Danjou-Banessy “Supernova” Vin de France/Roussillon 2024 Tchotiashvili Rkatsiteli Kakheti/Georgia 2017 |
| I travelled back East recently to visit my people, and of course, I had to do a bit of pizza research. If you’re a regular customer, you know that I will inevitably bore you with pizza discourse while you shop, and for that, I apologize and thank you for your indulgence. This visit, I tried Chrissy’s Pizza in Greenpoint, which a visiting New Yorker suggested to me last month, and it did not disappoint: NY-style pizza that respects tradition, but with dough that goes through a long cold ferment, and assembly that happens with meticulous attention to detail. As I gorged, I thought about why I enjoyed the pizza so much, one that was at once traditional (e.g., high protein bread flour, cooked sauce, low moisture mozzarella, ten minute bake—all of which are anathema to a Neapolitan, but are part of the lifeblood of New Yorkers) but at the same time next level, and realized that I use the adjective “traditional” quite a lot when describing traditional wines and how they’re traditionally made, but when I stop to think about it, I’m not quite sure what I mean by tradition and why I feel it’s important to utter the word when describing certain wines. We hosted a tasting earlier this year which was a rumination on tradition, but as I sat and stuffed my face with pizza, I accepted that tradition remains a fuzzy concept for me with regards to wine, so please indulge me again with another exploration of tradition with this week’s tasting, which will lack pizza, alas, but be full of traditional wines.
To be sure, many dimensions of tradition are not salubrious – slavery, for one, and the disenfranchisement of women, for another, but color me woke for even mentioning this. Tradition, as a blind obeisance to what came before, can become a stultifying straitjacket of conformity when all we want is to be free of the chains that we sometimes forge for ourselves, daddy-o. Our tongues in an age of mechanical reproducibility must be freed from the crushing monotony of supermarket wines, free to experience experimental wines that can be failures, but sometimes not. And yet, the past is fragile, fragmented, friable, and can slip between our fingers before we even realize it, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. Sometimes, the old stuff is good stuff, but it only remains so as long as we experience it and know it. We’re starting with an Austrian white wine made from a grape, rotgipfler, whose heyday is long past. Traditionally, the grape was often blended with zierfandler to make a type of sweet wine named “Spätrot-Rotgipfler,” of the sort that evokes airless, dim rooms replete with doilies, antimacassars, dust, a ticking grandfather clock, and grandma. Today, there’s only about 275 acres of the grape under cultivation, and the rotgipfler we’re tasting has zero residual sugar. Next, we’re tasting a wine from a grower who is new to us, Domaine Paterianakis, from Crete. The Greeks, of course, have an extraordinarily long tradition of making wine, and this wine is 50% mandilaria, a grape cultivated there since at least the second century. Mandilaria is a structured grape, and can have loads of tannin. Before the rise of bottled wine, ancient Greeks traditionally stored wine in terracotta amphorae. My hypothesis is that the ancient Greeks traditionally cultivated tannic red grapes like mandilaria to make wines that might last for a few years—but here, aged in barrel for a few months and blended with the softer kotsifali, the resulting wine is surprisingly delicate and perfumed. Then, a rustic Chianti Classico from Caparsa, aged in the traditional botti grande (huge, huge old barrels), followed by two unfucked up orange wines: one is short-macerated, from Roussillon; the other is longer macerated, from Georgia. |