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| Winemaking is an inherently conservative practice. Conservative not in the political sense (although there are certainly National Front sympathizers amongst the growers with whom I work—best not to talk politics sometimes) but in the sense of conservation: of conserving terroir, traditional craft practices, the genetics of old grape varieties, and the taste and sensibility of the people who make and drink the wine. The Bordeaux classification of 1855 is, for better or worse, premised on the eternal noblesse oblige of certain privileged grape growing sites. Winegrowers who choose to propagate their vines using massale selection rather than grafting monoclonal selections purchased from a nursery are conserving the biodiversity of the grapes grown in their vineyards; sometimes, the genetic stock goes back centuries. Conservation is on display whenever a vigneron proudly shows off her glorious old wooden vertical press, still in use today, or points to the quincunx pruning technique established two millennia ago by the ancient Romans, still found on Mt Etna today. Biodynamic farming is largely a conservation of old farming techniques, and Steiner looked at the self-contained medieval small hold farm as the ideal form of agriculture, one in which you have a cow not only for milk but also to provide manure to fertilize your fields and ideally need take nothing from outside your farm to make a go of it. The reason why you do not see late-harvest, fortified sweet vin doux naturel wines from Beaujolais is that the Beaujolaisien don’t have that sort of taste sensibility—they make the typically light, vivacious, dry wines because that’s what they enjoy. During the Soviet era, the Georgian Orthodox church kept the ancient practice of macerated qvevri wines alive when the practice was otherwise outlawed due to the dictates of central planners. And it is thanks to the Georgian Church, or more accurately, Italian grower Josko Gravner’s trip to Georgia in the 1980s when he observed winemakers using their traditional vessels to make macerated wines, that we see any number of winegrowers today trying their hands at making skin-contact, orange wines. Now, some folks with their refined sensibilities and Eustace Tilley sneer turn up their noses at orange wines, rejecting it out-of-hand as fashionable ephemera, yet how can this conservative practice, the very oldest form of winemaking, be a mere trend? Sure, some orange wines are fails, but others are glorious, no different than any other sort of wine. Today, we are tasting five orange wines from five different countries, including Georgia. Will you like these wines, the progeny of a ten thousand-year-old trend? I do not know, but there is only one way to find out. |
| Weingut Mann Weiss Trocken Rheinhessen/Germany 2018 Jousset “Macération de menu pineau” Vin de France 2017 Gotsa Tsitska-Tsolikouri Kartli/Georgia 2017 Donkey & Goat “Stonecrusher” Roussanne El Dorado/California 2018 Menti Monte del Cuca Veneto/Italy 2018 |