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| Maurer Bakator pét-nat Serbia 2024 Malat “RAW” unfiltered gewürztraminer orange Austria 2023 Ghëddo “Tinaar” Vino Bianco La Morra/Piemonte 2024 Tessier “Sables” Cour-Cheverny 2023 Fongoli “Rossofongoli” Umbria Rosso 2023 |
| How much, really, do you know about the texture of the everyday life of your relatives of three or four generations ago? They lived long before the age of social media, and you’re lucky if you have the signature of your great-great-great-grandmother inscribed on a page in the family bible, or perhaps a letter or two. But what did their homes smell like (me: schmaltz and fried onions), what did they like to eat (pickled herring, fermented borscht, flanken when they could afford it), what tunes riddled their heads (no idea, but perhaps “Oyfn Pripetshik”)? What can you say about a wine made from bakator, a grape that has at most two growers working with it? It’s an old Serbian grape variety that was hammered so soundly by the phylloxera plague of the 19th century that it’s shocking that it’s hanging on, if just by a thread. Having never experienced wine from any other grower made from this grape, what can you say regarding its typicity, other than you dig the wines and want more of them? The easy way out is to reject that which feels not of us, even if it is, the way that John Muir characterized elderly Mono Indians he encountered when hiking in the Sierras, with faces “strangely blurred and divided into sections by furrows that looked like cleavage-joints of rocks….they seemed to have no right place in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out sight down the pass.” Our shop is a bit of a museological space dedicated, in part, to these old, marginal varieties. Still, it would be a drab, dusty sort of preoccupation if the wines made from these old varieties were simply freakish curiosities. OK, sometimes, they are, but more often, they’re doors that can open your brain to a palette of flavors of bygone days: lost, but not quite yet. These wines cannot truly be a Proustian madeleine, as their doors of perception open onto a landscape that is not our own, peopled by folks with differing sensibilities and foodways, and yet, the wines speak to us, they resonate. We’re tasting Oskar Maurer’s dry, sparkling bakator this week, which is one of the only wines made from this grape I have yet to taste, and somehow, it resonates in ways that I cannot quite put my finger on.
What can you say about another wine made in part from arneis, a white grape historically employed to soften the tannins of nebbiolo (some say that it was used to attract bees, to defend red grapes grown nearby), nearly extinct by the 60s when only a few acres of it remained? Well, quite a lot, it turns out, and we’re tasting a wine that blends arneis with another Piemontese curiosity tonight, timorasso —another grape that nearly went extinct if not for the passion of a single, visionary grower, Walter Massa. The label on the bottle resembles a cryptic alchemist’s vial bearing a line drawing of a ship with flowers and fruit for a sail. Or a skin-contact, zero-sugar gewürztraminer (I have to say, macerating aromatic grapes wines such as gewürztraminer opens a door of perception for me, and has a way of girdling the oft-too-blousy nature of these wines)? Or, a wine made from romorantin, a grape that is a fellow traveler with chenin blanc and menu pineau, but hews, if it’s possible, to an even more acid-driven profile? We’re tasting all of these tonight, plus an atypically juicy, low-tannin, low-ABV red from Umbria. |