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| Nusserhof Südtirol Lagrein Kretzer 2021 Frantz Gojer Südtiroler Vernatsch Alte Reben 2022 Martin Gojer “Campill” Schiava Alto Adige 2020 Bergmannhof Lagrein Südtirol 2021 Niklas Lagrein Südtirol 2021 |
| This week’s tasting focuses on wines from high altitude vineyards located in the northeast of Italy. Not Friuli, where Carlos Montanar, our guest two weeks ago hails from, a region contiguous with the Slovenian border, but the mountainous region to the north that is contiguous with the western border of Austria. It is an area where it is common to find folks with German surnames, and indeed a fair number of speakers of Tyrolean German, which my Viennese friends liken to a New Yorker deciphering someone from the deep south. In contrast to Friuli’s long stretch of flat coastal plains, it is a hilly area and the wines do have a distinctive alpine cast to them—savory, mineral wines that quietly suggest but do not bleat their terroir messages. The area is stunningly beautiful and heavily forested, and the first thing that same to my mind while driving north from Bolzano is “the hills are alive with the sound of music.” Occasionally if you look up in the right direction you might spot a lonely WWII concrete pillbox, still standing sentinel for a war long gone but still ever-present. Here, you find two red grapes not cultivated outside the region, producing two quite different alpine expressions. One grape is schiava (or, in Tirolean, vernatsch…I find myself sometimes randomly blurting out this word for no other reason than I find it satisfying to do so), which makes wines that at first sip you want to decode like a fresh, evanescent gamay, but quickly realize that they can be, if anything, even more evanescent. The other is lagrein, which can make a lovely, dry, style of rosé referred to as “kretzer,” but also a more serious and potentially ageable wines, full of smoldering dark fruit and a hint of camphor—we are tasting good examples of both expressions. |