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| Pranzegg “Miau Miau” Rosato Frizzante 2024 Pranzegg “Elysion” Pinot Bianco 2023 Pranzegg “Vino Rosso Leggero” 2024 Pranzegg “Campill” Vino Rosso 2022 Pranzegg “Laurenc” Vino Rosso Lagrein 2020 |
| For this week’s tasting, we’re hosting the irrepressible importer of Italian wine oddities, Jeff Morgenthal, who is bringing us new vintages of the ever-delightful wines of Alto Adige grower, Martin Gojer. If you’ve tried Martin’s appropriately named “Vino Rosso Leggero” (literally, light red wine), you know that it’s precisely what your Death Valley gullet needs this time of year; if you haven’t, get in here and taste it for yourself. I recommend serving this vibrantly fresh, translucent red wine chilled, but it’s not quite the adult juice box wine you might imagine it to be. At only 11.5% ABV, it’s terrifying how refreshing it is. The grape is vernatsch in German dialect, and schiava in Italian: the latter word means “slave,” which refers not to the labor conditions of those who historically worked the vines, but the simple fact that it’s a grape that growers can task with producing prodigious quantities of fruit. Typically, overcropping is a recipe for insipid wine, and when I first studied the grape, 25 years ago, I learned to deprecate it as it was worthy of nothing. But something magical happens with schiava when you farm well, as Martin does, and reduce yields.
Martin works in higher-altitude vineyards north of the city of Bolzano, the German-speaking part of Italy near the Austrian border. He exploits varieties that are traditional to his region, including the aforementioned schiava, lagrein (another unique autochthonous variety), but also more familiar grapes such as pinot bianco and gewürztraminer. Alto Adige is hardly a hotbed of innovative, creative winegrowing, and instead is a place where foursquare, well-wrought wines abound, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that—I love a good NY street slice pizza, and can and have eaten it for many, many years, never tiring of it, and don’t look for pizza innovators (ok, that’s a lie). Martin doesn’t seem to give a hoot about what his neighbors think of what he does, and so he refuses to offer up his wines for the obligatory denominazione panel tastings, so none of the wines we’re tasting have a DOP designation. Without the DOP designation, growers are forbidden to name the grape(s) they use, so Martin gets around this by listing but redacting the varieties on the labels. |