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Month: February 2023

Wine of the Week

Rawditis

Have you ever heard of roditis? This grape comes in many variations and clones throughout Greece. Robinson, Harding and Voillamoz (in the book Wine Grapes) say that it has generally low ambitions and often comes in field-blends. Here it is in its crude version, and with serious goals, a lovely natural wine from producer Oenops Wines of Drama.

Winemaker is Nikos Karatzas. The grapes come from old vineyards and are picked by hand. Fermentation is carried out with native yeasts in a clay pot, where the juice remains on the lees for a month. The wine stays in a for further a 6 months. No additions are made.

Rawditis is accompanied on the market by the equally ambitious and raw red Xinomavraw, also recommended.

Rawditis 2021 (Oenops)

Golden with orange hints. Expressive aroma of peach, apricot, white flowers, citrus peel, honey and a touch of smoke. Rich in the mouth, with a good acidity and some bitterness towards the end, long and dried-fruity finish.

Price: Medium

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Wine of the Week

Occhipinti’s Contrada BB

Vino di Contrada is a series of three wines that come from specific sites in the same vineyard, planted exclusively with frappato. Here Arianna Occhipinti wishes to express various nuances that this magnificent grape can offer.

Contrada is a now unofficial subdivision of an Italian municipality. Bombolieri, or BB, comes from a site with a thin layer of sand over a rock with high content of limestone, much of it white in colour. This gives a wine that has a bit more structure and saturation than the other two.

All of Occhipinti’s vineyards are worked using biodynamic principles, and the work in the cellar is careful, never pushing the wine, but letting it take its time. Natural yeasts are employed, there is no temperature control, no fining or filtration and minimal SO2 at bottling.

Arianna Occhipinti is the niece of Giusto Occhipinti of the COS estate in Vittoria, south-eastern Sicily. Her wines have been featured in these pages. Here you can read one of several mentions of her wonderful entry-level red SP68.

Vino di Contrada BB 2019 (A. Occhipinti)

Clear red. Red fruits (raspberry, sour cherries), blackberry and an earthy note. Medium-bodied, concentrated, fine tannins, fresh acidity, a slight volatile touch and a long, salty finish.

Price: High

Food: Creamy pasta, light meat, antipasti

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Wine of the Week

Diwald’s Zündstoff

Martin Diwald comes from a family of organic winegrowers in Wagram, northwest of Wien, though this project only dates from 2014.

This is his orange wine from the grape grüner veltliner, from a vineyard called Altweingarten. The grapes were hand-picked, de-stemmed and fermented on the skins. Every day the cap was punched down once or twice. 10–14 days later there was one gentle pressing before the wine matured in used 500 liter acacia barrels for 12 months. The wine was not fined or filtered, and only a small amount of sulphur was added.

Zündstoff translates as an explosion. It would maybe be tempting to use an analogy, an explosion of flavours. Anyway, it’s a tasty wine.

Zündstoff Grüner Veltliner 2021 (Diwald)

Light golden colour. Aroma of mature apples, hay, ginger and oranges. Medium-bodied, lightly textured, a slight touch of toffee, adecuate acidity and a nice bitter finish (grapefruit).

Price: Medium

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Wine of the Week

Forks and knives, a table wine

Milan Nestarec’s Forks and Knives wine has changed somewhat over the years. It has been made with aromatic varietals, carbonics, and “sought-after expressions”, as Nestarec puts it. Now he calls it a “village wine”, a traditional, balanced and rich wine from his village. For the white wine this is Velké Bílovice, southeast of Brno and not far from the Austrian and Slovakian border, and the soil is loess. The grapes are now grüner veltliner, welschriesling and neuburger. The varieties are processed separately, some skin-contact overnight and very light pressing the day after. Fermentation was carried out in 3000 liter barrels. And, as he says, “no noise, no unnecessary bells and whistles, just purity and a lot of patience”. It was bottled late summer 2022, with no sulfur added, no fining, no filtration.

Forks and Knives 2020 (Milan Nestarec)

Golden colour, lightly cloudy. Aroma of mature apples, oranges, apricot, white flowers, and also a tiny volatile touch (which is good in these quantities). Full-bodied and rich, concentrated, lightly textured and with a good acidity. Long.

Price: Medium

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