Yes, I know.
Bloggers blog therefore making me the world's sorriest excuse for a blogger.
So sue me. I am over it. Even though I spend most of my waking hours writing wordy, mistake -ridden prose at my job, I hereby resolve to write wordy, mistake-ridden blogs more frequently.
One of my excuses has been that I have nothing to blog about, and even if I did, who'd really want to read it. But I've been told by those that know far more than I that that's a sort of reverse Narcissism and I should just shut up and write.
Besides, I've been puzzling over some wine things these past few days and maybe the act of writing about them may help sort them out.
Over the summer my wife and I traveled to Austria, Italy and Croatia and at the risk of creating the internet's ten trillionth travelogue, now, some ninety days after returning, some of the trip's most salient wine related points are still resonating with me.
But first of all, let me say that if you've never been to Dubrovnik in southern Croatia....go. And go soon. I've been lucky enough to have travelled to many, many places and my first steps into the walled city count as some of my most memorable. Please conspire to have your first view inside the city walls to be after sunset. That was a moment I doubt any of us- my lovely wife and San Ramon neighbors and friends Jim and Marla Simon, will ever forget. The city's sheer medieval glory is stupendous: far more than enough to counteract the effects of the resident's relentless pandering to its vast tourist population and, no matter how tired you are and how you much you resent the fact that there is a charge to do EVERYTHING in Dubrovnik, also make the trek over, around and, literally, through the city's walls and take advantage of one or more of the well-advertised docent-led morning tours. We spent two hours with a guide who was sixteen and living in Dubrovnik when the Serbs started bombing the city in December 1991. You'll never look at the city, or any of the poorly knit confederation of warring states that we grew up calling Yugoslavia the same way again. There are tours about what it was like to be Jewish there, an architect's view and many more. Make the time, even though the temptation to just sit in one of the amazing street-side cafes drinking ice-cold beer and watching an endless parade of fascinating people may prove irresistible. Fortunately we were able to make time for it all.
We also spent some time visiting wineries on Croatia's scenic Peljesac (Pel-yeh-zhak) peninsula, Central Dalmatia's most important wine growing region. This is certainly worth the detour if you're staying near Dubrovnik, if for nothing else than to see the ancient towns of Ston and Mali Ston and the impressive 'Great Wall' that connects them. A few hours beyond gets you to the heart of Peljesac wine country and a widely scattered multitude of tiny towns and wineries ranging in size from the miniscule ("Please don't make any noise while you're tasting, you'll wake the baby.") to several larger ones with tourist buses and all. The best-known appellation on the peninsula is certainly Dingac (Ding-gazch). It is here that the local Plavac red manifests its best expression, making wines that remind me somewhat of a mythical blend of Gevrey-Chambertin and Barbaresco....but, unfortunately, not always necessarily as good as that sounds.
In fact, let me refrain from making too many qualitative statements about the Croatian wines I tried- one way or another. Our friends and I bought a mixed case or so of reds and whites from a good merchant who gave us wines that covered the length of the Dalmatian Coast. But we consumed them mainly while sitting on our balcony overlooking the gorgeous Adriatic, usually as the last giant cruise ships left the harbor just a few hundred yards under our noses, not the best circumstance for serious wine evaluation. We could have been drinking battery acid and it would have tasted good and, in fact, there unfortunately were a few wines that did a pretty fair imitation I am sorry to say. And there were several other wines we tried out in wine country that were also, how to put this politely, rustic. But, at their best- and there were several wines that were very, very good- the whites were clean, zingy and loaded with mineral. The Malvasia-based wines tended to be blowzier, even fat, and when I could find a well-made one that was of a current vintage (not as easy as you might expect), the usually inexpensive Grasevina, the Croatian synonym for Welschriesling, was a solid choice for watching the ships and fishing boats leave Dubrovnik at sunset. The reds were even more of a mixed bag even though 90% of them were made from the Plavac grape, a close cousin to Italy's Primitivo and a direct descendant of our own Zinfandel. They could be lean, acidic and unfriendly or ripe, raisin-y and filled with volatile acidity. The best, as I said about Dingac, had a Pinot Noir-like charm while also reminding me of the thoroughly delightful Zweigelt (my current favorite red) of Austria.
But I need to get to the original reason for this post which involves not just Croatia, but the fascinating area just north, where Italy, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia come together, one of the most intriguing areas I've ever visited. My wife and I spent a couple of days in Friuli, Italy, not my first time but hers (and I've been on the wine trail throughout the northeast several times before) but it was a glass of the Vodopivic brother's fascinating Vitovska (an indigenous white grape from near the Slovenian border) at Terroir, a wine bar in San Francisco that features 'natural' anti-avant-garde Luddite wines that rekindled my interest in the region and has me ferreting them out from a variety of sources.
The area makes the best whites in Italy. I think that's a safe statement and I apologize to Alto-Adige, Campania, the Veneto and Piemonte all of which produce wonderful whites. But nowhere in Italy can you find a greater selection of wines that define the state-of-the-art AND are uniformly high quality at the low end too. And even before you get to the envelope-pushing fringe, you have to acknowledge winemakers like Silvio Jermann, the Fellugas, Mario Schiopetto and others for making some of the most exciting wines in Italy. But it's that lunatic fringe, a generation of young iconoclastic winemakers, that have taken their (very long) ancestral legacy and turned it on his head. This is where more than a few winemakers (including the aforementioned Vodopivic wines) have made the antique modern again by fermenting their wines in terra cotta amphorae, much like it was done many centuries ago, as well as reintroducing other techniques that have long been abandoned. Even though wines like Jasko Gravner's Breg and Radikon's Ribolla Gialla are idiosyncratic, to say the least, they are thrilling to drink as you can palpably feel the past bleeding into the future right there in your glass. I've been cautiously buying them over the years and putting them on PRIMA's wine list but it is a rare diner indeed that comes in looking for them or even notes their existence. I'm OK with that because every once in a blue moon I hear the next day (I'm rarely on the floor at night at PRIMA) of a customer- often a domestic winemaker- who experiments with a bottle or two and I find that very gratifying.
I have gone as far as put one of my very favorite whites, a Vitovska from the distinctly out-there Edi Keber, into the high-end wine club I control at PRIMA. The hundred or so members of our Super Consorzio have proved to be enthusiastic consumers of some of my more not-quite-ready-for-prime-time wines and, even though I suspect many of the Super Consorzio newsletters (another excuse for not blogging) wind up in the hamster cage, I am proud to be getting wines like these into the hands of many wine lovers who would never have voluntarily chosen a wine like Vitovska (or even heard of it) for themselves.
In that way our world view increases just that much.
