you have in Slavonia going out towards the Danube you have Graevina which is
Welschriesling then in going down to Dubrovnik down the Dalmatian coast
Dalmatia is famous for a big red wine called Plavac Mali
which means little blue grape and that's a big red
wine lovely fruity dry red wine and then in Istria which is this tiny little
peninsular, very heart-shaped, peninsula near Italy which was part of Italy for
many years until the Second World War Malvasia, Istrian Malvasia, is the
local grape so this is their most important one even though it's the
smallest part, For us this was the one that we wanted to concentrate on in
the beginning because it was the wine that we felt the British market would
identify with the most because it's much more, it's much more commercial it's easy
to, it's easy to drink, it's easy to pair with food and it was a little bit - it's
it's commuter time - ... We used to say to people when when they say well what
is it like? We'd say well you know when you go to to Venice and you're sitting
outside in Friuli or the Veneto and you're drinking something like a Pinot
Gris or a Sauvignon Blanc, this is our Sauvignon Blanc, this was our dry
white wine it's crisp it's light, it's fresh, it's slightly citrusy, it's a
lovely summer wine but you can also get it aged very well. It goes well with oak,
it goes well with acacia and long skin contact as well, so you can make
fantastic natural wines from it. So it's really adaptable and really versatile with
food.
Because the thing is the malvasia
is them initially the most accessible white wine to the British would because
they have something in their head which they can adjust it to. If you go down much
further down south the wines become bigger, they become
stronger because its hotter.. Higher alcohol, so you get something like Posip which is a white wine, which is a lovely white wine, but it can have a lot
of big heavy alcohol content. It's very difficult as a first grape from Croatia
to try to get someone to drink of say a 14 or 15 percent white wine whereas here
Malvasia you can make eleven and a half percent 12 percent up to 13 and a half
percent as usual, and it's light, it's fresh.
You look at something like
lahtina or another white wine from down in the Dalmatian coast, again big
alcohol. So you've got to think of everything, you can't just go
into it lightly and just say that was nice. We'll see if we can sell some
bottles, because you've got to look at the British palete and how it changes
and what it will go with. So you have to put in a lot of thought.
It's a
commercial decision you have to make a commercial decision, and yeah I mean like - I love crazy ones, I just love them - I. Mean I would spend all day trying to buy
crazy wines but never sell a bottle. I'd have to end up drinking them all... Which is not a bad thing.
Probably why he why he buys them! The Reds you have Teran and Refok. One
of our winemakers many years ago told us a great way of identifying them: they're
like two brothers, so basically they're they are family... Refok, one with the
green [stem], one with the red [stem] The Refok, in Croatia, is, he
said, it was rather like a businessman that it goes to work every day it sits
in a city bank, wearing a suit and a tie, sits behind a desk nine-to-five, it's
very refined, very classic, very stylish. Teran is it's Punk wild brother who's
never done a day's work in his life and I love that analogy.
So you have this
rather classic Refok and then you have this wild Teran which can
be very bloody on the nose, very dark and you get a lot of long skin contact -
sometimes 50, 60 days skin contact - so it's full of flavor
and it's a beautiful black wine .The black, black
wine and that's, that to us is a really exciting wine... Truffles!
You have fantastic white truffles and summer black truffles, beautiful truffle
oils, lovely olive oils. You have fresh fish, fresh seafood. So something like in
Malvasia with a shrimp risotto is perfect or a spaghetti, scampi.
Beautiful
the Adriatic sole. Which is solio, a little sole, that's just sits on a plate. It's
absolutely perfect size so you get a lot of grilled fresh fish with these white
wines. In the winter you get fantastic wild boar salami, a lot of the
winemakers make their own salamis and prosciuttos.
In fact, we were in a winery
this morning and I took photos of hams hanging down in the garage with
all the stainless steel tanks on either side and then these legs hanging down,
and she said 'oh they've been there for two years'. And the prosciutto was
absolutely beautiful. So that really goes well with those red wines. In the winter,
they even have their own soup, which they call Manetra, which is Istria, buts
it's actually, it's like a soup.
Like a minestrone, their own
minestrone. It's fantastic. Yeah. But it goes with the Teran, it goes with the Refok, in the winter..
No comments:
Post a Comment