Wine and Spirits - October 2011 - (Page 80)

Last Word The Wind in the Rock Vitovska, the Bora & Carso The Duino Castle was built on carso, the rock that stands in for coastline surrounding the Adriatic port city of Trieste. The castle looks like it had been imagined by Tolkien for his Middle Earth trilogy, rising above the sea on 200-foot cliﬀs of bare limestone, a narrow bridge of rock leading from below the castle walls to the ruins of another ancient keep. In 1912, when Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis Hohenlohe invited the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to stay at Duino, this was the southern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Em- by Joshua Greene Sandi Skerk dug in Prepotto. An engineer by training, he hired a company to drill the rock, but says they gave up after two drill bits were shot in a day. So he went to the quarries to get advice. A new team cut the corners ﬁrst, to remove some of the pressure, then cut the walls with a diamond string. He now has an underground cube where he makes his wine, the walls decorated in the swirls, caverns and natural variations of the rock. Eddie Kante’s cellar is a cylinder rather than a cube, 82 feet down into the rock. His wines ferment at the naturally cold temperatures three levels down, then they move to the top ﬂoor into tanks to settle and stabilize through the cold of winter. Once bottled, they age on the second ﬂoor, where he holds four vintages in stock. His longest aging wines are his Selezioni, made only in years when the vintage cooperates, held in the cellar for seven years or more. His 2005 has developed a toasty richness while still juicy with the fresh peach and nectarine character of the grape. Kante viniﬁes his wines without skins. Other producers, like Zidarich, ferment at warmer temperatures with the skins, but without any yeast addition. Either way, there’s stony, mineral tension in these wines, not only apparent in the vitovska, but in other whites from these producers. Vitovska, in fact, is generally a blending grape, used in wines like Zidarich’s 2009 Prulke, youthfully ﬂoral with a tight, stony structure (a blend of sauvignon blanc, vitovska and malvasia) or Skerk’s 2009 Ograde, ﬁlled with fresh peach fuzz ﬂavor and a luscious buzz of mineral acidity (it’s vitovska, pinot grigio, malvasia and sauvignon harvested from eight diﬀerent vineyards). That Ograde has the feel of Sandi Skerk’s cellar, where the wine was cooled by the surrounding rock and by the entrance to a cave below. “It started as a little hole in the wall,” he explained by a ladder leading down into the earth. “Air kept blowing up out of the hole so we opened it up and could climb down 120 feet. We got to a narrow part and it took eight years to dig out a tunnel.” Following the air, he’s spelunked 380 feet below the cellar ﬂoor. “That’s where I found another hole and dropped a rock down. Since all things fall at the same velocity, you count the seconds. It sounds like another 120 feet.” I gies, which, according to many of the academics who make such judgments, stand as the greatest poem of the 20th century. There has been less agreement among the politicians who battle over lines in the rock. The Italian Carso is, today, a narrow strip along the coast, with the Karst Plateau of Slovenia extending inland to the north. People speak Slovene on both sides of the border; whether in Carso or Karst, they specialize in growing vitovska. It’s a local grape variety with its own poetic response to the rock and the wind. The name vitovska has several associa- Eddie Kante ferments his wines 82 feet below ground in his Carso cellar pire. He stayed on at the castle when the other guests had left, and it was in January when he went for a walk along the terraces and across the rock bridge, trying to clear his mind after reading a particularly disturbing letter from a creditor. The Bora was on, full force—a wind that builds when high pressure in the mountains screams down to ﬁll a lowpressure zone in the Adriatic. The wine can be strong enough that old people venturing outside in Duino or Trieste will ﬁll their pockets with rocks to anchor themselves. It was in that cold wind from the north that Rilke believed he heard a voice—a question he wrote down in his notebook, which became the ﬁrst lines of The Duino Elegies. It would take him more than a decade to ﬁnish the work, by which time Middle Europe would be rent by war and the Empire that once ruled this land had crumbled. The rock and the wind is still there, as are Rilke’s Ele80 W I N E & S P I R I T S O C T O B E R 2 0 1 1 tions for the growers here. One of them, Benjamino Zidarich, told me the name might have evolved from the Slovene word vitica (pronounced vitizza), the tendril of the vine. Vitovska’s tendrils are unusually strong, and growers often plant it on the perimeters of vineyards, as it can stand against the Bora while protecting the sauvignon, chardonnay, malvasia or terrano vines within. Most of the vineyards are tiny plots on sunny, high ground, grown in slight depressions in the rock or on terraces—areas that can hold a little topsoil. The carso itself is formed from limestone bedrock dissolved through weathering, which also washed all the soil down into deep ravines called dolinas. The topsoil, hauled up from the cold, humid dolinas, allows the vines to get a root-hold in the carso, before eventually following hollows and narrow pathways though the rock for moisture. You can see those pathways in the cellar Image by Stefan Albrecht

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine and Spirits - October 2011

Wine and Spirits - October 2011
Editor’s Note
Happenings
Contents
Fined & Filtered: Jordan Mackay
Best New Sommeliers 2011
San Francisco’s New & Notable Restaurants & Bars
Raúl Pérez
Chablis Crosses Borders
Extreme Values
Tastings Overview
Chardonnay
Burgundy
Aussie Shiraz
Bierzo & Galicia Red
American
Imported
Joshua Greene

Wine and Spirits - October 2011