Another US expat living here in Friuli, my friend Matteo Burani entered immediately into the wine world of Friuli Venezia Giulia. Working in cellars, vineyardsand in offices alike, Matt has really made a name for himself here. We shared an interest in wine when a mutual friend introduced us, and we embarked on a short-lived project podcasting for GrapeRadio. We've drunk some winners and some losers together, but Matt has always shared my passion for Old White Wine.

Here is an email he sent me a few weeks ago after he drank a bottle of 2004 Movia Sauvignon that I'd like to share as this week's OWW... 

"Not a bad OWW... Surprisingly grassy, minty and fresh (with) white and rioe peach. Very clean. Hardly evolved at all. Perhaps not as rich in texture as is classic Collio Sauvignons, and I say that as a negative. (I think this means Matteo thinks Collio Sauvignon tends to be TOO rich.-WY) Balanced acidity, long, elegant, no oxidation, needed more time. For all the Movia "weirdness" this wine is very classic and not strange." 

Thanks for sharing the tasting note, Matt, but how 'bout sharin' the bottle next time??

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends...

AH, finally! Back again for some more fun and games with Old White Wine. I have to apologize to the 3 of you left out there that still know who I am and what this blog is all about. I don't really make resolutions, and usually one makes resolutions on January 1st, not February 1st, but I really miss OWW.com and I am going to try liike hell to keep this thing going in 2012.

I wanted to talk about a wine I've seen in a lot of different places, and a wine that I saw mentioned in Levi Dalton's enviable blog just the other day. An Old White Wine from the Loire...

Domaine aux Moines Savennieres Roche aux Moines.

Levi was lucky enough to taste and write about a bottle of the 1994. 

I was lucky enough to taste this EXACT same vintage of this wine at the Merano Wine Festival last November... 

Then, just before the holidays, my friend in OWW, Matteo Burani (soon to be making a contribution to OWW.com) brought a bottle of the 2004 to an OWW evening we did...

A quick look at the site for Domaine aux Moines shows that it is a Mother-Daughter operation and that the vineyards are the highest in the area. Also, the winery has been working toward organic certification since 2009.

There is something about this wine that is following me around. I have encountered it so often recently... Maybe the wine is trying to tell me something?

I have never been to the Loire, but I think I something is calling me.

Tasted at Bern's last month... From 1983... A little sweet but still very heathy and great peach and mineral backbone and plenty of petrol...

The Graf de la Tour is the top wine of the Villa Russiz estate, along with its red counterpart, the Merlot de la Tour. There's also a Grafin de la Tour Chardonnay. I scored this bottle in the same little deal I made when I got the ZH Gewurztraminer I tasted here.

I'll be very honest. I wasn't expecting much from this bottle. 1998 was a cool, rainy year in Friuli, but those who managed to get grapes in before the torrential September rains made some solid whites (reds were almost universally washed out). I also don't expect much from aged Friulian Sauvignon. The older Friulian Sauvignons I had tasted had lost their fresh and fruity charm and weren't able to develop into something more interesting and complex with time. 

Then I tasted this.

The nose was still discernible as Sauvignon, already a rare feat for a wine of this age. There was a note of methane or natural gas on the nose that was obviously a product of age. No obvious oxidation in color, aroma or flavor. On the palate there was gorgeous weight, sexy texture AND freshness. Very much alive and kicking. There was mature citrus and grapefruit... On a 13 year old Sauvignon!?  Tons of length, very balanced and simply delicious. My notes say "OMG it's so good. This is a 13 year old white wine I want to drink right now"... and I would gladly drink it again and again...

If I could find more.. but alas it was my only bottle. And what an experience it was.

I defy anyone to find a wine, white or red, that gives more pleasure and satisfaction after 13 years. Magnificent.

Coming soon... Austrian Riesling!

Another great Old White Wine Post today coming from Brooklynguy: Check it out!

http://brooklynguyloveswine.blogspot.com/2011/06/hirtzberger-scandal-of-85-an...

It's the beginning of an Old White Wine REVOLUTION! 

I have my own Austrian Riesling to post soon, so sign up for the feed or email subscription!

I am always SO enthused when someone as influential and important as Dr Vino blogs about an old white wine. Well, he did it yesterday when he wrote about his experience with a 40-year-old Riesling from JJ Prum:

http://www.drvino.com/2011/06/29/j-j-prum-wehlener-sonnenuhr-1971/

I'm Jealous!

Stay tuned OldWhiteWine fans.. I have more goodies coming VERY soon! Austrian Riesling! More Friulians from the EPIC Menotti tasting and beyond!

'Tis a great day for Old White Wine!

As part of the EPIC tasting with Gianni Menotti, I opened one of my last bottles of Edi Kante's killer Vitovska from 2003. Kante is a kind of icon/superhero/mythical beast. He's known for riding his motocross motorcycle through vineyards.. at night. He has supposedly ridden a full-grown stallion into his tasting room. His cellar was dynamite-blasted into the granite of the Carso hills, just outside Trieste. He has to truck in soil to hold up young vines he plants on solid granite. He ages his wines until he feels they're ready, sometimes releasing younger vintages, and then backtracking to relaease an older vintage the next year... And no one blinks an eye, because for the most part, you could classify Edi as a mad genius.

Edi gave me a bunch of his bottles as a gift when I brought 2 friends to visit his unique cellar (and he INSISTED on making a dinner out ofthe event, instead of a simple walk-around-the-open-a-bottle-type affair). Edi makes wines in bottles of 500ml and 1000ml with unusually narrow necks and skinny corks. He says the selection of quality cork at that size is infinitely better than the standard diameter.

This was a 500ml bottle that we opened, and the initial nose was something like menthol or eucalyptus, which eventually softened out into sambuco flowers (Elderflower, for non-Italiani). Really tight on the palate, spicy and verging on metallic, but not at all unpleasant. Still so very fresh with NO signs of oxidation, but slightly short and light on the palate.

With air the malic acid really showed itself with Granny Smith apple flavors... Hints of smoke and gunpowder too. 

Gianni remarked that this wine was made for lovely aromatics and less for weight, complexity and longevity, and despite there not being tons of weight, and being a little bit short, we both agreed the wine was first-class, clean and VERY drinkable.

You can get a little taste of Edi's world (and a glimpse of yours truly) in this video made a couple years ago by two visiting Somms:

Visit to Edi Kante

I had the pleasure of tasting through some glorious old whites, all from my home of Friuli, and some (not all) from the winery where I work: Bastianich. Especially significant was the fact that I shared this experience with one of the greats in Friulian winemaking, sig. Gianni Menotti, ex-winemaker of Villa Russiz and current consultant for such producers as Scubla and Castelvecchio.

I'm not going to tell you about EVERYTHING we tasted right away... oh no, you have to wait for it! But, if you look close at the photo of Gianni above, you can see what we had the pleasure of sampling...

Today I'll tell you about one of the wines, something near and dear to my heart... The 1999 Bastianich Pinot Plus.

1999 was my second harvest in the cellar, and while the vintage can only be described as fantastic, the harvest itself damn-near killed me. In 1998, my first experience in the cellar, I worked like a slave. Nothing had prepared me for the 16-hour days, the cramped hands and the soggy feet. 1999 found me more prepared with proper footwear, but the brutal schedule... sometimes 20-22 hour shifts... was one of the toughest experiences I have ever had.

So tasting the fruits of that laborious harvest a decade later is a pleasure, and a trip back in time.

Pinot Plus is labeled Pinot Grigio, something we only made for those first couple of vintages, but if I remember well, there was a small amount of Pinot Bianco in the mix, and possibly a bit of late-harvest juice (at that time referred to as "piccolo bambino", as it had to be coddled like an infant child).

Wednesday the wine showed lean and mean for a hot vintage like '99. Clean, with not apparent oxidation. Very minerally and stony - almost tannic on the palate. Not lots of fruit or weight, not much of that silky sexiness that comes with age on Friulian whites, but the dryness and mature stoniness makes this a very appealing food wine at 12 years old. Hints of apple and pear on the finish evolve with air to include a lively white pepper element. Heat of the '99 vintage peeks out in some warmth at the end. Remarkable.

Gianni and I both agreed that we would GLADLY drink this wine on a regular basis, even with 10 years of bottle age.

Stay tuned... more goodies to come!

The winery cooperatives of Sudtirol (or Alto Adige, if you prefer Italian) are without a doubt the model for what coop cellars should be. They have intimate relationships with their growers, strongly reinforcing their need for the best from quality areas and being smart enough to produce inexpensive wines from lesser vineyards for cheap and cheerful local consumption. The surprise is just how good the top wines from these cooperatives can be, producing wines that rival even the smallest, quality-oriented independents.

St. Michael-Eppan (San Michele-Appiano) is probably most famous for their "Sanct Valentin" line, especially the Sauvignon and Gewurztraminer, both perennial high-scorers and prize-winners.

Last night I had the pleasure of having a lovely smoked salmon tasting plate at Jolanda DeColo's Bistro in the center of Udine. After consulting with the very helpful waitress present she brought us a bottle of the 2005 Montiggl Riesling.

While not particularly old, I consider 2005 just under the limit for Old White Wine.com...

We were all impressed with the nose on this wine, showing tertiary characteristics of slate and a hint of Riesling diesel with a distinct saline character as well. On the palate there wasn't tons of stuffing and body, but the raciness and minerality were all there. This is quite typical of wines grown on the granite-based soils in Sudtirol. The lack of calcium doesn't give the same depth and weight to whites like Friuli does. What it DOES do is give rise to great aromatics and remarkable stoniness. There was a sweet element on the finish that reminded me of caramel and/or vanilla, and after that subsided I was left with clean mineral backbone. It was the perfect compliment to the salmon tasting.

Back in 1998, when I had my first chance to travel to VinItaly (and Europe for that matter), I asked Joe Bastianich if I could take some vacation time afterwards to travel.

"Of course," he answered. "Where are you going? Piedmont? Tuscany?"

"Alsace and Champagne," I replied.

"You're the wine director in an Italian restaurant and you're going to visit France?"

I couldn't pass up the opportunity. I had fallen in love with Champagne and especially the great whites of Alsace during my time at Wine Spectator, and had read and tasted so much that I always vowed to visit those mythical places. Without going into detail (and diggin through 12 years of photographs), it was my first professional "wine tour", I was treated very well wherever I went and I tasted some truly wonderful wines. I even got to participate in the component and blending tasting for Domaine Weinbach... A true honor.

Obviously, one of the stops on the Alsace tour was Zind-Humbrecht. Zind-Humbrecht (or "ZH" to the geeky) is one of those out-there, love-it-or-hate-it kind of wineries (at least it was when I truly followed the wines of Alsace, which I have difficulty doing here in Italy). The wines are big, fat, rich, very concentrated and alcoholic (This one had 14%). They were easy to pick out in blind tastings for their fatness and alcohol, standing out from the more elegant Trimbachs, Hugels and Weinbachs and the ideosyncratic Marcel Deiss. I loved all of them, and still do to this day.

I came across this bottle (actually, FIVE bottles)  after a friend of mine decided to close his little Enoteca and liquidate his inventory. He had given me a bottle of ZH Riesling as a gift after a conversation about my love for Alsace a year before. When I returned to pick out some bottles from his inventory, the first thing I asked about was the ZH.

He had sold one bottle of each. I snapped up the rest. He was selling EVERYTHING in the house for 8 euros a bottle. EIGHT, thats right, EIGHT euros.

Into the cellar they went, 2000 ZH Reisling and Gewuratraminer Gueberschwihr....

The Gueberschwihr bottlings are on the low-end of the ZH line, and I think are not made for aging. In fact, I looked the wine up on Wine Spectator and it was recommended to "Drink now" in 2002... HAH!

This particular bottle was perfect, showing little or no sign of oxidation. When I opened it and poured a bit into a glass, my wife could smell it a meter away... I gave her a sniff up close and she immediately said, "Lychees!"

Mind you, my better half knows nothing about Alsatian wine, let alone Gewutztraminer, and she nailed it. Lychees and roses burst from the glass.  It was so seductive... On the palate it was very rich, almost syrupy, but with this beam of citrus and mineral that ran down the sides of my tongue while sweet mandarin orange also cut through. It almost seemed... Fresh?

With time and air the age started to peek out with hints of caramel, but the wine seemed to get more mineral and lighter on its feet (or maybe I was getting used to the weight?). There was none of that petrol character I find often in older whites, but I picked up a touch of gunpowder beneath hints of white chocolate, cocoa and coffee. At times i did notice a little heat on the finish, but it wasn't so bad that it detracted from anything.

TEN YEARS OLD, no oxidation, layers of complexity, Uber-rich and somehow fresh simultaneously, a nose that made you sniff deeply again and again...

Awesome Old White Wine.

I'll let you know when I open up one of the Rieslings...