Wine Club: Up on the Snow-covered Hilltops!
EM DRINKS WINE
With Thanksgiving over with and our bellies, fridges and freezers full from the fall harvest, we turn our heads toward the winter that is fast approaching. Lucky for you we have some great winter wine club picks to enjoy this December. We would never leave you out in the cold, so pull up a chair by the cozy Cork fireplace as we learn about some fantastic new French and Italian wines.
Wine Club: 2 Bottles
Cantina Furlani ‘Alpino Macerato’ Trento Italy • Muller Thurgau, Sauvignon Blanc and Traminer
The first wine club wine this month is Alpino Macerato, literally meaning alpine maceration, from Cantina Furlani. Italian winemaker Matteo Furlani works a 4th generation vineyard in Trento, Italy. Trento is known as the “alpine city” as it is a part of the Dolomites mountain range in Northern Italy. His vineyard sits at 720 meters, or 2,360 feet, of elevation. The soils in the vineyard are primarily surface clay over schist and broken granite, and host vines planted over 30 years old.
Furlani practices biodynamic winemaking, and uses the higher elevation temperatures to his advantage. He uses cement tanks and glass vases called Demijohns (vases with larger bodies and small necks fixed with wicker on the outside) to age his wines and wine must outside during the winter. This does many things to stabilize the wine, including clarifying the wine after fermentation. I mean this is the great thing about living in the colder mountains, you need more room in the fridge, just put things outside!
What I personally find the coolest about this producer is the fact that there are no added yeasts or sugars. This really a true test of good winemaking. Using natural yeast from the vineyards and only the sugars produced from the grapes really creates a simple and beautiful wine. In addition, did I mention that this wine is frizzante! Yes there are bubbles :)
Cantina Furlani created the Alpino Macerato by allowing the wine to “sui lieviti” or sit on the lees. This winemaking decision creates a round, nutty or brioche taste if left to sit for a longer period of time. The Alpino wine undergoes its spontaneous (no added yeast) second fermentation in its bottle which creates the frizzante sparkle that we all love. This wine is a blend of Muller Thurgau, a grape of German origin (Riesling X Madeleine Royale), Sauvignon Blanc and Traminer, or Gewürztraminer, which are all white grape varieties. When going to enjoy the Alpino you can expect zippy and fresh notes of lychee, citrus fruit and some toasted almond notes. This wine is light and refreshing, I would definitely drink this as an aperitif or with any sort of classic charcuterie.
André & Michel Quenard ‘Le Grand Rebossan’ Chignon France • Roussanne
The second bottle for wine club this month, Le Grand Rebossan, is one of my favorite bottles of wine…like ever! Located in the Savoie region of France, producers André & Michel Quenard farm their family vineyard that was first started in the 1930s by André’s grandfather. The farm originally sold their wine in bulk to nearby ski resorts to quench the thirst of the guests (sounds familiar…), until the 1960s when André recognized the potential of bottling wine with the family name.
Within Savoie there are twenty-one different sub-regions or “crus”, this wine fits within the Chignin Bergeron cru. Chignin is a cru within the Savoie region, as well as the name of the village, and Bergeron is the local name for the grape variety that this wine is made from, Roussanne. Roussanne is a white grape variety that finds its origins in the Rhone region of France.
At the Quenard vineyard, the Roussanne vines are over 40 years old and are planted in steep limestone scree slopes. Scree slopes are rocks and fragments of rocks that have collected at the bottom of a mountainside after years of periodic rockfall. This rocky type of soil allows for drainage and keeps the vines from accumulating too much moisture. In addition, the limestone retains heat throughout the day helping to ripen the grapes. Although the vineyards hug the western alps, the sunshine from the south moderates the cooler climate and allows for the sugar levels to rise in the grapes fully before harvest. The cooler mountain breeze helps to slow the ripening of the grapes and in turn this helps the grapes retain a good acidity.
But enough about the soil, let’s get to the drinking. Upon first inspection, this wine is a pale golden color with yellow hues. On the nose, I get notes of stone fruit, pear and pine resin. On the palate, this wine medium bodied with a nice light finish and tasting notes of walnuts, peaches, and honey. I would pair this wine with a warm meal on a cold snowy night. A fish chowder, the creamy squash tortelli we have on the menu right now at cork, or even some aged cheese with savory small bites like a paté would be delicious with this wine.
Wine Club: 3-4 Bottles
Athénaïs ‘Côtes d'Auxerre’ Burgundy France • Pinot Noir
The Château de Béru, Athénaïs Côtes d'Auxerre Bourgogne Pinot Noir, is definitely a mouthful if you don’t speak french. So don’t worry about pronouncing this one, but rather take a mouth full of this delicious wine instead.
Winemakers Èric and his wife Laurence planted new vines in their land in Chablis in the 1980s, after the phylloxera epidemic in the late 19th century took the Beru family out of viticulture after 400 years. Since 2004, their daughter, Athénais, has been working hard to change the practice into one that is organic and biodynamic. This has led to a notable increase in the quality of the wines Château de Béru 2.0 has produced.
This Pinot Noir is a super cool project that is organized under the Château de Béru. Sometimes in winemaking, like with the Grandma’s Gris we saw in the last wine club, we have farmers who sell their grapes to a winemaker who then produces the wine. This is exactly the case with the Athénaïs wines. The grapes for this wine were grown in Saint-Bris. They were hand-harvested, whole cluster fermentation with indigious yeasts. This vintage is the 2018 Pinot Noir, but as of 2020 all Athénaïs wines are certified organic.
This complex Pinot is delicate and has a long finish. Tasting notes of ripe berries wash over the palate, and you are left with sweet spice notes on the end. Aged for 16 months in barrel, this wine has the silky tannins to prove it. I would pair this wine with a lamb tagliatelle or a vegetable lasagna.
Foradori ‘Fontanasanta’ Trentino Italy • Manzoni Bianco
To start and now to end this wine club, we turn to the mountainous region of the Dolomites in Italy. Fontanasanta vineyard is made up of calcareous clay soils. The clayey-limestone soils are home to vines of Manzoni Bianco (Riesling X Pinot Bianco), a white grape variety, that are anywhere from 15-35 years old.
Elizabetta Foradori fell into the wine world after a familial commitment to take over the family vineyard. She recentered the viticulture of the farm around biodynamic practices and her obligation to the vineyard turned to passion. This elevated the wine that Foradori was producing and earned her the title “Queen of Teroldego.”
Today her three children, Emilio, Theo, and Myrtha, are taking over the operations to let their mother take a step back. The grapes at the vineyard are hand harvested and destemmed, and spontaneous fermentation occurs with the natural yeasts from the vineyard in steel tanks. The juice is left in contact with the skins of the grape for 3-4 days, making this technically an orange or skin-contact wine.
The wine is then put into acacia wood barrels for 7 months, during this time the wine goes through malolactic fermentation. What acacia barrels do for a wine, versus other types of wood like oak or redwood, is impart a floral note to the wine, it takes some of the woody-ness out, and improves the texture.
This beautiful wine is round, medium-bodied, with tasting notes of orange blossom, apricot, honey, lemon zest, and a slight nuttiness. I would pair this wine with so many different green vegetables! Brussels would go perfectly with this wine, or even a white fish fried with lemon and served with garlicky mashed potatoes.
