August 2022 Wine Club
Styrian Mountain Wines from Matic
Welcome back to the wine club blog, friends! We’re staying in Eastern Europe this time, because it’s such an interesting and relevant region. Eastern Europe includes Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Czechia — all these wine regions are starting to hit the Virginia market. It’s a bewildering variety, but I’m going to try to give you some tools to place them in relation to one another.
Those Romans Again
In order to understand Central and Eastern European winemaking, we really have to acknowledge two empires: the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. These two empires contested for power over the people and territories in these regions for centuries, and now neither of them remains. In many ways these contests shaped our modern concepts of Eastern and Western; then the upheavals of the World Wars remade this region in many ways, and the deep memory embodied by wine regions and winemaking helps us to throw these long time scales into relief, perhaps the better to reflect on our own lifetimes. Here are maps of both empires at their greatest extent:
How does this affect wine and winemaking? To put it briefly, as much as we love local food and wine, food and wine can never truly be bound by locality. The identity of a place is a nebulous thing, always defined in terms of patterns that move, shift and reverse over time. Many appellations are younger than your grandparents, and new ones come into existence all the time. There’s no fixed identity, but there are flows of ideas and techniques. That’s what makes natural winemaking so exciting! We do dive into history and geology to give depth and breadth to the uniqueness of these wines. It’s worth appreciating that each winemaker choosing to adopt natural winemaking cannot just join a trend or reproduce an idea, but must create a novel synthesis due to the nature of the singularity of place.
Slovenia, being (like many Slavic nations) caught between both empires, is composed of elements of both and neither. As these empires declined in the 18th and 19th century, ethnic and cultural groups whose identities had been overcoded by imperial allegiances began to reemerge into history and attempt self-governance. The Slavs of Slovenia, who centuries ago had been making raids against the Roman fortress of Carnuntum, found themselves defending the empire as an eastern border state, then being absorbed into the central regions of the Austro-Hungarian empire, then becoming a northwestern border of Yugoslavia during the 20th century.
We’re going to focus specifically on northeastern Slovenia, in the region of Styria, which extends into Austria. Located at the same approximately the same latitude as Quebec or Washington State, Styria is a regional designation that originates at least as early as Roman times. It’s the region extending from Graz to Maribor in the following map.
Graz being in Austria, we’re going to focus on Slovenian Styria — Stajerska — , in the area of Maribor below. Sharp eyes might spot Ptuj, the home of another of our favorite Stajerska producers, Kobal:
Then finally, we will zoom into Malecnik, home of our winemaker of the month:
Matic
Matija Žerjav, a.k.a Matic, is a young winemaker in Malečnik. His farm is 9 miles from the Austrian border and 20 miles from the Hungarian border. He’s the third generation of winemakers in his family, and aims to bring back a traditional style of winemaking — no additions in the field or the cellar, yielding simple, handcrafted indigenous varietal-focused wines. His inspiration is his grandfather, who would have been born in the Austro-Hungarian empire (or the rubble of it). One of his specialties is Šipon, more generally known as Furmint, a varietal made famous in the Hungarian dessert wine Tokaj Aszu.
True to his roots, Matic farms without irrigation, fertilizers, refrigeration or added yeasts. His farm is certified organic and 100% solar powered:
Far from being a traditionalist, Matic is also experimenting with amphora ageing. His cellar being underground keeps the wine at a perfect temperature for fermentation, which is how he avoids the need for refrigeration.
The high elevation of Stajerska ensures cold nights in the summer, which preserves elevated acids, and cold winters, which cleanses the soil, culling root parasites specifically. The hard marl-rich metamorphic soils of these slopes force the roots to work hard and dig deep, producing excellent minerality and aromatic concentration. So what does Matic do with this unique arrangement?
Mea Sipon
The first wine we’ve selected for you is an orange pet-nat made from the Hungarian grape Furmint, known locally as Sipon. It’s beautifully fresh, crisp, dry, and aromatic, with high acidity. Although Matic produces this with an older process and longer skin contact, the style is recognized as characteristic of the region, displaying the stone fruit and mountain minerality celebrated in Stajerska.
Frankovka
The other wine we have selected for you was actually the first wine we ever tasted from this portfolio, and it obviously made an impression. Frankovka is the local name from Blaufrankisch, a spicy and intensely aromatic grape. If you recall the Kekfrankos from Peter Wetzer, you’ve experienced a serious, intense and refined Hungarian take on the grape; this is a youthful, light, playful, juicy, and vibrant variation on this varietal, almost the exact opposite.
Enjoy both of these wines on these hot summer days! They’re incredibly refreshing and we’re lucky to be able to enjoy these gifts of these high mountain vineyards. While you do, enjoy this bonus map that I keep coming back to:
As a final exercise, you might take a look at these patterns of tension in the earth’s crust and ask yourself how that tension has contributed to the flow of people, power, and ideas we’ve discussed here. Plate tectonics gives us a view of the deep past, the dynamic present, and the possible future — just like a good wine should.
Good luck out there, friends.
Jason
