March 2020 Wine Club
Biodynamic skin contact Pinot Gris from Burgenland and Cab Sauv from… Bolivia!?
Welcome back to Grandiflora’s wine club blog! March’s selection was a difficult choice between many strong candidates, and we ended up with two wines that we love — BioKult’s Naken skin-contact Pinot Gris, and La Concepcion’s Cabernet Sauvignon from Bolivia. Both are representative of what we love about wine — an encounter between new and old cultures and ideas, tended to and curated by people with a sense of caring and responsibility toward the land and people affected by their work.
BioKult — Naken Skin Contact Pinot Gris
First up, we have a skin contact Pinot Gris from BioKult in Austria. Spearheaded by winemakers Angela and Werner Michlitz, BioKult is a group of growers who committed together to principles of biodynamic farming and minimal-intervention viticulture. Growing grapes within the Burgenland and Niederösterreich designation, their wines are Demeter certified — a difficult achievement! They also comply with the BioSuisse Organic certification, on a more technical side.
Region Focus: Niederösterreich, Burgenland, and the Neusiedlersee
The landlocked lowlands of Austria bordering Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia are dominated by a hot continental climate, with large diurnal temperature swings. Home to Vienna, the most urban wine region in the world, the eastern part of Niederosterreich enjoys more moderate temperatures thanks to the influence of Europe’s largest terminal lake — the Neusiedlersee.
This lake is surrounded by wetlands and plays a critical role in bird migrations. It is extremely shallow, with an average depth of 1.8m. This makes it vulnerable to being drained for agriculture, and it was at risk of total destruction in the early 20th century. Fortunately, development around the lake is severely restricted, and local and regional environmental coalitions continue to protect it from damage through the construction of dams and bridges.
Support of biodynamic and dry farming on the shores of the Neusiedlersee protects this important wetland by reducing its overall pesticide load and protecting and preserving water resources crucial to the survival of its ecology.
© AWMB / Marcus Wiesner
BioKult’s producers farm grapes in Burgenland, a wine region wrapping around the Neusiedlersee to the west and the north, and their winery is located in Pamhagen, near the northern shore and close to the Hungarian border.
The thing I love about the Naken is the way that it’s a serious, technical wine style— dry farmed, macerated on skins for several days, spontaneous fermented, and unfiltered — and it’s made with a great deal of heart and love for the land. The vineyards are planted in polyculture, with fruit trees playing a central role in the harmonization of birds, insects, and livestock’s roles in the vineyard. Even the presence of wild animals such as hedgehogs, dormice, and stone marten is incorporated into the overall vitality of the vineyard.
The wines are fermented with no new oak to let the quality of the grape shine through. And shine they do! They even shimmer, with the unfiltered sediment continuing enzymatic action in the bottle, releasing minimal amounts of CO2 for the slightest hint of effervescence. This is a characteristic central European skin-contact wine, ripe with heady phenols as well as richly varied textures from several days of maceration. To put it bluntly, it’s a white wine that drinks like a red.
I find it interesting that Pinot Gris seems to be such a common choice for skin-contact wines. A mutation of Pinot Noir often made into white wine in its Italian form as Pinot Grigio, it’s not technically a white grape, as its skins develop a pinkish-grey color. Other notable growing regions for Pinot Gris are Alsace and Oregon. This wine is 90% Pinot Gris and the other 10% is Muskateller, the Austrian name for Muscat Blanc a Petit Grains.
What we love about BioKult’s Naken
The bottom line about this wine is that it’s delicious. It’s beautifully and responsibly made and offers a range of textural experiences as you drink through the bottle and the medium-high natural acid and tannins find balance. We recommend drinking this fresh — maybe wait for a nice spring day and enjoy it outside while listening to the birds!
Next up:
La Concepcion — Bolivian Cabernet Sauvignon
Located in the La Concepcion valley near Tarija in southern Bolivia, La Concepcion has developed a viticultural program around adapting French varietals to the valley’s extreme altitude (5700 feet) and climate. Situated in a sedimentary basin in the foothills of the Andes, wine was introduced to these sites by the Jesuits in the late 1600s. La Concepcion’s Cab was planted in the 1980s from cuttings from France. In the following interview, owner Claudia Morales describes their low-intervention approach to viniculture:
Region Focus: Tarija
Near the border with Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay, Tarija is upland of the large and agriculturally rich Gran Chaco basin. The largest industry in the area is wine, although this is threatened by the discovery of significant natural gas reserves in the region. Fortunately, Tarija has quite an independent streak, mounting a regional general strike against the central government’s appropriation of taxes on resource extraction in 2008¹ and with its eastern province of Gran Chaco voting overwhelmingly — with the support of the national government — to become an autonomous region in 2009². International support of Tarija’s wine industry provides local communities with economic options beyond resource extraction. La Concepcion is located in Tarija’s south central province of Jose Maria Aviles, bordering Argentina on the south and surrounded by national parks.
What We Love about La Concepcion’s Cabernet Sauvignon
The first recommendation I have to tasting this wine is to throw out any expectations you have of Cabernet Sauvignon. Although these are French grapes on French vines, the terroir of Tarija completely transforms them. Its bracing acidity and plush, vibrant tannin holds the tart, sharp red fruit bouquet of this wine tight, like a ruby set in white gold. Decanting is not necessary but recommended. This 2018 vintage is the current release, it’s drinking beautifully now, and I believe it will age 3–5 years at a minimum.
Want in? Want more?
If you’re not part of our wine club already, or you are and you would like to stock up on these beautiful wines (subject to availability), hit us up at orders@grandiflorawine.com.
Cheers,
Jason
[1] Bebbington, D., & Bebbington, A. (2010). Anatomy of a Regional Conflict: Tarija and Resource Grievances in Morales’s Bolivia. Latin American Perspectives, 37(4), 140–160. Retrieved March 3, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25700537
[2]Centellas, M. (2010). Bolivia’s radical decentralization. Americas Quarterly, 4(3), 34.
