The Morning Claret

Simon J Woolf & Friends on Wild and Wonderful Wines

Month: September 2015

Alves de Sousa - Pessoal 2006
4 minute read

Alves de Sousa Pessoal 2006 – or “when is an orange wine not an orange wine?”

Definitions are tricky things – often cumbersome, frequently inconvenient, sometimes merely hard to pin down. By way of example, I’m slowly refining my personal reference point for what constitutes orange wine and what doesn’t – particularly fraught, as there’s nothing in the way of a legal definition, and indeed the term was coined as recently as 2004, by wine importer David Harvey.

Brkić Moonwalker 2012
4 minute read

Walking on the moon – Josip Brkić “Mjeseċąr”

For Josip Brkić, every year is an experiment – “Sometimes I bottle them, sometimes I don’t”, he tells me as we talk in his rather well appointed tasting room in central Čitluk (a winemaking town in Bosnia & Herzogovina’s Mostar region).

Mjeseċąr is one that made the grade. Translated as “Moonwalker”, the name is a homage to Brkić’s conversion to biodynamic farming. It’s both a sensitive interpretation of the region’s indigenous Žilavka grape variety, and a successful “orange wine”.