Čotar - Malvasia 2004

This seminal Slovenian Karst producer never stopped making macerated wines. And they age forever.

Branko Čotar has a very straightforward answer for me when I ask when he started using extended skin macerations for his white wines: "I've macerated my wines for 40 years - it's the tradition here (in the Slovenian Kras region)". Branko's unswerving adherence to the skin contact style was almost revelatory to me - it's popular to talk about the revival of orange wines, dating it to the mid-1990s, when Josko Gravner and Stanko Radikon so famously and visibly went back to style. I'm guilty of having regurgitated this version of history myself, but the truth is that this style never went away, it just went underground.