Simon J Woolf & Friends on Wild and Wonderful Wines
Wineries can soak up a lot of money – as per the popular industry joke “How do you make a million in wine? Answer: Start with two million”. The landscape is littered with vinous vanity projects created by wealthy industrialists, Read more
Create a 2,000 hectare farm on marshlands that used to be part of Austria’s biggest lake, let your Pinot Grigio vineyard run wild without any pruning, harvest, then ferment in concrete eggs with the skins for three weeks.
Patrick Meyer is the winemaker at the family owned Julien Meyer domaine in Northerly Alsace (Nothalten to be precise). He’s been in the saddle for a while – since 1982 in fact. The domaine has been farmed biodynamically (Demeter certified) since 1985, and Patrick spurns all additives including sulphur. More on that subject later!
There are a small number of winemakers out there who defy any attempt at categorisation, apart from superlatives. Elisabetta Foradori is one. She’s the darling of the Italian biodynamic wine movement, an early convert to amphorae, and a peerless exponent of long skin maceration for white wines. But it feels clumsy to describe Foradori’s output with such limiting terms and techniques.
I’ve featured wines from several of the Schmecke das Leben producers in this series, but not Tauss until now. Roland and Alice Tauss are perhaps the least well known winery in the group, partly due to their very small size – there’s a mere 6 hectares of vines at their bucolic estate in Southern Styria.
Somewhere, out there on the internet, the discussion rages on about natural wines. To true believers, it’s the one and only righteous path, to sceptics, nothing more than a farcical or even fraudulent movement. Regular readers of The Hosemaster have Read more