Harvest in Racha, Georgia | Our Blood is Wine

Harvest with Emily and Jeremy 

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Racha, Western Georgia

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6 October 2017

Then the next day we made some wine...

'Dinavolino' 2015, Giulio Armani

I’m a sucker for a specific sort of unspecific bottle labelling. 

Generalities in a world as specific as the wine one are right up there on my list of some of the most charming things in the world; a notch only below corduroy pants, basket collections and big format bottles with flip-tops and no labels. I associate etiquettes that state a precisely made wine’s percentage as imprecise and its grapes as unknown as belonging to the kinds of wines not intended to go further than the tables of the maker's friends and families. 

So, the best ones.

I also associate this sort of loose labelling with Italy. 

“Dinavolino,” listed on the menu as a ‘field blend,’ is one of these wines: precisely made with 25% imprecise varieties, 25% Ortrugo, 25% Marsanne and 25% Malvasia di Candia Aromatica. And Italian.

The field belongs to La Stoppa’s head winemaker, Giulio Armani, and is where he makes his own wines since 2005 as Denavolo after the mountain that looks over his 5 ha of sloping, calcareous vineyards in north western Emilia-Romagna. The vineyards reach up to 400 m (with two parcels planted between 500-600 m) above the not too distant sea level, and the grapes that make “Dinavolino” come from 28-year old vines at the bottom of this slope, which starts at 350 m. 

They’re hand picked, de-stemmed and fermented on the skins for up to two weeks during which they undergo up to 7 pump-overs in the first few days to extract as much as possible. The wine is then aged in steel.

Ok so that’s one way to describe it, but here’s another: “Dinavolino” is like a summer storm system rolling in. It tastes like the air smells before it breaks: fleshy fruit like deeply pregnant clouds hanging heavy like a late August orchard. Heady winds of dried oranges and cloves at Christmas time mixed with sun-baked earth and the telltale green-purple glow of storm electricity. Then it breaks and the rain thrashes the cracked earth to expose hot limestone under low-growing basil, sage and dusty saffron. (Plus all the elevation stuff).

Tasting notes:

Orange Skittles-orange in the glass with aromas of orange peel curling on the stove, Amaretto cookies and lady bug bitters. The palate is a mouthful of a very ripe, very fleshy papaya-pineapple fruit salad with torn basil but not in a sickly, mom don’t make me eat the rest of this, way but more a: ’Hey mom did you know that for all that sun hitting these south facing vines I can still deduce a vein of fresh squeezed OJ acidity from those cool mountain nights?!’ 

Grate on some orange zest for its pithy bitterness and serve.

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“Dinavolino”

Denavolo, Giulio Armani 

25% Ortrugo, 25% Marsanne, 25% Malvasia di Candia Aromatica, 25% unidentified varietals

Emilia-Romagna, Italy

4 months skin contact

D.I.Y Georgian wine in 10 (easy) steps

(You've already picked the grapes and punched a hole in your bucket cus that's obvious stuff.)

Step 1:

Roll your qvevri into a friendly winemaker's marani and bury it, packing it in with sand.

Step 2:

Set up your gear.

All of it.

Step 3:

Put some grapes — stems, bugs and all — into the bucket with the hole in and balance this on something high up but less precarious than some uneven bricks. 

Wash your feet and get in.

 Start  

s
t
o
 m

 p i n g.

Step 4:

Should look like this ↓

Step 5:

Around this point you'll probably realise you're going to need to get out and clean another vessel to put the juice in.

Get out and clean one or learn from our mistake and do it earlier.

Step 6: 

Pour juice into new vessel.

Marvel at it.

Taste it.

Step 7:

Get back in again and get your friends working too 'cus you have a shitload of grapes to get through and the romance of pressing your grapes by foot wears off sooner than you might think.

 Step 8:

You're 3 hours of stomping in and the neighbour has already come out (twice) and added you on Facebook just — you think — because he can (because you can't understand him).

You haven't eaten anything.

It's crazy hot even though it's October.

 Draft in anyone else.

"LOL"

↓

Step 9:

Gently press the stomped grapes with a hand press.

(This is optional but recommended if you don't have a lot of grapes but you want a lot of wine).

Step 10:

With skins/stems: Transfer juice and desired amount of skins into qvevri (not too full!) and wait for alcoholic fermentation to start. Do some punchdowns. Wait for your desired length of maceration, remove skins/stems, wait for malolactic fermentation, wait some more. You've got wine.

Without skins: Transfer juice into qvevri and wait for fermentation to start, do some punchdowns, wait, wait for malolactic fermentation, wait, wait some more. You've got wine.

Go drink someone else's wine. (That afternoon we drank Ènek's).

This will be Emily and Jeremy's second vintage, made from a blend of Mujuretuli, Aleksandrouli and Kabistoni grapes grown by Engus Natmeladze. Their documentary on Georgian wine, Our Blood is Wine will be released next spring. 

You can taste a bottle from their last vintage at Le Carton's Georgian Wine Dinner on Sunday. Two words: Georgian BOJO.

Need something to eat with your new wine? Read my how-to on how to butcher a lamb.

'Tsolikouri - Krakhuna' (no skins) 2016, Ènek Peterson

Me on  drinking what we bottled in June in October while sorting grapes: 'Cool, this is the second time I've drunk from this bottle'.

Me on the time we went down Ènek's qvevri for The Morning Claret.

Me on the one bottle* I have writable memory of after drinking bottles and bottles of the stuff for three days: 

Tasting notes:

Looks like dappled light across an orange ocean floor.

Smells like dry mandarins and crystal honey.

Tastes like sunshine zest. A Krakhuna-forward tropical fruit salad with stems on.

Feels like jello going down so, supple. Here be no angles.

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Tsolikouri - Krakhuna 2016

Ènek Peterson

Tsolikouri + Krakhuna (no skins, 3 x on lees)

Imerti, Georgia

We'll be pouring Ènek's wines, both skins and no skins, all without etiquettes, all 2016, for Le Carton's Georgian Wine Dinner on 29 October.

*Perhaps interesting to note that this is the one bottle of Ènek's we didn't drink with Ènek, hence some memory. (Hey Ènek!)

Ramaz Nikoladze

The first time I tried to write about Ramaz Nikoladze* I killed the story with facts. I talked about him being Georgia's representative for the Slow Food Movement, a bit about soil and rocks (calcareous clay!) and how, in 2007, he and another winemaker, Soliko (Our Wine), combed the west of the country looking for others that worked the way they do — according to ancient tradition and low interventionist, organic practices — assure them they were on the right track, convince them to bottle and, I quote myself, ‘focus the energies of natural winemakers in Georgia into an organised front’.

I explained he’s a fourth generation winemaker still working a parcel of land at his family home which the wine world calls ‘uncultivated’ and I call fucking wild and where, until 2015, he made his wine using the old style, outdoor crush pad and generations old, outside qvevri. (Since 2015 he makes his wine in his own marani which means cellar in Georgian). Then I described the place: down a kill-your-axels dirt track bordered by hazelnut trees, apple, pomegranate and brambles and in the metaphorical shadow of a looming, brightly red rock.

Said 'it's beautiful'.

Next I repeated some of what I remember he’d told us: how the land was traditionally divided between the family’s sons but is now divvied up between Ramaz and his cousins, how Imeretians don’t really like long skin macerations but he does, how he does everything by hand, how ‘he does everything by hand’ means ‘everything takes hours’ and ‘bottling 500 bottles’ means doing so on something the size of a small sewing machine. How he explained that he realised there was more than one way of making wine when, at the age of 14, he went to visit his uncle across some mountain range and killed a pig there (he didn't describe the wine), and how in 2010 he and a group of Kakhetian winemakers opened Vino Underground in Tbilisi in 2010. That he juggled work between his vines and there for years.

And it’s all true but I feel I missed the point, the point being that Ramaz took us in when we’d turned up for a tasting with no money for the driver, no intention to stay and not much of a plan, paid our fare, fed us for days that when we left five days later I got teary cus I felt like a part of the family.

The point being that if you asked, I wouldn't say, 'Yeah he's got x hectares', but that he listens to punk, eats chillies whole and has a really great cat he once drove 3.5 hours to bring to the vet. I’d say how we spent a lot of hours sitting on the steps outside the kitchen not really knowing what was going on eating watermelon and how this one time we were sitting there and his buddies rolled in and it was like a scene from Mimi, Fifi, Glouglou except Mimi was a skinhead punk in lime green pants and beads whose gigs the soviets shut down by killing the city's (Kutaisi) electricity, and instead of wine they were dégustation-ing female leaves weed tea which tasted like sprout water. 

And cus I think it's funny I’d probably tell you how when I asked a stupid question in the cellar about a grape that doesn't exist he said strange, someone wrote about that in an article too, and I said ohmygod that was me! and to think all this time I was at home wondering why the post was getting thousands of hits when it was a bunch of angry Georgian winemakers thinking who's this idiot? (This is that post). 

I’d tell you how we ate outside every night and go on and on and on about his wife Nestan's cooking, her wooden spoons, ALL THE TOMATOES AND FRESH, NEVER BROWNED, GARLIC and how she made polenta when she found out I love it. How, one night, when we got back from another winemaker's, we found Ramaz listening to a crazy Dutch flutist who was in my boyfriend's student society in Amsterdam and how we sweated in our chairs and he gave us a lesson in ‘mufa’ which is the taste of bad qvevri and how it tastes bad — like cork — on the condition that we finished it. 

How often we’d work in silence, how ‘breakfast’ was at 14.00, and how when we were bottling we drank from the bottles and got quite drunk and stuck the labels on wrong. How I found Didimi’s Krakuna too aromatic, how the name ‘Krakuna’ comes from the sound the grape makes when you bite it, how he took us swimming in a fall that was beautiful despite its banks being covered in garbage and how his car key is broken in the ignition — or in other words, different sort of facts.

*You can read my second attempt at writing about Ramaz on The Morning Claret. 

Also on The Morning Claret: a toast to the 2017 Georgian harvest.


**On Sunday 29 October Le Carton cooked a Georgian dinner to soak up all the wines we'd been suit-casing. Pictures here.

Ramaz Nikoladze

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July 2017, Nakhshirgele, Georgia

Future Le Carton pop ups.