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Articles about 'Enjingi'

Recent Breakthrough: Cabernet Sauvignon goes with lobster

Posted 12 30 2009 by Stetson    0 Comments
 
a great combo: lobster with Batic Cabernet Sauvignon Rose & Enjingi Grasevina.
a great combo: lobster with Batic Cabernet Sauvignon Rose & Enjingi Grasevina.
Most of my Christmas’ are spent in Maine at my parents. Their house is on an island in the Atlantic, just off the coast. Winters are both beautiful and brutal. No matter how cold the wind, or rough the seas the seafood remains ridiculously fresh. This year brought a special surprise; soft shell lobster. These freshly molted “bugs” are the unquestionable pinnacle of the lobster world; super sweet and tender. You wont find them far from where they are caught as they are much more vulnerable, to even gentle travel, than there hard shelled brethren. There is no reason to get fancy with them. In fact you can faintly read “steam only, serve with butter” on some of their shells. So what do you drink with succulent lobster in this arctic cold? Big Chard is the standard prescription but we have forced this for years, unless you are drinking properly aged top tier Burgundy the pairing rarely works. So Cabernet of course!
    The pairing logic: In a form this naked, lobster is best complemented by a soft, full bodied wine. We started with a decent feline scented Sauvignon Blanc from Chile, which the lobster made thin and astringent, so when I popped the two wines specifically selected for dinner, I did so with confidence.
    The first was Ivan Enjingi’s 2003 Grasevina (Italian Riesling) from the continental region of Croatia. It could be argued that Enjingi is the Andy Warhol of wine. The 2003 Grasevina “Krasna Berba" (late harvest) is a liquid contradiction. Dense and alcoholic but savory, mineralic and complex. Not old world, nor new, Enjingi is “Other Worldly”. Grasevina is typically drunk fresh but the good ones will age like the diamond hard Semillon of Australia’s Hunter Valley. We caught this one in its adolescence, starting to show its maturity but still brash and bouncy. With the lobster it was the sauce. Herbal and rich, the wine complements the lobster as if made for it, and vice versa.
    2007 Batic Rose of Cabernet Sauvignon – Vipava Valley, Slovenia. If Batic were a forge their Cabernet Sauvignon rose would be the Swiss army knife. It will appease the Cabernet narrow, fans of white zinfandel and hard core wine geeks. More texture than flavor, it is varietal cabernet without the color, tannins and smack. Musk, pepper and fruit are an unusual counterpoint to lobster but here it fits, actually accentuating the briny quality of the lobster. This is only a positive with the freshest of seafood. Ivan (wow I did not realize both producers share a first name) would love the combination, local, simply made and delicious.
    Not expected, not traditional but perfectly suited. Cold weather is great for red wine but if the food demands; as it does in coastal Maine. Whites and Roses can too be kings.
Tags: batic    cabernet sauvignon    croatia    enjingi    grasevina    slovenia   

 

A Day in the Golden Valley (part 2: Enjingi)

Posted 09 22 2008 by katherine    0 Comments
 
Gently sloped vineyards in Venje near Kutjevo.
Gently sloped vineyards in Venje near Kutjevo.
(continued from part 1)
    We have been told that Ivan Enjingi is a mercurial soul, but perhaps we’ve been immunized by our native habitat of New York — we find a generous, even gregarious man with twinkling eyes and a smooth cap of silvery hair waiting in his private cellar with a feast of cheeses and meats arranged on a barrel top. We sip Enjingi Zweigelt, a red with lovely aromatic herb, bayleaf, and red currant aromas until half of his pair of young enologists, Josipa Andrijanic, arrives. The other, Milan Budinski joins us as we wander through the fermentation rooms taking samples from the taps. It’s difficult to take notes on the hoof like this, but we taste Enjingi’s dry, late-harvest grasevina, a beautiful late-harvest Rhine riesling, about a dozen experiments and wines in development, and two real stand-outs:
enjingi
Enologists Milan Budinski and Josipa Andrijanic next to Ivan Enjingi.
    VENJE 2002 Named after the town where Enjingi is based, this is a blend of riesling, pinot gris, welschriesling, sauvignon blanc, and traminac that is made only in favorable years and is matured in barrique. It has medium body and an Old World flavor: slightly oxidized from barrique maturation, very subtle oak, minerals, plus dried pear and white peach. A red version of Venje is in the making, too, a blend of zweigelt, pinot noir, cabernet, merlot, and frankovka.
    PINOT CRNI 2000 This curious pinot noir has a heavy spritz in the bottle, and uncharacteristically high alcohol at over 15%, but it is an impressive wine. It is barrique matured and bottled unfiltered, with beetroot, violets, and sweet oak on the nose, plus vanilla, ripe black plums, and blackberries on the palate—medium-bodied with medium length. It’s been seven years since harvest, but I’d be interested to see this in another eight.
    After tasting, we drive up the hillside to see the new event space and guest house Ivan has built, which has a lovely view of the town of Venje, the Enjingi vineyards, and the Golden Valley beyond. The building next door is where Enjingi’s barrels are made—he has a team who craft his Slavonian oak barrels in the workshop here. We also examine a machine harvester that Ivan has adapted to suit his particular requirements. Here is a man who makes no apology for doing things his own way, and the results are a startling success. We linger, talking and sipping Enjingi grappa, into the early evening, when we are forced to sadly begin our two-and-a-half-hour drive back to Zagreb and, early tomorrow, our flight to New York.
    (We are happy to announce that we now carry our first wines made by Ivan Enjingi, see our wine shop.)
    Text and photos by Katherine Camargo, DWS / kcamargo@verizon.net
Tags: croatia    enjingi    katherine camargo's travels    katherine camargo''s travels    kutjevo    slavonia   

 

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