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Miha Batic’s great-grandfather made wine on his property in the old Austria. His grandfather made wine on the same property in Italy; Miha’s father, in his turn, in Yugoslavia, and now Miha makes wine with him in Slovenia. As Miha explains it, the rulers and their rules don’t matter so much as the land in the Vipava Valley that has been cultivated by his family since 1592. For him, as he explains his family’s wine to 60 appreciative guests at a tasting dinner in New York, it always comes back to the land, to nature.     The Batic winery lies on 18 hectares of land on the westernmost edge of Slovenia, 15 miles from the Italian border. Grapes are planted on the slopes edging the valley, where the dry breeze of the Mediterrean climate meets the Alpine chill. The Vipava Valley is historically known for its white wines—and Batic makes ageworthy Pinot Gris, as well as Chardonnay and Sauvignon—but Old World–style reds are produced as well: Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Cabernet Sauvignon. Indigenous varieties are blended with international in the Batic cuvée Bonisimus: Pinela, Rebula (known as Ribolla a few kilometers away in Italy), Chardonnay, and Pinot Gris. Zelen and Vitovska are also grown.     Batic father and son are clear that it’s the growing that matters—not the cellar. Wines are made in the fields. Batic wines are farmed organically, and regional tradition places importance on farming by the lunar cycle: knowing the effect of the cycle on planting, growing, racking, or bottling. Such biodynamic principles may be trendy elsewhere, but Miha explains their uses for potato growing as much as grape growing, and one has the sense this is just old-fashioned farming, looking to nature rather than science for guidance. “Every step is a step back to our roots.”     These wines are not “modern”—they are true to the land and the grape, and are made only in successful vintages, and in tiny quantities (most in the low thousands of bottles). Old ways, now newly popular, are used in the cellar, too. The wines are fermented on wild yeast, and sulfur is used sparingly, if at all. Red and white wines alike see oak—usually in three- to five-year-old Slovenian barriques, but Batic will soon move back to larger, old Slovenian barrels. The wine is nicely balanced, with an Old World oak profile that settles beneath the spicy fruit of the Merlot, and adds a touch of oxidative interest to the velvety body of Bonisimus.     Borders may shift, as well as winemaking trends, but the wine world is slowly coming full circle, and the old ways of land and nature may emerge as the one cutting-edge method that carries us forward. Batic has waited for 400 years.     (text and photo by Katerine Camargo, Camargo Wine Support LLC ©2010)

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.

We're on a journey through the wine regions of Austria, Slovenia and Croatia. We're here in Austria right now and we have a lot to say (maybe too much), but not enough time to say it. So, enjoy watching our video describing what we've learned and found so far on our wine adventure.

--Stetson and Kristyn

We are about to enjoy a night of burgundy and food before we head off to Austria, Slovenia and Croatia. Our bags are packed and ready to go. I doubt we will be sleeping tonight, but that it is what the flight is for! We will try our best to blog about our journey daily, but if you don't hear from us...squawk!

A very special thanks to Frank and Zsuzsa of Blue Danube Wine Company who have made this trip possible. Words cannot describe how much we appreciate it.

--Stetson and Kristyn

This is what's called "Just In Time Delivery". When our guest Tamara Glavina, the wine maker of the top Slovenian winery Santomas, hopped on the plane to visit San Francisco for the first time in her life, our friends at IntoWineTV posted the video of the Santomas Big Red tasting on their web site. Then Roger and Cindy followed up with a delicious Slovenian wine maker dinner at Caffe Venezia in Berkeley.
What a nice way to welcome Tamara in California.     We always knew that the Santomas Big Red is a great wine but now our opinion has been confirmed by a group of expert tasters which gave it excellent ratings. Made from 100% Refosk, the Slovenian name for what Italians call Terlano and Croatians call Teran, it is easily recognizable by just looking at its deep purple color. The Big Red sports dark red cherry and black berry flavors. A good dose of acidity makes it an ideal wine to pair with many foods. But watch the show yourself and then pop a cork of this inexpensive beauty.          

Last Saturday, CAV hosted a tasting of Slovenian wines. Naturally, such a tasting wouldn't be proper without Frank Dietrich from Blue Danube Wine in attendance to point out the various facets of the extremely long list of wines. In case you missed it, stay up to date at the News & Events section on this site as well as my twits that I write about wines and events in San Francisco.     And what it list it was, drifting from whites to reds, to desserts. It showed that not only is Emil able to somehow talk these very small producers in to exporting, but also that Slovenia is really producing a great wealth of wines these days. Starting with such wines as the Guerila Pinela those in attendance wandered in to the Batič Cabernet Franc and Batič Rosso 2005 (which I hadn't tasted previously, but found to be one of my new favorite vintages). Then it was off to the bolder reds such as Santomas Big Red and Santomas Antonius to experience the great, full-bodied Refošk that the Slovenes on the coast are producing. Closing all of this was a taste of the Batič Valentino which is a delightful, nutty dessert wine.     It looked to me that all in attendance were really enjoying exploring these wines. And while this was merely a week long tasting stretch, the good news is that CAV regularly stocks these wines as well as a great number of Croatian wines to enjoy anytime. While it can get a big packed in the evening due to popularity, CAV is a good place to check out anytime, since they always put together interesting wine lists.

These days wine blogs are almost passé, Twitter is on the go, Wine TV is in, and social wine sites mushroom. Witness the many new entries in this field. I was made aware of yet another social site called IntoWine.com with a wine tasting TV section build in when its founder Brad Prescott contacted us. He was planning to produce a future segment on "Wines from Strange Places". Well, that sounded a little better than the usual "Weird Wines of the World" so we complied and offered a selection of our wines from Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia to be put through the ringer by an illustrious tasting panel at an equally illustrious place, namely the Incanto Restaurant in San Francisco.          The first episode from this shooting has been posted and you can watch it here. It features a wine made by one of my favorite Slovenian producers, master vintner Franci Cvetko of the Kogl estate in the North-Eastern Podravje wine region. It's a Saemling (AKA Scheurebe) mainly found in Germany in a fruity style and sometimes in Austria as a dessert wine. In the hands of Franci Cvetko it joins his Mea Culpa line-up of elegant dry white wines with a rather filigrane (filigree) structure and subtle flinty fruit.

[This trip was taken in early May. It was organized by an importer for whom my husband is a consultant.]     The three of us wind through the streets of Ptuj in the car, past the hilltop castle, a monastery, and countless unknown wonders. We won't see anything in Slovenia's oldest town (mentioned by Tacitus in AD 69) except Slovenia's oldest wine cellar, Ptujska Klet, which can be traced back to the year 1239. When we arrive, we are given first the tourist treatment, then the behind-the-scenes tour. As tourists, we walk through a cold cellar beneath the visitor center and tasting rooms, where there are rows of oval wooden barrels taller than I am, rich dark-chocolate wood trimmed in forest green, with picturesque scenes of winemaking carved (recently) on the barrel heads. We also see the famous wine archive, where wines dating back to 1917 are stored, recorked every twelve years. Tito drew wines from this archive, and anyone fairly young can still buy a wine from their birth year, back to at least the 1950s, in the shop next to the tasting rooms. There we spot a wine from my husband's birth year--a welschriesling from 1959--for 600 euros. (Can it possibly still be drinkable?) I should state right now that Ptujska Klet's wines are not yet available in the U.S.--the notes below are just a tease.     In the tasting room, we are joined by Bojan Kobal, the enthusiastic and amiable thirty-year-old enologist, who takes us through the lineup. Ptujska Klet is clean and modern in its winemaking. The semi-cooperative operation buys from 140 growers. Importantly, it can afford to select the best fruit, all picked by hand and grown under a program of restricted chemical use prescribed by the winery. This is the Maribor region of Slovenia, where wine production is 80% white, of which some 50% is welschriesling. Our later walk through the working cellars, with numerous stops for barrel and tank samples, suggests much experimentation going on here; on the higher end (the Nobl line), the production is quite small, at 600 cases or so. Of the whites tasted upstairs, the most interesting are:     "Noblesse," a rumeni muskat (yellow muscat) with a beautiful muscat nose, off-dry and fairly simple, but with a lingering perfume.     "Nobl" Cuvee 2005, of traminer, chardonnay, and sauvignon blanc--a tank sample with a long finish and a layer of sweet barrique oak that will mellow after bottling.     "Nobl" 2005 Traminer (last year's Slovenian dry wine champion), an oily, almost-full body and honeyed mineral flavor, with slight lychee/floral notes--good character and depth. For this wine, half the grapes were raisined at picking, and the halves were fermented separately, then blended.     Red wines are only 15% or so of the winery's production. We taste a few pale pinots and a couple of blaufrankisch, of which the 2004, with a red plum and rosehip nose and an earthy, black-pepper finish is most pleasant. We taste a more impressive sample in the cellar, though, from a barrel that will be bottled in '09.     The tourist complex winds into the rest of the cellars, which extend beneath the city streets for blocks and bring us up beneath the winery a five-minute walk across town. We pass more giant oval barrels and barriques, plus an aisle of glass-lined concrete tanks, and row upon row of stainless steel tanks of various sizes, from which we taste another dozen samples, including a couple of pinot noirs with promise (more extract than those mentioned above), a sweet muscat and an excellent sweet German riesling. It's cold down here--I can see my breath as we examine thousands of bottles cellared in square brick bins on the floor, all coated in thick black mold, even the fairly recent vintages of the 90s.     We return with out host, Marko, to his home in central Slovenia, for a homemade lunch of light chicken broth with short, straight noodles; green salad dressed in local pumpkin seed oil; veal in a bath of savory brown gravy, accompanied by sour cream and blackcurrant jam; and marvelous, billowing pillows of layered dumpling dough filled with a mild, ricotta-like cheese. Thus fortified, we depart by car for Istria.

This blog entry is a shameless plug for a guided tour through Slovenia's wine regions, commencing on October 10 to 18 or on a second date, November 7 to 15, 2008.     If you have never been to Slovenia this is your chance to visit her vineyards in style. Just take a look at this gorgeous brochure and you'll see that Slovenia could be considered the Promised Land - if not of milk and honey then of excellent wine and gourmet food. This tour is not cheap but worth it if you can shell out $7,380 PLUS airfare. At least you don't have to bring some change to buy a glass of wine. Enjoy your trip!     Let me just add that I had the good fortune to travel through Slovenia's wine country with Emil Gaspari, our importer friend and owner of Slovenian Premium Wines. Emil knows and loves his home country and he was a superb guide to the estates of his portfolio. What a pleasant and informative way to get to know the wine makers and their terroir.

Alder over at Vinography just wrote a great article summing up the merits of a number of the Slovenian wines we carry. Some of his favorites included, 2005 Kogl "Mea Culpa", 1999 Batić Reserve Pinot Gris, and 2004 Batić Pinot Gris Riserva. He went on to elicit, "Any wine lover who enjoys white wines I strongly urge to seek out some Slovenian wine and give it a try." Don't take our word for it though and read his entire article. It's a great summation of the Slovenian wine industry and the very high quality wines that they are producing and we are happy to import.     Probably the only thing we'd add is that Slovenian is not just about the whites. There are a great many reds that we feel warrant a lingering, enjoyable tasting.

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