2006 Movia "Gredic" Tocai Friuliano, Brda, Slovenia
Friuli, just to be clear, sits at the northeastern edge of Italy. The region surrounds the ancient city of Trieste, which balances on the tip-top of the Adriatic Sea. In the 1960s, Mario Schiopetto, whose name is about as Italian as you can find, imported German winemaking techniques to create the “super whites” that define the modern Italian style: clean, fruity, refreshing. I know where Friuli is; I’ve passed through Trieste on my way to Croatia.
So knowing all that, you might wonder why I picked a Slovenian wine for this edition of Wine Blogging Wednesday, the monthly Internet-wide tasting event that this month asked us to find Friuli whites.
Borders are a funny thing. We can hope that Italy’s borders will remain stable for a long time, since wars tend to be the events that move them, but not that long ago surveyors needed to decide where Italy ended and other countries began. Working in the hills that straddle Collio, an Italian wine region, and Brda, a Slovenian one, some engineer had to make a long series of decisions about which ground belonged to which country. And one of those decisions put the line through a vineyard owned by the Kristancic family, then and now the proprietors of the Movia estate. So some — maybe all — of the grapes in my bottle of Slovenian wine are actually from Italy.
That may be the most mild of the stories surrounding Movia, today the property of the charismatic and passionate Ales Kristancic. I’ve heard that Movia, alone in Slovenia, stayed private under Tito’s Communist rule because Ales’s father or grandfather was a friend of Tito’s. To get around the problem of a privately owned winery, Tito bought up all of Movia’s inventory each year. I’ve heard that American presidents have wandered through the vineyard.
And then you get to the cellar. The standard (and useless) definition of biodynamic viticulture is “organic plus.” Movia sometimes seems like “biodynamic plus.” I’ve heard that Ales records his fermenting yeast and plays their own song back to them. He uses the atmospheric pressure of the new moon to clarify his wines. He leaves some of his whites in Slovenian oak barrels and on their lees, the dead yeast cells that drop from the wine during fermentation, for 2 years. He ages his reds for 3 to 7 years.
Clearly, Ales flouts modern winemaking. But he also makes some killer wines. I have tasted a number of them, either at wine dinners or at Jack and Joanne’s house. I have never been disappointed.
His 2006 Gredic ($19), a well-balanced Tocai Friuliano, has light, buoyant aromas of honey and flowers, wax and cheese. It spanks your palate with searing acidity but then kisses the pain away with rich flavors of peach and wax. And if you ask Jack, who drinks them often, this is the least of Movia’s wines. If you ever get the chance to order a bottle of Movia wine, do so.
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