The UnCorker

Weird Wine of the Week- 1999 Movia Puro Rose

April 6, 2009 | In WINE REVIEWS | 1 Comment

This one is chock full of weirdness- is it Italian? Slovenian? The bottle says Collio(a D.O.C. in Friuli Venezia Guilia) though half of Movia’s vineyards are in the Brda province of Slovenia. This part of Europe has a mix of tradition and cultures that rival anywhere else in Europe, but it also has an energy unleashed after decades of centralized communist rule. Slovenia was, after all, part of Communist Yugoslavia, and Movia was one of the few privately owned estates in the whole country.

Movia produces a whole range of cool, funky wines biodynamically, but nothing as weird as the Puro. What, you might ask, the geographic weirdness aside, qualifies this as WWOW- we at The UnCorker can’t think of another bottle of bubbly that hits the market without being disgorged- but the Puro Rose is, and man, that’s weird- strange, unusual, and very difficult. You see the secondary fermentation in the bottle(see glossary- methode champenoise) is started by adding unfermented must from the new harvest along with some indigenous yeast. And why not disgorge at the winery, for instance as every producer of Champagne does? It seems the respectable thing to do, right? At Movia they believe disgorging robs the wine of flavor, and the Puro Rose sure has a bunch of that, and also claim that because it isn’t disgorged, its capacity to age is endless. We at The UnCorker have had some damn fine sparklers we didn’t have to disgorge ourselves, and as for the aging, well, only time will tell. We did like the novelty- one must store the bottle upside down for a day or two, then open it under water; a mass of goo is disgorged, the wine best decanted.

100% pinot nero(noir) spends 4 years in French oak barrique, and a furthur 32 months in bottle before release, it has a pale salmon color and scents of apples, apple cider and raspberries with some grapefruit on the palate- a little toast and yeast but not as much as we would have thought, some savory notes as well; cinnamon and a hint of nutmeg- a fine persistent bead helps give this a long pleasant finish- all pinot but unlike any brut rose we’ve ever had- less then 2000 bottles produced, well worth the search.