Can a wine made with the heirloom savignon blanc ancestor “Fie Gris” take on a world class Sancerre?  What would happen if you took one of uber-importer Kermit Lynch’s more off-the-wall discoveries and faced it off against a classic, famous appellation wine in the same price range?   Does it hold up?  Is there any compelling evidence that a wine-drinker – when given the choice – should choose to go weird?

Well, in general we think so.  That’s why we spend so much time flirting around the edges of what’s available in the US wine market – partly out of boredom, but also because there is a lot of value lurking off in the shadows.

Fie Gris vines were discovered in Tourraine and eslewhere in the southern Loire and are believed to be the ancestors – the pre-Phylloxera ancestors! – of savignon blanc.  This sounds so promising right from the get-go.   After all, it was Phylloxera that wiped out so many strains of heirloom grapes throughout Europe and forced growers onto mostly the same rootstocks and clone varieties.

The beauty of the Fie Gris is that it tastes really different.  You see  things like green pepper in people’s tasting notes – but it doesn’t always come across on the palate.   Especially in savignon blancs – which tend to have strong citrus flavors that obscure such subtleties. You may be a super-taster and be able to  identify the precise genus and species of each fruit, twig, nut, and stone that you are using as a tasting metaphor. You may have a normal palate but have trained yourselves – master sommellier style-  to identify and classify the wines – but let’s face it, tasting notes are often a stretch.   According to Jamie Goode’s excellent book “The Science of Wine”, most of us pick up about four flavors (max!) in anything we’re tasting, and if you count grapes as one of those, then that leaves you with three.  But then a wine comes along and you think – holy bejezzus.. now I get what these tiresome bastards mean when they say a wine tastes like [insert flowery tasting note reference here.]

Here’s a wine that  is really different and pronounced in a way that immediately hits your nose and palatte – strong green pepper and spice – think jalapeno, or tomatillo.  A decided lack of citrusy flavor, but with some other mysterious source of refreshing acidity.  This is what we want our Sancerre’s to be, really.    Vegetal, earthy – but incredibly light, spicy, and minerally.   And avoiding the grapefruit-style flavour profiles makes these fun and unusual flavor profiles so much easier to discover. What a perfect match for seafood this was.  Mario Batali has claimed that his secret is basically adding acid and spice to simple Italian dishes.  Well, this is a wine that does that very thing – which makes it a fantastic accompaniment to simple roasted or grilled fish.

Just to prove our point, we immediately opened a bottle of Lucien Crochet’s 2007 Sancerre, a major name producer which retailed at the exact same price point – $23 – to compare.     Tight, lean, and steely.   Compared to the Fie Gris, the aromatics were buried and calling flavor notes out was more an act of faith and imagination than sensory perception.   And Crochet is considered a bargain in Sancerre.   It only goes to show you that when in doubt, go weird.

Welcome to the Ontario’s Niagara region – a thin isthmus between two great lakes about an hour and a half south of Toronto, extending down below the falls on both sides of the border. It’s kinda like the Florida of Canada, although the closest big city to these vineyards is the famously inclimate American city of Buffalo, New York – which is due south, just to put things into perspective. In wine circles, this region is best know for being home to Inniskillen, which is world renown for it’s ice wines. But word of the Pinot Noir grown here, particularly on the US side in the AVA called “Niagara Escarpment” is starting to leak. The truth is that Lake Ontario provides a semi-maritime effect and creates favorable growing conditions for the problem child, Pinot Noir. Some would say Burgundian conditions, but wine marketers have been known to spin those sorts of comparisons to death so hard to say how true that is. One thing we know for sure is that they don’t get the Lake Erie effect – which is responsible for the piles of snow whipping off the lake that have kept Buffalo from being a viticultural hotspot. It’s not clear where DA wines are sourcing their fruit – the website is pretty clear that things are inspired by “Dan’s Travels” – but apparently it’s in Ontario somewhere.

To say that Dan Ackroyd Wines is all over the place in terms of it’s product offering is no understatement. Umm.. have you seen the Crystal Head vodka he’s merchandising? Complete with a pirate mythology and mystical powers ascribed to the macabre packaging. This seems a strange counterpart to his award winning liquid gold, the Vidal Ice Wine. Then there’s Dan’s whole Sonoma County line, which is actually made by DeLoach. Is this whole effort a cynical attempt to license one man’s dopey comic aura and milk it for all it is worth? or is it really about the wine? That we’re not sure of, but it’s peaked our interest in Niagara pinot and now we can’t wait to get our hands on some of the bottles we’ve heard about such as those from Warm Lake Estate, in Lockport NY.

There are only two viticultural appellations on the island of Mallorca, D.O. Binissalem Mallorca and D.O. Plà (Pla i Levant), and AN is not in either one of them. This winery was started on a shoestring in 1994, when Cabernet Savignon was in fashion amongst the Priorat set (and Priorat was where winemaker Francesc Grimalt cut his teeth). Callet grapes were easy to find and cheap on the island, but it took courage to think about using them. The winemakers wanted old vines and something expressive of the local terroir, however, so they were determined to work with it. Long cultivated throughout Mallorca, Callet took a back seat to it’s more stately indigineous counterpart, Manto Negro. It’s a problematic grape to vinify, with it’s weak color, low acidity and sugar. Coaxing an extracted flavor-bomb out of this stuff is no small feat. And since most Callet vines are left to reproduce sexually on Majorca, not clonally (which is weird enough in this day and age) there are 1000s of strains of the grape – making the winemakers job that much more difficult. There wasn’t a whole lot of knowledge of the varietal in oenological circles when these guys started – and they’ve done a lot of experimenting with long macerations and extended exposure to oxygen. In fact, this very bottle went back into the cement tanks after it’s time in barriques for two months prior to bottling. They had been gradually upping the percentage of the Callet used in their wines until 1999, when they managed to pull off a 100% Callet. (The 2004 is 95% Callet- buttressed with 5% Manto Negro and Fogoneu.)

Since the days of the vagabonding Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, Mallorcan wines have been compared to those of Italy rather than Spain. The analogy holds – this is like something excellent from you might find by a careful Italian winemaker working with indiginous grapes, such as Sicily’s Arianna Occhipinti. The wine is medium weight, and the light that filters through it betrays the potent concentration of flavor. Lifted, bright red fruit qualities on the nose. Lingering finish with vanilla, wild spicy notes. Firm acidity combined with integrated tannins means this lively, finessed wine pairs with almost anything. It’s $45 to go for the full weirdness of the AN (with it’s high percentage of Callet), but you can drink the excellent AN/2 – which is blended with a substantial amount of Syrah but still feels wild and unique – for about half of that.

Coenobium is latin; in this sense it refers to communal monasticism, or cenobitic living. This blend of malvasia, grecchetto, verdicchio and trebbiano is an organically produced beauty from the Lazio hills, north of Rome, and qualifies as WWOW for a bunch of reasons.

The first and most obvious being the producers themselves; nuns- that’s right, sisters. Living cenobitically, as it were. Lives given over to prayer, worship and communal labor. Living modestly on the produce they can grow, or in this case, vinify.

If we UnCorker’s had a time machine(and what we wouldn’t give for that) we could go back to a time long ago when religious orders kept viticulture alive. As you’ve read in these pages, after the fall of the Roman Empire, during the dark ages, it was the church that kept all that the Roman’s had learned about viticulture alive. Today, we don’t think twice about drinking beer made by Belgian Trappists, but wine made by nuns- weird.

Another weird bit; viticulturally, at least until very recently, Lazio was considered a backwater- Frascati and Est! Est! Est! dominate the landscape. Overcropped, carelessly made oceans of the stuff guzzled in the trattorias of Rome. And why not? The biggest market in Italy is just down the road, willing to drink just about anything, so long as its cheap, which didn’t give producers much of an incentive to make quality, characterful wines.

That’s been changing with the likes of Sergio Mottura, Casale del Giglio and Colle Picchioni, but these are big time players- trying to wipe the tarnish off of Lazio’s image, make names for their estates, and make money- not so the Suore Cistercensi, whose production is relatively tiny, and who keep a decidedly low profile. Very weird indeed in this day and age.

Like their middle-age forebears, the sisters make their wine organically, without fining or filtering. Giampiero Bea(Paolo’s son) has been the viticulturist responsible for production, so its easy to see the influence of Neal Rosenthal, the wines importer/distributor in this. An early and influential supporter of natural, traditional winemaking, Rosenthal introduced Bea’s wine to America, and the Bea style is evident in Coenobium, and even more so in Coenobium Rusticum. A good long soak with the skins gives this wine a complex personality; a rich perfume of honeysuckle, green apples, custard apples, apple cider and orange blossom give way to a rich golden wine that looks more like something commonly seen out of Friuli these days. Mineral driven, it is surprisingly clean on the palate-

The Rusticum is the same blend of grapes from the same vineyards, but in this case Giampiero Bea convinced the sisters to give a small batch an even more extended soak, and boy is this reminescent of Bea’s famous Santa Chiara- more orange then gold, rich scents of apples again(close your eyes, you’re in a beautiful orchard on a warm fall day) big and almost musky on the palate, this is the opposite of how even Roman’s have considered the state of viticulture in Lazio.

Another piece of weirdness- you can pick up a botlle of Coenobium for around $20, cuz the sisters, they’re not in this for the fame of money.

The Scholium Project is Abe’s brainchild, and now something of a consortium of like-minded wine weirdos. They take this non-interventionist winemaking thing just about as far as it can go. The wine is bottled when it is ready, even if the fermentation stalls and doesn’t manage to restart itself for months on end. When it comes to yeasts – they are “grateful spectators” – introducing and inoculating nothing. It’s ambient microbes only, that is to say the little critters that ride in on the wind are enough for these purists. Each of the wines they bottle are named in a literary fashion (you know… with greek words and stuff like that) and truly have a story behind them – which is the most fun aspect of the Scholium Project. The website makes great reading – as the provenance and story of each type of wine is there to read about. We love the transparency of this approach – and wish all wines were marketed this way. Of course, the flip side of this is inconsistency. It’s hard to predict what you’ll get when you buy a Scholium Project wine, but we’d guess that Abe would claim the inconsistency is nature’s doing. The RiqueWihr is the winery’s first dabbling with gewurz – which they handled in characteristically oddball fashion by pressing it and macerating it on top of the verdeho skins used for another wine. Use of SO2 is allowed here – and helps control the oxidization and stop the malolactic fermentation. The overall effort comes in at a blistering 15.8% alcohol.

The wine is plush, odd, and challenging. Appearance is greenish hay in color, medium bodied. Initially it smells like an Aveda Store – eucalyptus, pine, petrol/rubber, minerals, grass. Very medicinal. As it warms, saturated tropical fruit aromas emerge… pineapple, banana mainly – but not really as much as we’d expect from a gewurtz. The flavor is soft and ripe through the mid-palate but with a finish that’s dry and spicy, and hot butane from the alcohol. There’s a little oxidation going on, perhaps. Such an odd tincture of tropical fruit and medicinal herbs – almost asking to be swabbed on the skin with cotton balls. The use of small port bottles reinforces this feeling, more suggestive of the packaging for a depression-era miracle cure-all than a table wine. Underlying all of this is a subtle but present mushroomy, loamy funk. We think Abe has succeeded in making us taste the bacteria, the yeast, the wine… not just the fruit. This is one strange outing, but we’re willing to go along on the ride. Finally, there’s the price – $33 for a short, stubby 500ml bottle – extending the discomfort to the wallet. Wines can be hand-made and loved to death in their production – but the price must ultimately be justified by the flavor. After all, $33 per half liter gets us pretty close to some fine white wine territory – like Montrachet or great Alsatian Pinot Gris. We’re split on whether we like the wine or just the idea of the wine – and this high price forces us to ruminate on that point. But for now, we’ll accept Abe’s genius as a matter of faith and understand that judging an iconoclast like this should happen over the course of a career, not based on an individual effort. So do with Abe’s wines exactly like you would do if Frank Lloyd Wright personally designed you a summer home full of edgy angles, uncomfortable furniture and low ceilings – shut up and pay.

At first glance, you might be thinking, “what in the world is weird about another Cali Zin?” After all, we know that California produces veritable oceans of the stuff- from the Central Valley to the Napa Valley.   Drank by the miners back in gold rush days, Zinfandel was in decline until the mid 1980’s when the ‘craze’ for ‘white’ zinfandel spread like a blight on the land. While its popularity declined, zinfandel properly vinified took off with cult producers like Turley demanding huge sums for its polished single vineyard zins.

Still to the question of why the Coturri zin is weird, which we wish it wasn’t- Oh God, how we wish it wasn’t weird at all. We at The UnCorker fervently hope to one day be able to consider this a delicious but un-weird wine- common even, which it certainly is not. Let us consider the ways. Its organic- and yes, lots of Cali wine is organic, but the Coturri folks put the O in organic. No SO2, no inoculation with sulfites, no yeast cultures, no use of concentrates to boost sweetness(yes, people do that all the time in California), no added water, acids, or other manipulation of the wine, all of which can be done in a wine deemed ‘organic’. The Coturri winery is a small production family run outfit- 3rd and 4th generation Coturri’s manage the vineyards, pick the grapes, and unlike just about everyone else, make the wine- no consultants, no lab technicians,  just farmers making wine.

Their wine-making processes are all gentle, all-natural small production methods; a small basket press is all they have- oh so gentle compared to the huge modern horizontal press. Open redwood fermentation tanks are covered with clean cloth and punched down by hand. The fermentation takes place over ten days to two weeks using ambient yeast with no effort at temperature control. Coturri has their own cooperage, using reconditioned old barrels to make 60 gallon barrels- weirdly small- then they constantly rack the wine, moving from barrel to barrel, finally bottling the wine unfiltered and unfined by hand, even hand labeling the bottles. A huge task mitigated by the fact that the entire production of this wine is tiny. 350 cases puny.

Oh yeah, now for the real weirdness; this zin is made from botrytised grapes and comes in at 16.2% abv. Now I know just last week, we UnCorkers were complaining about monstrous wines, but this isn’t one of those- this stuff is pure, natural wine goodness. Dark and rich, beguiling aromas of dark, sweet fruit waft from the glass- tons of glycerin coat the palate. There are exotic savory spices, raisins and some odd notes of apricot and cantalope melon. It’s a bit porty in that way that screams for blue cheese(just like a Sauterne), and weirdly, the Coturri family were kind enough to sell this for less then $25.

We poured and raised our glasses all toasting ‘Breaky Bottom’, and we were, well, fairly impressed; this was real methode champenoise wine- straw yellow, green highlights with apples, pears,  hazelnut and a yeasty finish. Not a fine Champagne, or Franciacortia- but lets face it, our expectations weren’t exactly high either. So maybe this piece shouldn’t be a WWOW, maybe it should be a Weird Wine Region piece. We decided to look into the British wine scene(at least as best we could, there are no English wines imported to the States) and it seems that in England, there is a confluence of events and trends that are rapidly changing the agriculture of Southern England.

As a wine region, Southern England is a blank slate, one where modern viticulture, climatic trends( i.e., global warming) and geology all swirl around and play out. In Europe, viticulture was historically dictated by the grape varieties one found locally, as well as tradition, ultimately codified by  laws and systems; the AOC, DOC, etc, etc. The new world might not have had native vitis viniferia, but it had immigrants from the old world bringing their familiar grapes.  Being completely free of the moorings of law and tradition, the English are free to pick and choose whatever grapes they feel have a chance to thrive- in the case of Breaky Bottom, it’s seyval blanc, a early-ripening, productive white grape- a weird french hybrid in itself, that thrives in cool climates. With some non-viniferia genes, it is outlawed in the EU for quality wine production.  Breaky Bottom started planting it in 1974, and it is the most widely planted grape in England. When Breaky Bottom got started in 1974, there were only 12 commercial wineries in Britain, many of them dedicated to the production of fruit wines-now, according to various sources, there are no fewer then 350. Many of these are moving away from seyval blanc, for reasons of taste- apparently it is good for sparklers, but not much else. So, besides the desire to produce still wines, the Brits, ever status seeking, want some prestige and respect- so they are turning to chardonnay. Modern viticulture, in tandem with global climate change may help English winemakers thrive; using modern scientific techniques, the best earliest ripening clones can be paired, using global positioning systems (GPS) to the best sites. Things can be tried and abandoned with relative ease- no rules, no regulations- they are out to see how far you can get with money and science.

Those white cliffs of Dover, why they’re made up of the same submerged basin of clay and chalky limestone, ancient oyster beds, called Kimmeridgian, that gives chardonnay its unique character in Chablis and Champagne, and extends well up into southern England, so why not? As the world warms, their vineyards will thrive- as heat destroys the razors-edge acidity and typicity of Champagne and Chablis, wine lovers will beat down those British doors demanding their wine.

So its possible that someday we’ll eat oysters and drink a crisp, appely, mineral driven chardonnay from the south of England- but for now, we’ll have to stick with Chablis.

The wine is 100% Monastrell grown on old, low yielding vines still planted on native root-stock… which is very, wonderfully weird given the havoc that phylloxera reaped elsewhere in this region. The wine is vinified in “traditional ways” – and aged exclusively in old oak barrels and in bottle. Now keep in mind that “old oak” is also referred to as neutral oak, meaning that it doesn’t impart that much in terms of flavor components into the wine unless someone is stripping down the wood and re-toasting it alot. Therefore the wine really has only one purpose in those old, mellow barrels, and that’s getting itself oxygenated – which is oak’s other great role in the winemaking process. And just how old are we talking here? Because oak isn’t easy to keep sterilized – which over time introduces all kinds of wonderful fungal and bacterial possibilties into the equation.

Here is the argument part of the post. The crux. Old style winemaking leads to flaws. Oxidation. Reduction. Brettanomyces. TCA (“cork” taint) are among the most common. And all of these flaws have huge impact on flavor – often reducing any talk of terroir to marketing oriented fantasy. But depending on the intensity of those flaws and the way those flaws combine with one another, it can be a formula for a distinctive and even wonderful wine drinking experience. Immediately on the nose it’s apparent that the Raspay Reserva ‘Brut’ has a strong, oxidative quality. Given it’s slightly dull, brick-red hue it’s a bit of shock to get such a prounounced sherry-like first whiff. Then the flavor is hard to place – almost sweet, but not quite. A lot of secondary aromas -such as a black, ripe quality that would be called stewed or raisiny in lesser wines, but comes across as ripasso-like here. With some time open and after some food (we had spicy sausage & roasted tomato), comes this lingering briary fruit quality (blackberry, cassis) and a strong cocoa’d finish. The wine feels very complete and balanced, with integrated tannins and even a sweet-tart acidity showing. Given that we paid $23 for this, who is complaining? At this price point – too high to be a daily drinker and too low to make big demands- one can really only ask one thing from a wine… don’t bore me. This one is weird, wonderful, and packs an incredible punch for the price.

So, some mad genius at Re Manfredi looked around Mount Vulture and saw something maybe nobody else had even considered; that the potential for northern white grapes was huge, and that taking a chance might pay off. And why not? German grapes have thrived in the Alto Adige for centuries; the Adige valley is searingly hot during the day, but the nights, nice and cool. As you have read in these pages, the Aglianico in Basilicata is one of the latest harvested grapes in all of Italy- the slopes of Mt. Vulture have vineyards planted up to 800 meters, giving a huge temperature differential between day and night. Traditionally, what white grapes there are in Basilicata are the ubiquitous malvasia and moscato, dry and sweet, still and sparkling, and with the rare exception, uninspiring, and not much exported.

Making this Basilicta Bianco both weird and exceptional- these northern varieties, muller thurgau and traminer( a less aromatic varient of gewuztraminer) thrive in the volcanic soils of Vulture- planted at 400 meters, they get loads of sun and heat, and enough cool night air to allow them to ripen fully without becoming flabby and ridiculous- certainly a risk with these grapes at this latitude.

The 2006 Basilicata from Re Manfredi jumps right out of the glass with tropical fruit; pineapple, grapefuit, a tinge of white peach, surely the Muller making its presence known. A rich straw gold, this wine does not lack for body- its honeyed richness is balanced by a cleansing acidity and a bit of smoky minerality you’d expect from a wine grown on Mt. Vulture. Delicious stuff to pair with seafood, soft cheese or as an apertif.

Such an unexpected treat- sheer weird genius from Re Manfredi.

Traditionally, viticulture in the Canary Islands was focused on sweet wines, often called Malmsey, for export; Shakespeare called it “an absolutely penetrating wine,” in Henry IV. Robert Louis Stevenson writes that “a little good canary will comfort me the heart of it.” The Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV, drowned in a barrel of Malmsey in 1478. With modern tastes turning from sweet wines, vintners in the Canaries had mostly focused on crappy mediocre dry wines for the tourist trade, and almost none of their production was exported anywhere. The last decade has seen some big changes, modernization, and the number of denominated zones(do’s) making wine of real character. Lanzarote, the island farthest east is where our WWOW hails from. It is on the forefront of the Canaries wine revolution, and Bodegas los Bermejo is one leading the charge.

Viticulture on the islands is difficult; the winds are legendary, driving the weaker of the population barking mad, and driving wineries to dig zocos, little half craters for each indivdual vine- And the soil, wow, black volcanic pomice covers most of Lanzarote- over a half of the island was covered by ten feet of black lava in the 18th century. This has had its benefits; phlyoxera never got a foothold, the vines roots go deep into the soil, the volcanic pomice holds water and air, important since rain and water is scarce.

Malvasia is more of a family of grapes then a single identity, though there are usually some commonalities, for instance they all tend to be on the aromatic side, orange blossoms, peach, flowers-generous, even when bone dry. The NV Bermejo lacks that aromaticity-rather a honeyed, leesy nose is found, with a rich color to match. And boy is this bone dry- Brut Nature indeed(3 grams of residual sugar max per liter, and no dosage) Sherry and hazelnut dominate the palate, with a fine, almost sharp, persistant bead that reinforces that sense of dryness-Not our favorite sparkler, but pretty weird and unusual stuff.