Cost of living crisis, be damned. Special occasions are special occasions, and sometimes wines are occasions in and of themselves. The wines of Damijan Podversic definitely fit that bill. If the words Radikon and Gravner mean anything to you, you’ll want to sit up and pay attention if you’re not yet across these.
Podversic learned conventional winemaking from his father growing up in Friuli, near the Slovenian border, but an encounter with Josko Gravner in 1985 changed everything. He abandoned his family business and set out on his own, purchasing an abandoned plot and working the old-fashioned way: organically and biodynamically, slow ferments, long macerations, extended ageing in wood and several years in bottle.
All four of these are wines for the chin-strokers, best decanted for some time and enjoyed in fat Burgundy glasses over the span of several hours as they come up to room temp. The 2020 Bianco Kaplja makes a creamy-textured virtue of chardonnay, friulano and malvasia, wedding stone-fruit aromatics with the savour of beeswax, ginger tea and woody herbs. For a more perfumed expression, look to the 2020 Friuliano Nekaj, an oily friulano heady with flavours of poached pears, tangerine peel and potpourri.
The dial gets turned right past 11 in the 2018 Ribolla Gialla, which has had some time to settle in bottle: chalky and chewy with dried nectarines, candied citrus peels, white flowers and salted caramel in the mix. What a wine. And while the region’s reds don’t often get much airtime, the 2020 Rosso Prelit is proof they probably should, a supple cab sauv/merlot blend that dovetails the best of both worlds, meshing red plums and mulberry jam with liquorice bullets and eucalyptus. Miniscule quantity, maximum reward. Go forth.