Sense of place: High-density wine-growing at Elanto Vineyard
The Burgundy-obsessed Australian wine-grower trying to emulate the nectar of that Pinot Eden is a well-worn trope. But it is one thing to mimic the cellar practices of your idols and quite another to dig down to the root of what makes for memorable, inimitable excellence. And another again to turn that concept into a reality.
Sandro Mosele is the mastermind and co-owner of Elanto, a 2019-planted southeast-facing site that is home to 10.6 hectares of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. The vines are trained 0.5m from the ground and planted at a density of 11,111 vines per hectare in rows spaced 1.2 metres x 0.75 metres. But this isn’t a numbers game; this is a far-reaching farming equation, as Sandro explains.
Grapes into wine: Quealy’s skin-contact Turbul range
This is an extremely interesting style of wine, and this range has turned out beautifully. Kevin McCarthy and Kathleen Quealy wrote the first chapter on skin-contact wine in Australia. Their son, Tom, took it up a level with the first release of Turbul Friulano a decade ago.
Now, drawing on their years of friendship and learning in northeast Italy, experimentation at home and organic viticulture on the Balnarring vineyard, they have released a groundbreaking Turbul quartet: Ribolla Gialla, Malvasia Istriana, Moscato Giallo and Friulano.
In this video, Tom explains the evolution of the project, the time and technique involved and how these delicious, thought-provoking wines reveal themselves at end of the process.
Sense of Place extra: The Parra gallega vine training system of Rías Baixas
The rain in Spain falls mostly on... Galicia. And that’s part of the reason why grapegrowers employ the parra gallega - the local riff on pergola-trained vines that makes use of the region’s abundant granite - in their lush Albariño vineyards.
I recently caught up with my friend Diego Ríos, the Chile-born winemaker at the helm at Bodegas Granbazán, at the iconic Finca Tremoedo just outside Cambados in the Val do Salnés subregion of Rías Baixas. In this short video, he explains the whys and wherefores of this system of canopy management.
Mind your language! Parmi les vignes (Among the vines)
Mind Your Language is a new Vininspo! series in which we look at words and phrases taken from European languages and universally adopted in the English-speaking wine world. This gives a guide to pronunciation, precise meaning and application. With a look at the roots of words (etymology), a flirtation with the formation of words (morphology) and a bit of linguistic tongue-in-cheekiness, this also gives a chance to keep expanding our web of understanding as we navigate the incredibly rich global winescape. Not only that, it will also go some way to increasing comprehension for English speakers discussing wine with people with another mother tongue.
This short episode looks at various French terms that arise in and around the vines.