Specogna gets Surreal
Our Friulian odysea finishes at Specogna - biodynamic and completely surreal. By Kate
The afternoon was like a hot shroud and staying awake was a struggle. Time for the final visit though, a too short drive away through the high hills, cool green still in the relentless sun.
We were greeted at Specogna by Christian, 23-year-old son of the proprietor; a slim, stylish young man who brimmed with slightly over-enthusiastic sincerity but managed to come across as charming none the less. His eccentric English helped enormously.
It was to be a vineyard visit first, so we trooped somewhat reluctantly down the short drive to stand exposed to the full glare of the sun, looking out over the amphitheatre of hills garlanded with vines stretching into the distance, the furthest being in Slovenia, a mere kilometre away.
Specogna was started in 1963 when his grandfather bought his first plot of land here after moving to Switzerland
All their holdings are on the Rocca Bernarda and Rosazzo hills in the Colli Orientali DOC where soils tend towards the clay, lime and sandstone. Christian explained that they have a very particular microclimate which allows them to leave their grapes to mature for much longer than many others in Friuli .
He also spoke of the fact that they have many older vines, some dating to 1916 and 1920, which they treasure and nurture. He started to speak about biodynamic viticulture which was of great interest, but the group had begun to slowly separate from him, drawn to a patch of shade by a high wall below the winery. Eventually, he held forth alone in the spotlight of the sun while we huddled there, desperate for cool.
The retreat of his audience dimmed the dedication to his speech not a jot. He clearly is very passionate about working naturally which is to be applauded and encouraged, but his extreme youth (and he looks even younger than 23), did make the whole scene somehow slightly incongruous. The very small but impressively vocal grey kitten shrieking piteously at us from the top of the wall throughout the speech did not do much to help with establishing an air of gravitas either.
We learned that they currently only farm about 30% of their vineyards bio-dynamically, but the plan is to eventually reach 100 percent. For the remaining 70%, organic methods are now followed. It is more hands-on work, of course, but they think it is worth the effort.
“Every plant is different and only the eyes of the person can understand this,” Christian explained.
We all speedily revived ourselves when he suggested it was time to have a look at the winery and maturation cellar. The 18 degrees of the latter was very heaven and I warmly received his explanation of how they tend to go for extended skin maceration in whites and try work as naturally as possible, with natural yeasts, minimal SO2 and the use of cooler temperatures to control things.
They do not want or encourage malolactic fermentation and they also use inert gases as protection against oxygen. There were a range of barrel sizes in the cellar and as they never look for overt flavours the barrels are neither all new nor all oak. They are starting to experiment with cherry and acacia, which is of course traditional both in this region and just over the border in Slovenia
Christian was perhaps most excited though about a single barrel of extreme Pinot Grigio romate which is macerated on the skins for an extraordinary 30 days. At the moment, this is just made for friends and family, but maybe, just maybe, he will be persuaded to make it commercially in the future.
“For you, my special friends, we make a tasting of this wine today” he announced flamboyantly, drawing a sample from the barrel. It emerged, dusky rose in colour, more like a pale red than a rose even.
Off to the tasting room which felt close and airless after the relatively crisp cellar. We started with a Ribollo Gialla, a grape which can be traced back to 1135 in the region. It is much prized for its acidity, elegant minerality and the fact that, even when left in the vineyards for an extended time, it does not tend to get too high in sugar.
2009 Ribollo Gialla
Excellent fresh acidity with some fresh chopped herbs, fresh nuts and smoky minerality. It has a lovely balance of texture and freshness. Complex and very delicious to drink.
2009 Fruilano
2006 Fruilano
As above, but with a richer, honeyed note underlying the citrus and nut. Also excellent length and fresh, spicy finish. Christian explains that maceration on the skins gives a touch of tannin to the whites, which helps to prevent oxidation.
Apparently, they say in Friuli that you never go wrong when you match Fruilano with food.
“It can stay with a lot of different things. Can be good with some Asian spices as well," Christians assures us.
Both of the above are truly lovely – vibrant and complex and I think, a definite for the Green & Blue list this summer. Not cheap, but worth it.
2009 Blanc de Cuar – Fruilano.
This wine is a blend of the 20 different Fruilano’s from 20 different wineries in zone. In 2008, the young wine makers here decided to put away their jealousies and to make a wine which is a great representation of their region and the emerging new generation.
“Me, I am very proud of this wine,” says Christian as gravely as someone with his obvious flair for the dramatic can ever muster.
It was his idea, but getting the 20 people together was not easy, apparently.
“In the beginning the older generation was not with us but now the old men say we cannot imagine for the quality but most of all for the fact that we are able to continue this project for three, four years. The most difficult thing is not to do this for the first time but to maintain for the life. This is satisfaction for me.”
Getting so many together was indeed a good effort and keeping them together a commendable result, but sadly the wine is simply not very good. It lacks depth and isn’t a patch on the others we have tasted so far.
2009 Pinot Grigio
Richer, more honeyed spice nose than most. This wine has five to six days of maceration on the skins.
It is very fresh which is a nice change from the slightly more viscous versions we have tasted. I find it a tiny bit flat though, particularly compared to the Fruilano which is bursting with vitality. Nice peachy finish but still doesn’t grab me.
Finally for the whites – or should that be greys? We taste his 2007 Pinot Grigio, the one macerated for 30 days.
Amazing! Floral, red fruit nose, perfumed and unctuous on the palate. Beautifully textured body developes into spicy rose petals at the back and on the finish and there are richer honey and peach tones throughout. This is superlative wine – it tastes complex and clean and both the flavour and the feel of it linger in the mouth for ages afterwards.
Christian is very proud.
“When you arrive to find an equilibrium in the vineyard, and also working well with the cutting (yields, I think he meant), to have good rapport of leaf, grapes, you can leave for a long period without too much sugar. If you don’t work well, the plants have diabetic maturation. Too much sugar. 14 degrees for grapes harvested at the end of October is a great result,“ he points out, apropos of the alcohol level.
He is completely right and also clearly delighted at how well the wine is received.
“I want make you taste where the Pinot Grigio can arrive,” he beams indulgently at us. “Not the white paper we can sometimes drink.”
No, indeed, this is nothing like the white paper.
We move onto the reds which are really quite disappointing. Both display a distinct lack of finesse; the wine making is not nearly as assured as with the whites. Much work needs to be done on tannin management here, particularly with local variety Pignolo, which is the kind to bring a tear to your eye and a wounding sensation to your gums.
Pignolo is one of the most characteristic red varieties in Friuli , with the first record dating back to 1396. Already, 600 years ago, it was made in the Rosazzo hills and apparently highly renowned - the church demanded a proportion of it from all growers who had some.
By the end of the 19th century though, it had all but disappeared; a nearly fatal victim of phylloxera and its own tricky nature in the vineyard. Nobody tried particularly hard to save it when they came to replant and if it had not been for the efforts of a dogged local grape historian it probably would have been completely lost. After reading about Pignolo, he set out to re-discover it and at last after much searching found just five plants in the woods around Rosazzo.
I hope very much that in years to come this determned man's efforts will be widely applauded but I am afraid that the winemaking will have to improve a whole lot more.
Finally, two sweets – a Verduzzo Fruilano which does not have too much residual sugar and a Picolit which is more gentle than the one we tasted at Felluga but somehow not quite as good - it does not hang together properly.
Tasting over, Christian encourages us all to have a swim in the pool before dinner. This, he floridly assures us, is going to be ‘very special surprise, a beautiful evening’. He does go on about the beautiful evening at some length.
There will be many special guests but we, apparently, are the most special and he has consequently invited both a newspaper and Sky news to interview us.
This is relatively astonishing news. Surely, something has got rather mangled in translation?
We are at a small - medium-sized winery claiming a devotion to bio-dynamics (which, much of the time, is a marginalising factor), in one ofItaly We are all dusty, grungy and weary after a hard day’s tasting, eating and drinking in the heat, and nothing sounds better than diving into a pool though.
But as ever, big tings a’gwan in the world of Green & Blue and I really need to check my email first and so, as everyone troops out into the light I remain in the stuffy gloom, hunched over my laptop. Despite hoping it would be a five minute job I am still there half an hour later and feel even grubbier and more discombobulated when I finally get to walk out into the evening and up the small, rose lined path towards the blue of the pool.
Inexplicably, a very young woman in a very small dress is standing with a clipboard at the entrance. She coolly appraises my dishevelled state but lets me pass. It is very strange.
And then it gets even stranger. In many years of visiting bio-dynamic producers I have become accustomed to the form for breaking bread with them. These are often the very best meals with food as delicious as the wines but they are, without exception, relaxed affairs where the tone is resolutely rustic and ceremony of any sort is not stood upon.
But as I get closer to the pool I can see that while it contains the rest of our party, the sprinkling of people around it are of a different ilk entirely. Dressed for an elegant cocktail party, they clutch glasses of sparkling wine while good-looking waiters in black stand with trays of canapés. A bar has been set up as well as a long white gazebo down the left-hand side. Under this are several tables laid up with thick linens, elaborate glassware and a full meal setting.
I have rarely felt more grubby and out of place in my life. I am also still immensely tired and so after just a moment’s hesitation think, “Oh, fuck it!” and walk in. This was the alternative to turning and fleeing back to a place where I could at least apply lipstick.
This bravado does not last long as the next wave of arrivals contains, among others, a quite unfeasibly tall woman in a long and very low cut silk dress. Amply endowed, she seems in imminent danger of bursting the bounds of her garment in the chest area.
Her arrival is clearly something of an event for the rest of the smart crowd who seem to know who she is. It is also something of an event for our group who patently do not know who she is but who have all, to a man, spotted that the odds of a wardrobe malfunction are favourable in the extreme.
At that point I decide that exhausted or not, it really would be better if I made more of an effort about my appearance. Jumping into the pool no longer seems like a good idea but I do get some very slightly smarter things from the car, change very quickly and apply makeup before returning to the increasingly surreal scene.
Even more people have arrived. All are deeply tanned and deeply glamorous and are extravagantly greeted by our young host who is looking very spruce in immaculately pressed cream trousers, a beautifully cut shirt and sandals. Among the guests is a very thin, very young woman in another incredibly tiny dress. She is in the company of a much older man who, it later transpires, is her father.
The feeling that we have landed somewhere very strange intensifies as we are invited to take our seats. Firstly, the pool begins to change colour, from some underwater lighting. Blood red, fuchsia and deep blue it glows, a thing of complete artifice, against an impressively beautiful background of near and far hills, deep green fading to pale blue as the sky darkens behind them.
Then Christian appears with a microphone and, to the manner born, launches into an impassioned welcome to this "great evening of wine and culture." He makes full use of the length of his stage (the side of the pool), striding up and down, gesticulating now here, now there; speaking first in Italian and then in his singular English.
It is an impressive show for such a young winemaker, even more so for a wannabe biodynamic one but I think we are all starting to believe that on this night, anything is possible. And we are right. He finishes his speech and tells us of his profound delight at being able to introduce a person called Zelaika, gesturing with a flourish towards the very thin young lady and handing her the microphone.
Behind her, in a pine shed at the far end of the Gazebo, her father fiddles with a laptop, cueing up some music which soon reverberates through the speakers as she lifts the microphone to her mouth and begins, to our profound astonishment, to sing.
She is, like Christian, prone to frequent dramatic gesture and also like him, makes full use of the length of the poolside. The song is clearly not one celebrating a joyous event and she gives full vent to the pain. It is very heartfelt.
It is also, sadly, not always in tune.
The interminable courses comprising dinner begin to arrive and are interspersed not only by more songs from Zalaika but also commotions caused by the small film crew who are not only recording the entire event but also conducting interviews with various people.
Zalaika does a song in English, exhorting some unknown person to turn her on. One of our group, caught up in the moment, assures her that she very much has had that effect on us (he speaks for himself here, but then, he is the one who later demands a picture with the lady bursting from her dress).
Our group remains distinctly less sparkly and overwhelmingly more bemused than the other guests but it is fair to say that the evening is not at all what we were expecting. Still, we do embrace it after a fashion; some clearly more than others. It eventually transpires that the busty lady is a former Miss Fruili and Miss Italy
In between not terribly tuneful numbers by Zalaika we are regaled with a soundtrack of Rihanna, Shakira and The Killers, played at some volume. I had never really thought of ‘Rude Boy’ as a fitting accompaniment to the drinking of biodynamic wine and it turns out, it isn’t really. But in the context of this particular evening it makes more sense than it otherwise might.
Dessert is not served until just before midnight, at which point my stamina is being tested to its limits. But leaving is clearly not an option as Zelaika again takes up the microphone while her father, ever watchful, fiddles around with the laptop. This is clearly the grand finale. She launches into what is apparently a Pavarotti song, bellowing the notes as she lifts her arms towards the moon. The assembled Italians are both moved and greatly enthused and several of them join her in song. As soon as she finishes a short but impressive display of fireworks turns the sky to glitz and further rips through what had, only that afternoon, been perfect, bucolic peace and quiet.
For some, the party is only just beginning. Senor Specogna, Christian’s father (a man who is the polar opposite of his son in appearance), announces that champagne will now be drunk. He grabs my arm in his meaty paw as I head for the exit (I was actually just looking for the loo) and announces that our group are not permitted to leave.
This is not great news for me as it is now well past midnight, we have to be up at 6.00am and, as entertaining as the evening has been, I feel it really is time to go. Our group are split – three younger members attracted both by the promise of Krug and various nubile young women changing into bikinis - very much want to stay. The Krug turns out to be a vain promise but the bikinis do appear, and one sommelier later swears blind that Christian's new girlfriend was at one point stark naked. I am pretty sure that is not true but I will never know as four of us managed to make a get away before the clothes came off.
Despite their Herculean efforts at organising a 'beautiful evening' that clashes head-on with the idea of "natural," I really do like the Specogna family and some of their wines. Are the principles of biodynamic viticulture and natural wine making now permeating the wine world to the extent that it is not just those who are steeped in the concept of an alternative way of living and making wine that are embracing these? Certainly, Christian's youth has to do with it; there is no way that Senor Specogna would have gone down this path I don't think, but his son really has absolutely nothing of the tree hugging environmentalist about him and, beautiful and charming as they are, neither do his friends appear to.
Clearly though, he is passionate about making wine this way and this is something to celebrate. If I had had the enegry, I would have done so that very evening. The fact that young Christian is a showman of note will no doubt be a very good thing both for the region and for the biodynamic movement here, so I very much look forward to selling their delicious Fruilano and one day, who knows, their extraordinarily delicious deep rose Pinot Grigio.
All their holdings are on the Rocca Bernarda and Rosazzo hills in the Colli Orientali DOC where soils tend towards the clay, lime and sandstone.
He also spoke of the fact that they have many older vines, some dating to 1916 and 1920, which they treasure and nurture.
They do not want or encourage malolactic fermentation and they also use inert gases as protection against oxygen.
“It can stay with a lot of different things. Can be good with some Asian spices as well," Christians assures us.
It was his idea, but getting the 20 people together was not easy, apparently.
Christian is very proud.
I hope very much that in years to come this determned man's efforts will be widely applauded but I am afraid that the winemaking will have to improve a whole lot more.
There will be many special guests but we, apparently, are the most special and he has consequently invited both a newspaper and Sky news to interview us.
We are at a small - medium-sized winery claiming a devotion to bio-dynamics (which, much of the time, is a marginalising factor), in one of
But as ever, big tings a’gwan in the world of Green & Blue and I really need to check my email first and so, as everyone troops out into the light I remain in the stuffy gloom, hunched over my laptop.
Inexplicably, a very young woman in a very small dress is standing with a clipboard at the entrance. She coolly appraises my dishevelled state but lets me pass.
Behind her, in a pine shed at the far end of the Gazebo, her father fiddles with a laptop, cueing up some music which soon reverberates through the speakers as she lifts the microphone to her mouth and begins, to our profound astonishment, to sing.
She is, like Christian, prone to frequent dramatic gesture and also like him, makes full use of the length of the poolside. The song is clearly not one celebrating a joyous event and she gives full vent to the pain.
Our group remains distinctly less sparkly and overwhelmingly more bemused than the other guests but it is fair to say that the evening is not at all what we were expecting. Still, we do embrace it after a fashion; some clearly more than others.
Clearly though, he is passionate about making wine this way and this is something to celebrate. If I had had the enegry, I would have done so that very evening. The fact that young Christian is a showman of note will no doubt be a very good thing both for the region and for the biodynamic movement here, so I very much look forward to selling their delicious Fruilano and one day, who knows, their extraordinarily delicious deep rose Pinot Grigio.
