WINERY VISIT: GIRLAN KELLEREI AND KALTERN KELLERI

 Hi Everybody!

Last week I headed to Alto Adige with Eno Club, a wine shop in Milan, to visit Girlan and the Kaltern cooperative winery. 

Alto Adige has many cooperatives and almost all fo them focus on high quality wines, opposed to the rest of coops in Italy which focus on high volume, moslty inexpensive wines; of course there are exceptions.

Girlan Kellerei is in Cornaiano, it works the grapes of 200 growers with 220 hectares overall making 1.3 million bottles a year. Their main focuses are Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir and Vernatsch. To incentivize quality they pay quite a lot of the grapes (up to 2.5 Euros per Kilogram!) and the winemaker also visits every vineyard, offering counsel and advising the growers to reach the perfect level of ripeness and technical characteristics needed to make each wine.

The winery has grown quite a lot since its inception in 1923, the expansion has been built around the old underground cellar dating to the 16th century called The Caveau.

Entrace to the 16th century Caveau

The Caveau

It is very modern, with stainless steel, temperature control tanks and a selection of oak barriques and casks, although they also have 80 years old cement vats used for fermentation as well.

Decorated oak cask

80 years old cement vats

Stainless steel tanks in the newer part of the winery

White grapes are pressed as whole bunches with a short maceration on the skins to increase flavours and aromas intensity; whereas all red grapes are destemmed, for Pinot Noir they include up to 30% of whole bunches in the must. Whole bunches during fermentation undergo carbonic maceration which extracts more colour (much needed for Pinot Noir, famously a pale coloured wine, and promotes the fresh fruit character profile. The objective is to make the grape shine and come through so the use of new oak is limited. 

Only Pinot Noir goes through barrique ageing with around 30% new oak, 30% second-use barriques and the remaining wood being  of third or more passage; this gives subtle notes of toast and vanilla increasing complexity without masking the delicate aroma profile of the grape. The barriques chosen are among the highest quality coopers with some being produced by Tarnasaud (costing up to 2500 Euros!).

The other reds age in big casks of up to 70 hectolitres.

Barrique room

A Tarnasaud barrique, signed by the cooper who made it

We were welcomed by Philipp Nocker the Sales Manager for the Italian market. Very well prepared and an overall great guy to have me explain and teach about their wines! After a tour of the winery we headed up to the tasting room for an extensive look (and taste!) to their lineup.

Wines we tasted

Tasting room

The wines mare are divide into four collections, at the base made from younger vines and at higher yields (maximum 60 hL/ha) and as we work our way up the yields go lower and the age of the vines increases: Classici (typical varital character, to be drunk young), Vigneti (grapes sourced from the best vineyards with separate parcel winemaking), Flora (grapes sourced from the best sites of Bassa Atesina and Oltradige, expression of the potential of each variety) and Solisti (flagship wines, grapes from specific crus, unique identity showing the philosophy of the winemaker).

We started off with the 2021 Platt&Riegl Pinot Blanc (Vigneti), fine, elegant showing vibrant fresh fruit with an incisive body given by a short ageing on the fine lees this wine shows what Pinot Blanc is capable of giving in Alto Adige.

2020 Patricia Pinot Noir (Vigneti), fun fact about the name, an memeber of the board Patricia Von Elzenbaum had 8 hectares in the Mazzon area (now highly regarded as the best Pinot Noir area in Alto Adige) wanted to sell her grapes but no one wanted to buy them (the potential wasn't really understood at the time), in the end Girlian agreed to take in her grapes with the request that the wine would have been named after her. made with big caks and stainlees steel this fruit forward wine surprises with a sharp, cutting acidity.

We confronted the 2012 and 2020 Flora Sauvigno Blanc, 2020 shows the typical varietal character with green bell pepper, gooseberry and some passion fruit, very refreshing. 2012 flowed in the glass with a deeper golden colour with touches of honey and dried fruit and an incredible length.

Flora Pinot Noir Riserva 2019 goes through barrique ageing but only "old" wood, very elegant with nuances fo undergrowth and mushrooms and a very interesting salinity (or minerality if we are keen on sparking some debate) which complemented perfectly the wondefully balanced palate.

We then moved up to the Solisti wines, and boy we were in for a treat.

2020 Gschleier Alte Reben Vernatsch, fruit sourced from old vines (90 to 110 years old) which bring a natural restriction of yields, balance and concentration of the fruit this wine is a pleasant surprise, a bouquet of ripe strawberry and raspberry with hints of green, the tannins are low but the palate is well balanced and smooth, drank lightly chilled.

2019 Trattmann Pinot Noir Riserva 50% of fruit from Mazzon and 50% from Ghirlan, 30% fo whole bunches in fermentation (in stainless steel) with 18 months barrique ageing (1/3 new) this wine is incredibly complex with fruit and spices a light reductive note and some volatile acidity increased the comlexity exalting the freshness and sapidity of the wine.

2018 Curlan Pinot Noir Riserva, fruit coming from cru Girlan with volcanic soil, no whole bunches in fermentation, 18 months barrique ageing and 18 months of bottle ageing. Very powerful wine with a pronounced fresh red fruit character perfectly integrated with vanilla and sweet spice, high tannins and a full body.

2018 Vigna Ganger Pinot Noir Riserva, cru Mazzon with limestone soils (like Burgundy) same winemaking as the Curlan but with 1/3 of whole bunches in fermentation. Very round wine with notes of eucalyptus and pine cones, almost etereal and austere this wine needs bottle to really show its true self. Then we had the 2011, a hotter vintage whowing itself with jammy fruit and slightly higher tannins.

After a spot of lunch we headed to the Kaltern Kellerei, the biggest winery in Alto Adige after the fusion with Erste+Neue now producing more than 4 million bottles a year. They have 590 growers tending to 450 hectares of vines, the average holding is very small at 0.7 hectares. As with Girlan they incentivize quality by paying their growers more than average (up to 7 Euro a kilogram in some cases). A grower here can make about 23700 Euro per hectare with 9 tonnes of grapes.

The winery is huge, 16'000 square meters, 575 tanks, it's brand new developed by the winemake Andrea Moser (who previously worked for Franz Haas and Cloudy Bay, quite a CV!). This is a winemakers dream, like a playground, tanks of all sizes all perfectly placed and alligned to minimize movement of wine or grapes and increase productivity. The use of Sulfur Dioxide is minimized (in fact its only used at bottling basically), instead as grapes go through the winery they are covered by a layer of Carbon Dioxide to impede oxidation, very clever!

Pneumatic presses

The focus on quality is maniacal, when the grapes come in they are weighed and analysed, Andrea and his coworkers give an assessment between 0 and 16 (these "marks" are given throughout the year in the vineyard as well), the final number determinates the priced paid for the grapes.

During harvest he tastes between 2 and 3 kgs of grapes!

Here there is also much sperimentation with grapes, with concrete eggs, Clayvers and single vineyard wines, the experimental projects being labeled under the Project XXX name.

The visit was quick as we were short on time but we also tasted wines during the tour, Andrea took a bottle straight of the bottling line so we could quench our thirst and then we tried two different XXX wines.

Chardonnay from the bottling line, quite nervous as Sulfur Dioxide had just been added

In the background you can see the fully automated bottling line

Big oak cask with Franz Jospeh on the top, the founder of the winery

We tried a Clayver and new american oak fermented and aged Chardonnay XXX which was very funky with dried fruit, zest and a slight reduction, the acidity was very high even if a few barriques went through malolactic conversion.

Then we tasted the Cabarone, sounds like Amarone right? There is a reason, the grapes are dried just liek for Amarone, the tannins were very very high but soft with plummy fruit and jammy notes all layered with sweet spice.

We went straight for the Weincenter, their shop equipped with a fancy tasting room where we went on to test their top wines lineup.

The tasting room

Andrea explained to us the Kunst.Stuck project, born as a Project XXX it then became a lineup of its own. Grapes sourced from single vineyards where the ripeness is at its best, bottled only as magnums of which the quantity prduced follows the year fo harvest (eg. in 2014 only 2014 magnums were made). Made each year from the variety or varities that expressed themselves best with a label made from artists (many artist propose their label and then one is chosen). This line is the pure expression of vintage.

We started off with Pinot Blanc 2014 Kunst.Stuck crazy high sapidity and acidity and a great fruit concentration ending on citrus, rocks and salt weirdly enough. A prime example of what Pinot Blanc can be.

We moved onto the Quintessenz line, their top of the line in which grape varieties are paired to their most suitable terroirs, coming from the best vineyards it's made in 5 different styles: Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Blanc, Kalternsee (different varieties), sweet Yellow Muscat. 

Quintessenz Pinot Blanc, coming from 4 different vineyards is very concentrated with ripe fruit and a touch of salinity with a shorter finish than Kunst.Stuck.

Quintessenz 2019 Pinot Grigio showed disitnct stone fruits and flowers with hints of smoke (one year of oak ageing).

Quintessenz 2020 Sauvignon Blanc was purely varietal with elderflower, gooseberry, grass and boxwook; fermented and matured in oak casks.

Quintessenz 2021 Schiava (Vernastch) Kalternsee DOC Classico Superiore had a pure red fruit character with nuances of white pepper and some green notes that freshened up the palate.

Quintessenz Cabernet Sauvignon, 100% barrique fermentation and ageing with extra ripe redcurrant and blackcurrant, greatly integrated cinnamon, vanilla and toast; silky tannins smoothed the sip, ending long on vanilla and red fruit.

We closed our tasting with the Quintessenz Moscato Giallo, sweet but balanced by high acidity, no noble rot involved here, just passerillage. Typical muscat aromas with some dried peach and apricot.

Overall it was a great day and a wonderful experience even if by the last few glasses my palate was very tired and I was starting to struggle to taste the wines and distinguish aromas and flavours.

Cheers!