"Josko Gravner, a third-generation winemaker, left his family’s grove in Northern Italy, close to the Slovenian border, to visit the vineyards of California. It was 1987 and Gravner, like the rest of the world, had embraced modern winemaking techniques. He had stainless steel vats for fermenting wine. He had fresh oak barrels. In California, he went on a whirlwind tour and what he tasted turned his palate. Chemical manipulation, he realized, was destroying wine. Over the years, additives had been incorporated to take the risk and the time out of winemaking. From stabilizers and sulfur dioxide to help with preservation, to a sickly concentrate of color called Mega Purple to correct the hue of reds, Gravner saw the art of winemaking devolving into a business no longer invested in what the French call terroir. And it wasn’t just America. The trend was spreading across Europe, too.
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Gravner went back to Italy and he ditched technology. He went back to the beginning. He researched the earliest winemaking techniques and learned that until around 1000 AD, wine had been fermented in clay amphorae pots. He studied the traditional winemaking of the Caucasus region in Georgia, and he endeavored to revive these classic techniques and make an honest wine without additives. Gravner would come to use wild yeasts to ferment. He left the skins of the grapes with the juice to macerate in the brew for many months and act as a preservative. Because the skins remained, no chemicals could go on the grapes as they grew. For Gravner, orange wine required great care from soil to bottling. He let nature dictate the process, taking the great risk that a batch might not turn out.
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"Here was a guy who was making world class, traditional oak style wine. He had a list of fans two miles long. To go from making one of the top Italian white wines to giving people orange wine, well it freaked everyone out," Stuckey says."
Como eu gosto destes inconformados que têm horror ao que não tem paixão nem arte.
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