Terrazzi Alti, the High Terraces, makes its happy debut at Bowler.  Siro Buzzetti is Valtellinese through and through, born and raised in the hamlet of Triasso, near the “big town” of Sondrio.   Not from a winemaking family, he became its first vignaiolo in 2005, as his love for his native land pushed him out of the paper business and into the business of drastic, terraced vineyards in the cru of Sassella, where he started with a mere 0.1 hectares of old vines.  Since then the estate has expanded exponentially, to a whopping 1.5 hectares of vines and one hectare of woods.  Today Siro is joined by his son, Francesco.

We’re far from the Barolo zone here, three and a half hours to the northeast into Lombardia--north of Milan, north of Lake Maggiore, almost to Switzerland.   It’s here that we find Nebbiolo’s most Alpine expression.  Its local name, Chiavennasca, is usually attributed to the nearby town of Chiavenna, but Siro explains that it truly derives from either ciuvinusa (più venosa in Italian, more vein-y, referring to Nebbiolo’s noted vigor) or from ciuvinasca (più vinosa, more vinous, meaning the variety that made the greatest wine).     

Valtellina was carved out by the glaciers, with the valley oriented almost perfectly east/west.  The vineyards are the north side of the valley, facing due south, perched impossibly into the cliffs on dramatic dry stone wall terraces.   Terrazzi Alti’s vines, shooting up from 320m to 600m, are trained in the local archetto valtellinese, with the rows planted north/south on the east/west terraces, negating any attempt at mechanization.  The mother rock here, fairly rare in the world of Nebbiolo, is metamorphic gneiss rich in porphyry, quartz, and feldspar.   The rock is weathered down into poor, acid and shallow topsoils that are around 70% sand, 25-30% silt, and, importantly, almost no clay.  Terrazzi Alti works delicately to encapsulate these distinct conditions.

Watching Siro and Francesco scale these vineyards like mountain goats, the brutal task of creating and maintaining these walls is on full display.   This is what is meant by heroic viticulture.  It cannot be easy, and there’s no illusion of making significant quantities of wine here.  Speaking with Siro, though, one can immediately see the resolved sense of pride and satisfaction he feels from doing this work, from the luxury of being an ambassador for his homeland through the uniqueness of its wine.  

Terrazzi Alti makes two wines:  Valtellina Superiore Sassella and, in select years, a Valtellina Superiore Sassella Riserva, which is released a year later.  

We commend our friend Marko, Nomad Wine Guy, for bringing Terrazzi Alti to our attention.

To learn more:

www.terrazzialti.com
@terrazzi_alti

Dominik Huber started Terroir al Limit in 2004 with his friend Eben Sadie, a South African oenologist. The pair met in Priorat at Mas Martinet, and quickly became friends. Dominik, a native German with a growing interest in wines and gastronomy found in Eben the perfect partner to explore and understand the Catalan region.

With the help of the Pérez family of Mas Martinet, Eben and Dominik purchased some fruit and leased a little corner in the cellar of Cims de Porrera, where they vinified their first vintage of Dits del Terra in 2001. After two years at Cims de Porrera, they moved into a tiny cellar in Torroja del Priorat. From the tiny cellar in Torroja the pair started releasing new cuvées and increasing their range to site-specific wines: Arbossar in 2003, Torroja in 2005, Manyes and Tosses in 2006, Pedra de Guix in 2008, and Terra de Cuques in 2011.

Since its founding, Terroir al Limit has slowly evolved its understanding of the Priorat as a region as capable as Burgundy in its complexity and potential to make elegant and transparent wines. The Torroja and Terra de Cuques are the village wines, Dits del Terra and Arbossar the Premier Crus, and Manyes and Tosses are the Grand Crus.

Eben eventually left the winery to devote himself to his projects in South Africa and Dominik took the reins of the winery. Devoting himself primarily to the cultivation of the growing number of vineyard sites, Dominik could see his vineyard efforts were resulting in healthier fruit. With better fruit coming into the cellar he quickly realized that ripe, concentrated grapes combined with extractive winemaking and aging in barriques didn’t show their vineyards’ authenticity. By favoring wines of infusion rather than extraction, using whole clusters and avoiding pigeage and remontage, the wines emphasized elegance rather than the typical weight of other Priorat wines. Another differential was in the oak treatment; barriques were eschewed and concrete and neutral foudres became the preferred methods of aging. 

Realizing that organic or biodynamic farming during an era of global warming is insufficient for a region as hot and dry as the Priorat, Dominik farms rigorously to guarantee the health and vitality of his soils. The goal is to retain as much moisture as possible, reducing the hydric stress on the vines in summer and allowing for an earlier harvest of physiologically ripe fruit.

Through his work with Eben Sadie, and now with the help of Serbian-born Tatjana Peceric (who in the past few years became the head winemaker at Terroir al Limit and its sister projects) Dominik Huber has changed the way the wines of the Priorat have been perceived, showing the world what this region is capable of: characterful wines which are elegant, approachable and explicit about its terroir.

Terroir Històric

While working on establishing Terroir al Limit, Dominik Huber became entranced with the Priorat’s history – its rhythms of life, the simple cuisine, and the honest wines that honored their origins. When walking past the crumbling Sindicat Agricola in Torroja, he could recall those few bottles of Priorat he had tasted from vintages in the 1970s, and he envisioned a future where such wines could again be made.

Nostalgic and honest in spirit, the wines of Terroir Històric are a nod to the past and the style of winemaking that was popular at that time. Rather than focusing on individual parcels, Dominik sources grapes from many different vineyards throughout the region. These complex blends – dazzling mosaics of aroma and flavor – are an effort to express the Priorat landscape’s diversity.

Grapes here are sourced from vineyards in Bellmunt, Gratallops, El Lloar, Escaladei, Porrera, Poboleda, Torroja, Vilella Alta, and Vilella Baixa. Some of these are from younger vines planted high up in the Montsant near the border of Escaladei and Morera and where the soils are unique for being clay and limestone rather than schist. Finding that these white varieties are relatively scarce and under-appreciated in the Priorat – especially at the table – a significant percentage of Terroir Històric’s production is white wine. Unlike Terroir al Limit, which was founded on the Burgundian principle of site-specific wines, Terroir Històric is meant to showcase the complexities of the Priorat in its entirety.

There is one red and one white. The white is currently a blend of Garnatxa Blanca and Macabeu, the red, Garnatxa, and Carinyena. Harvest is manual, and the grapes are pressed whole cluster (whites) or fermented whole cluster (reds) without any manipulation, so their flavors are infused rather than extracted. Nothing is added or removed, and the wines ferment and age in concrete tanks. Bottled 6 months after the harvest, they are meant to be drunk young.

This profile and tasting notes were edited from the European Cellars and Terroir al Limit websites, along with the pictures used. For more information please visit: Terroir al Limit and European Cellars.

Thank you to importer Louis/Dressner for this Texier profile: 

(Click here  for more on Texier from Louis/Dressner and here for the winery's new website!)

It is no exaggeration that Eric Texier is one of the most important people we have come to know in our 30+ years of wine importing. Not important in a boisterous or regal sense, but rather from an evolutionary perspective. People like Eric and his wife Laurence helped us discover that mutual respect, growth and friendship were possible in this line of work, that a "business relationship" could shape philosophies, world views, values and even our senses of humor! For this we are grateful.

A Bordeaux native who has lived in or around Lyon since 1979, Eric is a jovial, energetic and fun-loving person who wants his wines to make their drinkers happy. But he is also a boundary pusher, endlessly questioning his own work (and, let's be honest, that of others) for the sake of moving viticulture and winemaking forward.

Eric is a trailblazer, putting all the but extinct regions of Brézème  and Saint Julien en Saint Alban on the map. He experiments with concepts you rarely if ever hear about elsewhere: finding acidity in Marsanne through anforas, not working the soil in favor of cover crops, "infusion" macerations, working on his own grafts, rediscovering forgotten grapes adaptable to the very real threat of climate change...

Strongly opinionated, he is not afraid to ruffle feathers or call people out on their bullsheeeeet in his heavily accented but perfect English. And since Eric always backs his claims with serious research, careful thought and true care for the subject matter, you'd best think twice before writing him off. I mean, the guy used to be a nuclear engineer!

Having said that, Eric loves to learn and exchange. And can even admit when he's wrong! One of the things we are most proud of here at LDM is the cross-pollination of growers we work with: growers who've befriended each other, talked shop for hours and drawn inspiration from each other's know-how and techniques. Eric truly is the poster child and "the glue" of so many of these friendships.

He originally became a winemaker after a first career as an engineer in the nuclear industry and without any family background in vines or wines. As such, his goals and methods developed not so much from his years of schooling, but from his readings, his visiting winemakers around the world, and working in Burgundy with Jean-Marie Guffens at Verget.

After giving up the idea of buying vineyards, which was too costly a proposition for a beginner with his ambitions, he started a small négoce where he selected particularly interesting vineyard plots worked by the sincere, hard-working farmers who grew the healthy grapes he wanted to buy and vinify. He rediscovered nearly forgotten areas of ancient fame, like Brézème in the northern Côtes-du-Rhône, and nurtured relationships with people who tend their vines with passion and care. Over the years, the shift from négociant to vigneron has occurred, and today Eric owns and rents the vast majority of the vines that go into his production. He has also replanted several hectares in Brézème and in Saint-Julien en Saint-Alban with Syrah and Roussanne.

In his purely négoce days, Eric was producing 30 different wines from 10 different origins, mostly but not limited to the Northern Rhône. As a land owner and vigneron, he produces 12 different wines from four different origins, with the Côte Rotie, Rasteau and Châteauneuf du Pape the only remaining cuvées made with purchased fruit. 

The wines are vinified in their areas of production, which means a lot of time management and traveling at the time of harvest. When they have obtained their AOC, the young wines are transported to Charnay-en-Beaujolais, just north of Lyon, where Eric lives and owns a wonderful élevage cellar. This beautiful underground, vaulted cellar was built in the 16th century, and temperatures stay cool and stable through the year.

Like all good winemakers, Eric strongly believes that wines are made in the vineyard, and that his work, after the harvest, consists in following the lead of the vintage and accompanying the wines so they fulfill their potential. Exact steps in vinification vary according to the varietals, terroirs and vintages, but the goal is always to provide the grapes, musts and wines with the best environment and to intervene as little as possible.

His techniques for white wines include sorting in the vines and at the winery, whole clusters pressed in a vertical press (that’s the old fashioned wood kind), no added yeasts, barrel, concrete and ceramic fermentation (no new wood), aging on fine lees, malolactic fermentation for all the wines, minimal use of SO2 at bottling only, no pump-overs, fining and filtration only when absolutely necessary.

For his red wines, he does the same sorting at harvest, no destemming most of the time, bringing the grapes to the press by conveyor belts, cold maceration under a CO2 blanket for aromatic extraction, natural yeasts, very little to no extraction during maceration and fermentation. The temperatures are controlled not to exceed 34 degrees C (93F), aging is done mostly in concrete, old foudres and demi-muids of 450L,  no filtration and egg white fining only when necessary.

The Thevenet family’s wines were one of Joe Dressner's and Denyse Louis's first imports: they tasted there in 1987 with Jean Thevenet and were smitten with his unusually rich, complex white Burgundies. His son Gautier has long since taken over the production of three different Viré-Clissé wines from three different properties in the appellation: the original Domaine de la Bongran (family owned), Domaine de  Roally (family owned) and Domaine Emilian Gillet (long-term lease). The heart of the estate is Bongran, which lies on a limestone ridge overlooking the Saone River and which Jean’s father began piecing together after World War I. It consists entirely of old Chardonnay clones on chalky, clay-rich marl soils, farmed organically and meticulously by hand. The name "Bongran" has been attributed to a couple of different sources, but Jean's research revealed it to be a reference to a priest by the name of Bongran who once owned some of the vines.

Gautier has stayed true to his father’s and grandfather's winemaking practices, which have long distinguished Bongran wines from all other Viré-Clissé producers: later harvest and thus greater ripeness of the fruit with touches of botrytis at times; minimal intervention in the cellar, including a very slow pressing, lengthy settling and a slow, spontaneous fermentation lasting up to two years; and years of bottle-aging in the cellar before release. Domaine de la Bongran bottles only one wine, a uniquely old-fashioned Viré- Clessé that always has some residual sugar, a result of the hands-off Thevenet approach. The wine does not drink sweet, but rather possesses an extraordinary richness of flavor and texture along with its characteristic firm acidity and minerality. It is unmistakably Burgundian. The concept of any sweetness in a white Burgundy may sound unusual, and today it is—but according to Jean back when and Gautier today, the RS is a distinct part of the expression of their terroir. 

Domaine de Roally is a separate property and wine from the Bongran home base. The original proprietor of Roally was Henri Goyard, an old schoolmate of Jean's and a similarly minded vigneron. When Henri decided to retire after the 2000 vintage, Jean purchased the estate and had his son Gautier take it over. The vines are farmed and the wines made identically to those of Bongran. The main difference is that Roally Viré-Clessé is aged for "only" two years in bottle before release versus four years for the Bongran. Neither wine ever sees any wood for fermentation or aging.

The third of the Thevenet Viré Clessé wines is Domaine Emilian Gillet, created decades ago but historically not imported by Louis/Dressner until quite recently. Per Jean Thevenet back in 2012: “Emillian Gillet is an estate I founded in 1988 with vines that have always been rented. Legislation is extremely complicated in France, and it was actually easier to create an entirely new, separate estate than to expand Bongran...The name Gillet is that of my ancestors.” 

An historical note: when the Viré-Clessé AOC was created in 1999, the regulations permitted up to 3 grams only of residual sugar. Thus the Thevenet wines did not qualify for the appellation and were classified as Mâcon-Villages. But the sweltering 2003 vintage led to the entire region's ending up with RS in their finished wines, which in turn led to the loosening of the restrictions; suddenly, Bongran and Roally made the Viré-Clessé cut. And the rest is Thevenet history.