Klinec Rebula Review

The world of wine continues to expand. Growing regions go well beyond what we cover, let's have a look at a Solvenian winery.

Hi, guys! Mark Aselstine with Uncorked Ventures. It's been a while since I've done one of these. This is going to be a little bit different because this is a wine that we don't actively sell, but I thought it was kind of interesting. As we get ready for a trip to Walla Walla, Washington next week, and getting some wine club shipments for the month of July out over the next few days, I thought I'd take a minute and talk about what might be the most interesting wine I've had in a really long time. The winery's called Klinec. It is Slovenian. Slovenia, the European country since 2004, used to be part of Yugoslavia, and they've gone ahead and started importing small amounts of some of their higher-priced wines. This retails for about $30 and I believe it's the most expensive wine made in the country.

Long story short, country is only a stones throw from Italy, if you're not familiar. I know most Americans get a little discredit for their view of geography. I'm certainly included in that. Although, I can tell you where fifty states are that I don't think that most Europeans can do. The [inaudible 00:01:03] glass, it's from a wine region where they have a lot of native grapes but they don't have a large history of wine cultivation, at least not in an international sense. You're going to notice this, so, yes, that's orange. Ribolla is the grape. Ribolla is kind of an interesting one. It is one of their native grapes in the country. It's one of the ones that, as they do tastings and bring wines into new markets, and in this case, San Francisco, they tend to make it Ribolla. The story is, it's pretty acidic, but it's orange because, not because it's a different type of skin. It's a white wine grape. They make most of the wines by macerating the skins and allowing a longer kind of contact between grape, and juice, and skin than you would with most white wines, that's where the color comes from.

In essence, they're making a white wine in a style that's more typically made for red. We've seen that a few other places. There's definitely some up and coming wine regions that are attempting to do the kind of stuff like that, but Slovenians are the first ones to do it on this scale. They have a whole vibrant local food and wine industry and I just wanted to take a few minutes and talk about that. Klinec is not something that will show up in a wine club shipment anytime soon. We have shipped this to a few customer just to see what they think and we've gotten kind of … Half the feedback has been, "We weren't quite sure what to do with that." The other half would be, "Hey, you suggested to put this with goat cheese and a prosciutto." Which is kind of relevant to the region of the world that they're in. If they were ten miles further to the east they'd be in Italy, so that makes a little more sense when you think of it that way. It held up pretty well.

It's highly acidic and it's also kind of an interesting … I do think that there's an area of opportunity for a lot of wine makers if you're going to make whites that don't necessarily sell as well as reds. Especially for folks that are looking to gain market share in Asian markets, where 90% of sales are red wine, doing something like this where it's macerated skins and it gives it a little more of a fleshy texture that we don't get with a lot of white wines, while keeping the acidity that's native in these grapes, I think there's a chance for some people to do some pretty special things.

Klinec, it's worth a shot. If I went out to a wine bar tonight, would I suggest that my wife, who will have a glass or two a week, to order it, no. If you're somebody who really, really enjoys wine, likes both history and kind of supporting up-and-coming wine regions, it's something to look for. I don't know what the distribution model is at this point in the United States. I don't believe that they have any. They went through a larger distributor who had some issues moving the wine, but those are large accounts. For a smaller, local vendor, they might not have something like this but they might have something that is interesting from a different region of the world that you can check out. I encourage you to do so.

We've talked about the future of the wine a lot on this plate, on this blog, and kind of in the video segments. In large part, as land in established growing regions gets more and more expensive and the wine then being produced in those growing regions becomes more and more expensive, you're going to have an increasing number of competitors who are coming from regions that you wouldn't necessarily know had grapes. This is a good examples. Those regions won't necessarily make wine the exact way that you thought they might. This is a good example of that. After all, it's orange, and we're not quite sure what to do with that. It's an interesting take and I hope you've enjoyed this small talk and small macerated skins, in any case, Mark Aselstine with Uncorked Ventures. Of course, we hope you'll consider a wine of the month club today as well. Have a good one.