Gravner

The Free Bacchus Story

In 1997 Joško Gravner had a successful winery making clean, modern, well-received white wine in Friuli. He then dismantled the entire approach, buried Georgian clay amphorae in the floor of his cellar, and started fermenting on the skins for months at a time.

The market's initial response was not kind. The wines came out amber rather than pale, tannic in a way white wine is not supposed to be, and several importers walked away. He had made the first one secretly, in his grandmother's old house across the border in Slovenia, using Italian grapes, because he doubted the Italian wine authorities would permit it. He kept going, and the amphora, the qvevri, a technology roughly eight thousand years old, turned out to be the beginning of a category rather than the end of a career. A great deal of what the world now calls orange wine traces back to this cellar in Oslavia. The qvevri are buried beneath the cellar floor, lined with beeswax, and hold between 1,200 and 2,500 litres each.

The estate is farmed without synthetic chemistry, the fermentations run wild, and sulphur use is minimal to absent. The Ribolla Gialla is the reference bottling, and the wines are released after long ageing rather than to the market's schedule — often many years after harvest, which is expensive in a way that mostly goes unnoticed by anyone not financing it.

Gravner is worth knowing about even if the style does not appeal, because it is the clearest instance in modern wine of a producer taking a genuine commercial risk on a conviction about method. He was not repositioning. He was, for several years, simply losing.