Gravner

Josko Gravner is, by most accounts, the person most responsible for the modern revival of skin-contact white wine — a technique that had survived only in scattered pockets of Georgian and Eastern European winemaking before he encountered it during a visit to the Republic of Georgia in 1996. What he brought back was not a trend but a conviction: that white grapes fermented on their skins, in clay amphora buried in the earth, and left alone for six months or longer, produced wines of a depth and complexity that had no equivalent in any contemporary European style.

The farming at Gravner's hillside estate in Oslavia — a small village on the Slovenian border where the soils shift between limestone, clay, and marl — is certified organic and biodynamic through ICEA. The conversion predated the amphora experiment; Gravner had already concluded that conventional chemistry was incompatible with what he was trying to grow.

The Ribolla Anfora is the wine that carries this philosophy most completely. It has drawn 97 points from Wine Advocate — a score that, for a wine this unconventional in style, speaks to the quality of the underlying material rather than any concession to critical expectation. The wines require time and an open palate. They also reward both.

Gravner does not produce wine for broad consumption, and he doesn't try to. What he produces is a record of a place and a practice, documented in bottles that age for decades.