Cracow. Confetti Wine Fest. Natural Wines Festival 2022
Wow! Last week was very busy for the wine industry and enthusiasts! After completing Capstone California Level 1 with Adam Pawłowski and a great festival of German Rieslings & Co. I went to Cracow for the Confetti Wine Fest. 60 producers of natural wines and many more wine lovers visited sunny Cracow on Saturday. This was only the second edition of the Festival after the inauguration in 2019. The mandatory break due to the C-19 pandemic was well used by the organizers to prepare something exceptional to cover up for the lost time. And what an excellent comeback it was!
The venue in Forty Kleparz was spectacular and very climatic. The day kicked off with a vertical tasting of orange Italian wines from the producer La Stoppa “Ageno” with a wine blogger Romek Ma Wino, Łukasz Czajkowski from Wine Mates and a special guest Elena Pantaleoni, who leads the winery. The tasting consisted of vintages 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019. 2018 and 2019 felt extremely young and rather closed, not easy to discern and in desperate need of more time. From 2016 downwards the wine began to fire on all cylinders of skin fermented juiciness. With each older vintage the colour became more concentrated with the notes of amber. Goes without saying that the sediment was omnipresent from the very first vintage. The flavour kaleidoscope rotated around minerality, wax, fireplace ash, smoked ham, prune, medicinal notes, quince, cut hay, freshly cut grass, herbal notes of thyme, grilled zucchini. It was a great vertical to prove the aging capability of this particular label. The varieties are Malvasia di Candia Aromatica 90%, Ortrugo and Trebbiano 10%.
After more than 2 hours spent on the vertical class it was about the time to visit the winemakers. And the place was simply packed, from the get go I knew there was no chance to taste everything. You can’t feed yourself with passion only, so I gladly jumped on a chance to get a lovely cheese platter from the Pod Czerwonym Kogutem to prepare myself for a further round of tastings. Organizers also selected Żonglerka to provide hungry wine drinkers with some hot and cold delicacies, including oysters, beans with hollandaise sauce and bottarga, artichokes and Sturgeon rillette, but the gastro zone was too small, you had to wait in a long queue to order and finally most of the dishes run out. Next year inviting more restaurants or food trucks to join the gastro zone would be a good idea!
I didn’t get a chance to visit every producer, but here comes the list of my subjective highlights of the event. Let’s start with the Polish wine scene and a lovely tasting I had with Kamil and Jarek from Winnica Barczentwicz. I tasted four different labels: Pinot Blanc, Chardonnay and two different Pinot Noir. Pinot Blanc was extremely fresh and crisp with piercing acidity. Chardonnay was very much pointed towards the freshness of the fruit and playful acidity with a touch of green apple. Kamil told me that both Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay are located in a soil mixture of limestone (proven to be amazing for chardonnay) and clay so the focus is solely on the purity of the fruit expression. Pinot had a distinctive smoky character, smoked salmon came to mind hugging a good red fruit core of cherries. This is super promising and I keep my fingers crossed for further development in this winery!
Dom Bliskowice greeted me with their flagship Johanniter 2019 which is a wine macerated on its skin for 14 days. Fresh and funky this wine has a lovely citrus upbeat and razor strap acidity. Can’t wait to see what other specialities they will conjure in the future.
The other wine that I found very interesting was the pét-nat from the Hungarian producer Szóló from 100% furmint. This wine was definitely one of the highlights from the entire faire. The remaining labels proved also very alluring focused on furmint variety with a distinctive volcano ash on the nose as a result of the soils where the fruit is sourced from.
Foradori imported by WinoBlisko from Trentino also brought an amazing selection. Theo offered a very nice tasting and his flagship reds from the Teroldego variety caught my attention. 2017 was just beginning to show tertiary aromas but my feeling was that it was just a starting point of a positive evolution, truly a wine with soul!
Rocco Di Carpeneto is a wine producer from Piedmont. They brought a very decent line up of Barberas from three vintages and different parcels. 2017 came from a single parcel with an average plant age of 50 years. Very concentrated with hints of eucalyptus and beautiful red cherry core. Great showing!
Last mention is Viognier pét-nat from Domin & Kušický from Slovakia. Very refreshing and sharp with peeled lemon and a touch of honey on the palate. Super interesting!
In the afternoon we continued with another tasting with a popular wine blogger Romek Ma Wino supported by MS Piotr Pietras - this time of Italian orange wines. Romek started with a thought provoking question: does the orange wines really exist or is this rather a skin-contact white wine? We didn’t find one answer to this question. The lineup was opened by Aura 2015 from Piedmont made from 100% Moscato grapes and this became my favorite bottle of the tasting. Inside the bottle with a characteristic clay label you could find a very fresh orange wine with a good tannin. After 4 days of maceration on skins it had quite light orange color and on the palate revealed hints of ginger, flint, spices, sour mirabelles, medicinal notes, herbs and white tea.
We continued with bottles of skin-contact Gewürztraminers, Verduzzo and other endemic grapes. Another 2 bottles that caught my attention were from the northeastern Friuli-Venezia Giulia region. The first one - Dario Prinčič Trebez Bianco 2014 imported by Vininova, made near the Italian border with Slovenia, showed hints of candied mango, cloves, cardamom and ginger in the nose, honey, dried apricots, cured meat and something physiological on the palate. The other - Solo 2015, top label from Paola Vodopivec presented by MS Piotr Pietras and imported by Terroiryści. Skin contact at its best! Expressive orange wine from Vitovska grapes, an old cross between Glera and Malvasia, which after almost a year of maceration on skins in Georgian amphoras and 3 years in large, neutral barrels from Slavonian oak is aromatic, multi-layered, complex and extremely mineral, with notes of chalk and nuts. It’s a wine to wait for, with relatively strong, but well integrated tannin and balanced acidity.
The time went by so quickly I was still in the middle of tasting when the clock inevitably reached 7 PM and thus the faire ended. Overall I was very much impressed with the amount of participants, variety and the high quality of many wines. There is still a lot of great potential in the category of natural wines and while we shouldn’t forget wine is a beverage that should bring pleasure first and foremost independently from the amount of sulphur dioxide added to it. Once again I was reminded that the future of wine is bright.
Last, but not least there was an after party with the winemakers. It would have been a great opportunity to chat some more, but spoiled by a strange division to split exhibitors and the rest of the industry with separate bracelets for the VIP room entry. Not so cool and definitely something to improve during the next edition, afterall the whole event was to get us together!
