Franz Gojer - Essential Alpine Italy
Once you’re introduced to Alpine wines, you can’t deny that something special happens to grapes grown at soaring altitudes on steep mountain slopes. It seems like magic, when you take that sip that's so crisp yet so complex, and it clicks in your mind that these wines have a separate and unmistakable identity. Maybe this hasn’t happened to you (yet), but it certainly happened to me, and I’ve been hooked ever since.
During my wine career I’d learned, of course, that cool climates promote good acidity, that high elevations lead to slow ripening, that rocky and difficult terrain can coax out stunning minerality; but it wasn’t until I worked in a restaurant specializing in Alpine wines that I had that “Ah-ha!” moment. Tasting wines exclusively from Alto Adige, Valle d’Aosta, the Swiss Valais, or Valtellina, my palate was led into a cool mountain pass to a land free of over-ripe or heavily extracted wines, where everything was bright, nuanced, and exceptionally food-friendly.
North Italy is rich with pockets of distinct cultures and historic wine denominations, collectively producing the major portion of all Italian wine. This volume of wine is partly due to some massive producers in Piedmont, but the rest is the sum of a staggering number of small producers, many dotted throughout the rolling foothills or remote valleys of the Italian Alps.
Franz Gojer is one such small producer, nestled in the mountain town of Bolzano, in the Italian province known as Alto Adige to the Italian-speaking population, or as Südtirol to those who speak German (Südtirol is the preferred term on Gojer’s labels). He tends just 6 hectares of his family vineyards passed down to him in 1982, where the steep hillsides and banks of the Isarco River are planted with regional varietals like Kerner, Schiava, Lagrein and Weissburgunder. Yields are expectedly low here, and his winery, Glögglhof, turns out less than 4,000 cases of wine per year.
Gojer’s wines exemplify what makes Alpine terroir extraordinary, yet this is a merit achieved only through humility. It may be the fact that they're not flashy, nor cosmopolitan, nor laden with credentials, naked and free of DOC-gifted neckties, that makes the Franz Gojer wines such outstanding ambassadors of this region. His vines know nothing but the traditions of Südtirol, and that gives Gojer's wine that singular and exceptional quality we endeavor to support here at One Kourt Studio, the quality of true sense of place.
- Tyler Armstrong