Faro grinned as I tucked into the bowl enthusiastically, and confided that it was among his favorite dishes growing up. He waited patiently while I apologetically scarfed up several more mouthfuls before turning to my notebook and pen to learn how he had become the proprietor of a small winery named Pietradolce on the slopes of the volcano that boomed occasionally in the background as we ate, talked, and drank.

The Faro family are perhaps most easily described as nursery magnates. They run a vast and highly-successful ornamental plant business that spreads over many hectares just outside the little hamlet of Carruba di Riposto in the province of Catania, Sicily. From precious small plants to large palm trees, the Faro family exports plants all over Europe, with delivery trucks rumbling down the improbably narrow back streets of Carruba at all hours to the massive shipping terminal that attaches to the orderly nursery grounds and greenhouses.

The 18-room hotel that Faro has named after his mother sits at the heart of this nursery operation, and is clearly funded by the former's great success.

"My family were winemakers three generations ago," says Faro, "but my father strayed into landscaping agriculture and we stayed there." Still, Faro remembers his grandfather making wine from a three-acre plot when he was growing up, and he distinctly remembers his first taste of wine at 10 years old, a sip of Nerello Mascalese ceremoniously drawn from his grandfather's old oak cask.

As Faro began his professional career as part of the family business, he found himself increasingly interested in wine and at the same time wondering why his family had abandoned their winemaking roots.

"I had fallen in love with wine at that point," says Faro, recalling his thinking in 2000 when the idea to start a winery came to him, "and I thought why not get back to winemaking?"

In 2001, vineyard land wasn't hard, nor expensive to procure on Etna, thanks to the utter impracticality of making a living growing grapes in the 21st century. The small villages that ring the slopes of Mount Etna were surrounded by countless tiny plots of old vines, abandoned in favor of pursuits more economically sound.

With the help of hired winemaker Carlo Ferrini, Faro sought out a total of 16 acres of old vines high on Etna, which he carefully rehabilitated. Some are 120-year-old, pre-phylloxera Carricante vines whose twisted trunks produce precious little fruit each year. Already trained in the ancient albarello (head pruned) style, Faro eliminated every trace of modernity, ripping out the formed cement posts that supported many vines and providing wooden stakes to those gnarled vines that couldn't hold up their own weight. Together they produced the first vintage of Pietradolce in 2005.

The vines are mostly dry farmed, and have never been treated with insecticides, or herbicides. They occasionally get a small dose of organic fertilizer mixed with water drawn from a well that sits next to the tiny stone hut that is slowly crumbling nearby.

Faro's oldest vineyards are in the Contrada Rampante area of northern Etna, and at the upper limit of altitude for the DOC growing area.

A few days after our dinner, early one morning we bounced up an irregularly maintained dirt road to take a look at some of his oldest vines.

"We've just got these small pockets of soil, and then other than that it's just rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks," says Faro as he stands with boots sinking into the powdery, pulverized stone that passes for soil under his scraggly vines. He points out the torrette at the back edge of his semicircular vineyard plots, which is basically a small ziggurat-shaped pile of rocks that represents a portion of what the creators of this vineyard had to drag out of the way in order to get a hectare or two of workable land.

The vineyards are ringed by 50 to 60 year-old olive trees, whose grassy and fruity-sweet oil I sopped up with bread while singing his mother's praises a few nights prior.

"When I'm a bit stressed I just come up here and relax," says Faro, absentmindedly fingering one of the filigreed sprays of wild fennel that grow in between the rock walls that separate his vineyards and the buckling lava flows nearby. In the quiet breeze I can hear the buzz of bees, and there are enough wildflowers in bloom to faintly scent the air with a sweetness that reminds me again why Pietradolce (literally "sweet stone") might just be the perfect name for a wine that tastes of crushed stone, berries, and flowers.

From the scraggly vines of Faro's precious Vigna Barbagalli vineyard, we head down the slopes of Etna to the newer Zottorinoto vineyard which fills out Faro's tiny holdings. We sit on an old stone bridge that spans the creaky railroad tracks that only occasionally see use these days. In the shadow of an ancient stone palmento, or press house, Faro explains his plans for one day turning it into a tasting room.

Despite clearly having the means, Faro has no intention to turn Pietradolce into something big. "I want to let it grow, but not fast," he says. "This is not an area that can support a big company, and we don't want to become one."

The winemaking at Pietradolce sticks to the simpler end of the spectrum. The wines are inoculated with commercial yeasts, but see very little new oak. The whites and rosé are vinified and aged in steel, while the reds are vinified in steel and then aged in large old oak casks.

Pietradolce produces a few thousand cases split across five wines. The primary wines are the Archineri white and red, but recently Faro began making a single vineyard bottling from his Vina Barbagalli, a less expensive red, and a rosé.

I had the opportunity to taste a portion of the portfolio while I enjoyed the remainder of Donna Carmela's pasta. The wines are composed and elegant, and prototypical examples of why Etna wines are so compelling and delicious.

Donna Carmela should be proud.

TASTING NOTES:
2011 Pietradolce "Archineri" Etna Bianco (Carricante), Etna, Sicily
Medium blonde in the glass, this wine has a wonderful combination of pomelo pith and white blossom aromas mixed with the sharpness of freshly grated exotic citrus zest, all wafting up from a deep stone well. In the mouth, crackling acidity makes flavors of asian pears, white flowers, and deep wet stone vibrant and pure on the palate. Notes of lemon oil and rainwater linger in the long finish that tastes like sucking on a chunk of quartz. Outstanding. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $30.

2010 Pietradolce "Archineri" Etna Rosso (Nerello Mascalese), Etna, Sicily
Light to medium ruby in color, this wine smells slightly smoky with primary aromas of forest berries and wet stones. In the mouth, gorgeously bright acidity mixes flavors of crushed rocks, dried flowers, and bright berries all wrapped in a gauze of powdery/chalky tannins. A hint of wet sawdust enters the finish. Zippy and mouthwatering, with profundity lurking just under the utterly pleasurable surface of the wine. 100% Carricante from 100-120 year-old vines. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $33. click to buy.

2009 Pietradolce "Archineri" Etna Rosso, (Nerello Mascalese), Etna, Sicily
Light to medium ruby in the glass, this wine smells of crushed berries, forest floor and pulverized stones. In the mouth gorgeous berry flavors mix with an incredible aromatic sweetness that carries scents of dried flowers deep down a shifting sinkhole of pulverized stone. The wine tastes as if it has been filtered through crushed rock dust, and the powdery tannins somehow contribute to this textural and flavor quality in the wine. Incredible balance and length. Outstanding. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $33 click to buy.

The Endless Row
McMINNVILLE, OR: Domaine Drouhin Winery estate Pinot Noir vineyards unroll over the hills of the Willamette Valley. The cities of McMinnville and Newburg are the epicenter of Oregon's wine production.

INSTRUCTIONS:
Download this image by right-clicking on the image and selecting "save link as" or "save target as" and then select the desired location on your computer to save the image. Mac users can also just click the image to open the full size view and drag that to their desktops.

To set the image as your desktop wallpaper, Mac users should follow these instructions, while PC users should follow these.

PRINTS:
Fine art prints of this image and others are available at George Rose's web site: www.georgerose.com.

EDITORIAL USE:
To purchase copies of George's photos for editorial, web, or advertising use, please contact Getty Images.

ABOUT VINOGRAPHY IMAGES:
Vinography regularly features images by photographer George Rose for readers' personal use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. We hope you enjoy them. Please respect the copyright on these images. These images are not to be reposted on any web site or blog without the express permission of the photographer.

Opinions abound as to the true value of Twitter and many employ a wide variety of metaphors that all circle around the general impression of it being 'a complete waste of time'. But for anyone interested in what wine people are thinking, drinking, and discussing this instant or this year, it provides an incredible window into the lives and minds of the world's wine critics, writers, sommeliers, wine buyers, retailers, and yes, consumers.

Using an application called TweetDeck, I actually have a streaming list of every tweet in cyberspace that contains the word 'wine' scrolling through my computer in near real time. It unfurls faster than ticker tape, and contains exactly the profound insights you might expect from a collective community of 200 million active users all over the globe.

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com.

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is available only to subscribers of her web site. If you're not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It's only £6.99 a month or £69 per year ($11/mo or $109 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

Image by Sally Falkow

I've been thinking about writing a response to the silly thing, but couldn't bring myself to do it. Thankfully my friend Blake Gray's willpower was flagging one night this week after a lot of wine judging, and he saved me the trouble.

Blake gets it pretty much right on the money. Wine tasting (i.e. criticism) is only bullshit if you think all criticism is bullshit. It's a subjective act performed by fallible humans. But that doesn't mean that some people don't know a shitload about wine, and it doesn't mean that some people can't pick up a glass and tell you which vineyard it comes from.

Enough. Go read what Blake has to say about it.

Image of wine glasses courtesy of Bigstock

Sunflowers
HOPLAND, CA: A field of colorful sunflowers grow at Saracina Vineyards under a warm Mendocino County summer sun near Hopland, California. An unusually warm spring has pushed vines and flowers into bloom much earlier than usual in California.

INSTRUCTIONS:
Download this image by right-clicking on the image and selecting "save link as" or "save target as" and then select the desired location on your computer to save the image. Mac users can also just click the image to open the full size view and drag that to their desktops.

To set the image as your desktop wallpaper, Mac users should follow these instructions, while PC users should follow these.

PRINTS:
Fine art prints of this image and others are available at George Rose's web site: www.georgerose.com.

EDITORIAL USE:
To purchase copies of George's photos for editorial, web, or advertising use, please contact Getty Images.

ABOUT VINOGRAPHY IMAGES:
Vinography regularly features images by photographer George Rose for readers' personal use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. We hope you enjoy them. Please respect the copyright on these images. These images are not to be reposted on any web site or blog without the express permission of the photographer.

But when Banks announced a week ago that he was buying the venerable Mayacamas Vineyards, you could hear wine geeks all over the country falling off their chairs. Then when the news emerged that former Screaming Eagle winemaker Andy Erickson might be brought in to make the wines at this supremely old-school winery, some were even outraged.

Despite my own awareness that Banks' involvement in the wine world was broader and deeper than one big Napa Cabernet (he's notably a partner in sommelier Rajat Parr's Sandhi Wines) I must admit I was intrigued by his purchase of a winery that, for all intents and purposes hasn't changed a thing about how it makes wine since the 1960s.

Could these two recent investments demonstrate a shift in Banks' taste for wine -- away from the high-scoring wines of his Central Coast project Jonata and Screaming Eagle, and towards the kind of wines that sommeliers pass around to each other after all the guests go home?

There was, as they say, only one way to find out. Banks was kind enough to spend some time with me on the phone last week, and so I'm happy to present to you the notes from our conversation.

Vinography: So Charles, you've made some news this week with the Mayacamas acquisition, just like you did a few weeks ago with the Wind Gap investment. What's your take on the reaction?

Charles Banks: In the end, I'm the least interesting part of the equation. Those wines, those people, and those places are what it's all about. To be frank I'd much prefer that our wines were making the news, not talk about the acquisitions. When we started Sandhi, people didn't give a damn. They said, "Oh, whatever, who knows what those guys are trying to do."

I think that when you buy something like Mayacamas, of course it's going to be newsworthy for a lot of reasons. None of which really have anything to do with me, thankfully. When you've got an historic winery that has made some of California's, and frankly the world's, greatest Cabernets, and there's been one guy doing all of that since 1968 in something like a time capsule up there, and then you have a transition like this, it's news.

Vinography: Should the broader world read anything into these two purchases, which seem to move away from the territory held by Jonata and Screaming Eagle and towards something new?

Charles Banks: The world should read a lot into that shift over time. I'm growing up. Our feelings change over time. Ten years ago you wouldn't have caught me dead making a $10 bottle of wine for instance, but now we own Cultivate, and we'll produce 50,000 cases of inexpensive wine this year. There's plenty of room for us all to grow and change. My palate has changed a lot in the last 20 years. Whose hasn't?

With Jonata I had no idea what I was doing. That's how I first met Andy Erickson. We brought in winemaker Matt Dees, and decided to do the best we could do with the piece of land that we had. And we did exactly what we set out to do. No one was making wines like that at the time in Santa Barbara. But they were what the land gave us. I didn't pick the piece of land. My partners found it, I came in and took it over and decided what to plant. It was a unique opportunity, but I couldn't exactly decide what style of wine I wanted to make. It was a place that made big ripe wines.

Then Screaming Eagle came along. Most people haven't actually tasted it. It's not a big extracted wine. Of course, compared to Sandhi, it's a ripe wine, but alcohols were always in the low 14s. The wines were elegant and feminine, but again, that was the place. We made wines with what the site gave us.

When we started Sandhi we went out and found vineyards and grapes that were very cool climate. My whole wine drinking life, I have preferred fresher-style white wines. Certainly my palate has evolved. There are still big wines that I enjoy -- I drink a lot more Chateauneuf-du-Pape than Raj does -- but that's OK. When you look at Wind Gap, Pax [Mahle] was finding sites and making wines that he wanted to make. I absolutely prefer that style of wine.

With Mayacamas it boils down to the specific site. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't make Screaming Eagle up there. The place is going to give us that mountain style, and it's a place with a story behind it.

But you should know that in addition to being driven by my personal tastes in wine, what I'm doing now in the wine world is influenced by the people I want to be in business with and like working with. I like these people, what they're doing, and their vision. I'm a venture capitalist in the wine world, but without the upside -- there is none. So when Pax has this idea, and I'm excited about it, I can provide help and capital and expertise on how to make it better than it is.

Vinography: Is there more investment to come in these kinds of wine projects?

Charles Banks: There's two aspects of where we're going with our investments. We're looking for wineries that are pushing the envelope. I want to make investments, to back guys like Raj and Pax, that are doing phenomenal things that people weren't trying to do several years ago. I'm all for that. The other angle is the tack that we've taken with Mulderbosch in South Africa. It's a winery that used to have a great reputation, but has floundered a bit for lack of focus and investment. The wines went from being the talk of the town to being over-oaked, or with high residual sugar in their Sauvignon Blanc. The wines went downhill, but we saw the potential to revitalize the company.

We don't do a lot of deals. I look at new deals every week and pass on almost everything. You have to weigh all these different things, to see if the opportunity is right and the place is right, and if you have right people and all other things in place.

Vinography: Let's come back to Mayacamas. Why did you buy it?

Charles Banks: I was up talking with Bob Travers [Mayacamas owner and winemaker]
the other day for lunch and we were tasting through the 2011's which are brilliant, and I was asking him about how he did that in such a hard vintage. He laughed and said that he was above all those problems. I said to him, "Bob for the last 40 years you've been above all the noise." The guy is the John Wayne of the wine business. He's not taking shit from anyone.

Not only did I respect that, and was very interested in that -- I've been talking with him since 2008 about trying to buy it -- the place itself is just incredible. You don't feel like you're in Napa. It's so remote, so alone. 465 acres up on the mountain, but 57 acres planted. But those acres are so spread out, it's like buying 15 different 5-acre Napa estates. It would take you a couple of hours to walk from the furthest block to the furthest block.

It reminds me of a painter's palette -- all those colors -- to have that many different diverse blocks to choose from.

In the end, the reason I bought Mayacamas (and I should say, this was a personal purchase that my wife and I and two friends made outside of Terroir Capital -- not one of our official investments) is so that I have the freedom to make wines the way I want to, which is to pay attention to what is there and that is it. Nothing else is relevant. I won't have to think about what any wine critic thinks of the wine. I can make wines the way Bob made them. I can keep that style and not worry whether people think it should be ready to drink when it's young. It's incredibly challenging, exciting, and appealing.

Vinography: I appreciate you are a fan of the Mayacamas style, but you're a new owner, and you're going to come in with winemaker Andy Erickson and start making the wines, and what most of us want to know is whether this is the end of Mayacamas as we knew it?

Charles Banks: In a way yes, in a way no. When you've had one guy doing everything for more than 40 years, and then he's done, something goes. I respect and appreciate what Bob has done over the last 40 years, and what the vineyards have done over the last 40 years. But Bob is going to Hawaii. He's ready to go. He's going to stay at the winery for a few months -- it's an important transition for him, but he's excited to work with Andy. A lot of people think Andy's going to come up there and try to make another Screaming Eagle. That's what Andy's done but that's not what he's about. We are absolutely not going to change the style of the wines.

Vinography: Since you're quite focused on the style, how do you describe Mayacamas' style?

Charles Banks: The style as I see it is a strange combination of finesse, elegance and rustic mountain power. The wines can be surprisingly floral, but incredibly tannic. I like that balance you can get in years when you achieve a perfect marriage of finesse and power. The wines last for a really, really long time. In the best vintages, the wines are good when they're young, when they're old, for their whole life. But there will be vintages when you can't achieve that, and you get rustic, hard tannins. But the style is that combination of finesse, elegance and power.

Vinography: OK, but certainly with new ownership there will be changes. What can fans of the wines expect?

Charles Banks: Certainly there will be changes. There will be an evolution over time. The forklift is still an airplane tug with bald tires. We're going to be upgrading some of the equipment. For now we're only doing some cleaning and putting in a new press. We're certainly not married to the equipment, but we are married to the style. We have the freedom to do that.

We will also be slowly replanting some vineyards. I want to get to the point where we're producing wines like they were in the Sixties, Seventies, and early Eighties. We'll be sticking with the style, but making the execution better.

Vinography: But if you're investing a bunch of money in this effort aren't you going to want to get a return? Won't that reality alone drive changes? You're going to want to sell more wine and sell it better than Travers has been able to do. Won't that drive you to make things more... ahem... commercially viable?

Charles Banks: Let's start with the fact that from an investing standpoint, if I was a really good businessman, I wouldn't be investing in the wine business. I'm doing this for a lot of reasons, a lot of which don't have an opportunity for me to make a return on my capital. I look at this as an opportunity to become a steward.

This is not a suitable investment -- not like the ones we make at Terroir. We're long term oriented at Terroir, but we're not generationally oriented. When we invest we don't expect it to take thirty years to turn a profit.

While I don't want to be bleeding money, I am definitely looking at this as a 20-30 year project.

Now it sounds like you're asking about what this is going to do to prices. That is a good and reasonable question. In the short term, there will be very little change in pricing. This business has a symbiotic relationship between ownership and the consumer. The consumer gets to vote with their dollars. Do they keep buying, or don't they, it's all just whether the wine is living up to their expectations.

But we are making an investment, and that means the price is going to go up. If that price creeps upward over five or six years, and the consumer says "No! these investments are not paying off enough to make me want to pay $65 or $70 a bottle instead of $60," then we're in trouble. But ultimately the reality is that the consumer does have to subsidize the investment, but hopefully paying more for wines that are better.

We're not talking about Screaming Eagle and Harlan Estate here, where the pricing equation is all about the power of brand and supply and demand. Our singular goal is to make the best wines we can make. We'll have to figure out what our customers need to pay to allow us to do that, and be fair at the same time. I'd like my dad to be able to afford a bottle. We're not going to be jacking up the prices to see what people will pay.

Vinography: I know you've done a lot of work with Michel Rolland. Will he be involved at all?

Charles Banks: No. He's an amazing guy with an amazing palate, that has done some incredible things, but that doesn't mean he should be doing everything.

Vinography: How involved will you be personally?

Charles Banks: I'm going to be VERY active. Andy and I have been talking for almost two years about the Mayacamas style, and really thinking philosophically about how we are going to do this. I haven't just hired him and told him to go do his thing. We want to keep things the same, but just make the execution better, and that isn't easy to do. We're going to keep our ears and eyes peeled. We're going to be detailed. I realize how high the stakes are.

* * *

As someone who appreciates Mayacamas wines, I was certainly among those who wondered about what this purchase would mean for the wines. After this conversation with Banks, I'm actually somewhat enthusiastic to see the fruits of his investments into the property. I've had my share of funky bottles from Mayacamas over the last few years, and while I definitely still appreciate the idea of a winery that hasn't changed a thing in decades, I certainly think the wines in some cases could be better.

We will all just have to wait and see what Banks and Erickson manage to do, high up in their mountain hermitage. Given that the current release Cabernet from Mayacamas is still the 2007 vintage, we've got another seven years before we truly see what this new chapter in the winery's history will taste like. But then again, the wines of Mayacamas have always required more than a little patience.

Image of Charles courtesy of Sandhi Wines

Sometimes the true story of a winery is not found in its history, tracing back the ownership from generation to generation. The story of some wineries begins when someone decides to start afresh with the materials of the past, looking forward instead of back.

Rex Brooke-Taylor was certainly forward looking when he planted his Marlborough Vineyards in 1980 and 1981. An engineer from Wellington, Brooke-Taylor named his winery Framingham after his ancestral estate in East Anglia, and had the unusual foresight to plant Phylloxera-resistant rootstock in an era when many couldn't imagine the pest making it to New Zealand's shores. Fatefully, Brooke-Taylor also planted Riesling, and those vines are now the oldest Riesling vines in New Zealand.

Unfortunately, Brooke-Taylor was a bit too forward thinking, and overbuilt the winery, leading to an eventual cash crunch that forced the winery's sale. Sold to Wyndham in Australia, Framingham quickly became a trading card for some of the world's largest wine companies, changing hands several times before ending up in the portfolio of Sogrape Vinhos, the Portuguese wine company who own, among other things, Sandeman and Mateus.

The winery might have kept changing hands were it not for a quirky Englishman with a penchant for Riesling who found his way to Framingham in 2001 and knew a good thing when he saw it.

Dr. Andrew Hedley, known as "Doc" to his friends, was trained as a chemist and expected to spend most of his career in a lab doing serious and complex R&D production of small batches of synthesized chemicals and process research. "I know a lot about Bromines," says Hedley, who realized one day that he was spending a larger percentage of his (growing) salary on wine each year.

"I've always drunk wine at home," says Hedley. "Me dad was a design engineer and had to go to the Mosel and to Austria frequently, and used to take us on holidays to the Alps. I can remember him coming back from one trip and sitting down to tell me the Pradikat story, and I was fascinated and it stick with me."

"In my spare time I ended up reading a lot about wine," he continues "and started going to tastings, and it just kind of mushroomed from there."

After a solid career in England, Hedley and his wife decided they were looking for a change, and began flirting with the idea of moving to New Zealand. It dawned on Hedley that he might be able to get work in the wine industry.

"We were getting the weekly job section from Auckland sent over," says Hedley, "but I decided to also go to the London Wine Fair and see who I could meet."

There he connected with Alan Hoey, who was working for Yalumba at the time, but had contacts through his employer to New Zealand. "He gave me the name of a contact there," remembers Hedley, "but I waited and didn't call yet. A little while later my wife was reading the paper when she said, 'Hey, there's a job here you might be able to do.' It was a position as a lab manager for a contract winery."

The hiring manager was exactly the same guy that Howie had referred Hedley too. Not willing to spit in the eye of fate, Hedley applied by fax and phone.

"It was the only job in Marlborough I could possibly have done," says Hedley. "It was Christmas Eve in 1997 when they called and asked if I could start on January 6th."

Hedley flew out, and was followed a few weeks later by his wife Debra, who hurriedly packed up their belongings and shipped them out.

"I was thrown into the 1998 harvest with no idea about anything," recalls Hedley. "Chucked in at the deep end. I knew my way around a lab, and I had scientific rigor, and that was enough to let me survive."

Hedley stayed there for three and a half years, eventually earning the title of Technical Winemaker.

"Basically I was the guy who would come in and troubleshoot for people, look after certain areas of process," says Hedley. "But the title had the word 'winemaker' in it, and that's what eventually enabled me to move to Framingham. It's all about being at the right place at the right time and being able to land on your feet."

In 2003 Hedley took over as winemaker at Framingham without every having been solely responsible for a wine.

"I rallied from having no experience to figuring out when to pick things. Thankfully most of the wines turned out all right," says Hedley. "When I look back, it was really seat of the pants," he laughs. "Everything I've done, I learned by reading on the toilet, and there's a real element of truth in that."

Hedley, it turns out, happens to be good at dealing with the things that life throws him. In 2006, in the prime of his career, he was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. He waited on pins and needles for the biopsy results, and received the news he did not want to hear.

A few weeks later, the doctors had completely removed his larynx, disconnected his esophagus, and punched a permanent hole in his chest opening his lungs to the environment but allowing him to breathe. This scarily complex re-plumbing operation had dramatic consequences. Hedley must now speak using an electrolarynx, a small hand-held device that, when placed against the throat, allow him to generate speech tones, which he usually begins by "apologizing for sounding like a Dalek."

More alarmingly, this operation completely thwarted Hedley's ability to taste wine. "I had to find a new way to taste and smell wines," he admits. Unable to inhale or exhale, nor to easily produce the retro-nasal draft that accompanies the quite gurgling taste of a typical wine professional, Hedley must create a vacuum in his mouth using his cheeks, and carefully swallow.

"I take a lot more time to taste things these days," says Hedley, "and I get desensitized pretty quickly. When this all happened, I told the winery owners that if I couldn't figure out how to make it work, I'd certainly step aside, but so far so good."

"We've actually won more awards since I started having to smell wines this way," quips Hedley, who also gives great thanks to Sogrape for their willingness to not only trust him, but largely stay out of the way of day-to-day operations. "They don't interfere, and don't want to change something that isn't broken" he says.

In the face of adversity, Hedley has managed to not only continue working, but develop into a winemaker of considerable talent. Possessing a lifelong appreciation for Riesling and presiding over one of New Zealand's finest Riesling vineyards has allowed Hedley to prove, almost singlehandedly, that New Zealand can produce world-class Rieslings.

"I love Riesling, and I don't know exactly why," muses Hedley. "Maybe it was the influence of my dad, or our holidays, but it's just always been the most compelling grape for me. It gets under your skin and never goes away."

"Of course, it's also about that mineral tone and a real sense of place," continues Hedley, "and you also get to feel a bit rebellious championing something no one gives a shit about."

One of the reasons Hedley seems to be so good with the grape has to do with how much of it he drinks. Sitting by a river with some friends of Hedley's they day before I visited him, I was informed with somewhat wild-eyed stares that New Zealand didn't have enough Riesling for Hedley, so he had to start importing it himself.

In my experience, the more benchmark examples of a particular wine that a winemaker has tasted, the better they are at making it. Conversely, after tasting some particularly unimpressive version of an imported grape made into wine by some winemaker, I'm often unsurprised to learn how little experience the winemaker has tasting it.

Hedley can rattle off a who's who of top German and Austrian producers, and easily and fondly recalls favorite vintages and wines. He travels regularly to Germany and Austria, as well as to international conferences on Riesling all over the world. It's not hard to see how deeply in love Hedley is with Riesling, especially when he talks about the 2012 vintage.

"In 2012 we made the full Pradikat series, Spatlese through TBA," he beams. "That's the first time anyone has done that in New Zealand. Of course, we only have 200 bottles of the stuff, and we decided to label our TBA [Trockenbeerenauslese] just BA [Beerenauslese], but we did it."

Hedley's winemaking regimen varies. "I'm a paid lackey," he jokes. "If it was my winery, I wouldn't have to give a shit about the consumer. But we do have those 25 people around the world that buy our wines, so we have to take care of them and make sure they like the wines. So we do a mixture of wild yeast and inoculated ferments for our main wines."

"In the F-Series wines," he continues, "we don't have to worry what people think about volatile acidity and sulfides. There's more creeping luddite winemaking year after year around here." He grins.

For running a winery owned by an ostensibly conservative, corporate parent, Hedley manages a fairly non-interventionalist approach to most of the wines. Apart from that occasional use of commercial yeasts, he takes a decidedly low sulfur, old-oak, very little temperature control, and a low-alcohol approach to most of his wines.

He's also in the process of working with the estate's viticulturalist James Bowskill to convert the estate to organic, but suggests that they will probably stop short of paying for certification.

Putting some official stamp on the bottle isn't important to Hedley. "Organic is the right thing to do, so we're doing it, but I always want the first thing that people to encounter to be what's in the bottle," he says, "Then they can get the philosophy and the back story, and allay whatever fears they might have about us."

There's nothing to fear when it comes to Framingham wines.

"Except the name," says Hedley, "no one can pronounce it. It's dubious as to whether it's of any use to us at all."

Hedley presides over about 40 acres of vineyards, from which Framingham produces a bit more than 5000 cases of wine each year, the majority being Sauvignon Blanc, and a few other wines that are produced just under the Framingham name. The F-Series wines, which Hedley insists are not meant to be a reserve range, nor necessarily better, represent alternative treatments of the grape varieties in the core range, as well as wines that the vintage specifically allows Hedley to make. These are produced in tiny quantities, sometimes as little as a single barrel.

Strangely, given their quality, very few of the Framingham wines make it to the U.S. They are better represented in the UK market, however.

Should you come across a bottle, especially a slender tapering one with the word Riesling on the front, you can't possibly go wrong. Hedley is the acknowledged master of the grape in New Zealand, and he's really only just getting started. Just imagining what this guy will be capable of doing in 15 years thrills me to no end.

TASTING NOTES:

2012 Framingham Sauvignon Blanc, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Pale greenish gold in the glass, this wine smells of gooseberry and green apple aromas. In the mouth the wine is quite silky and plush with flavors of gooseberry and green apple, with some underlying stoniness. A portion of barrel fermentation and malolactic fermentation has given the wine some weight in the mouth, and the acidity is somewhat softer than you might expect. But has pure flavors and a delicacy that some Marlborough Sauvignon Blancs don't have. 16,000 cases made. 13.0% alcohol. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $16. click to buy.

2009 Framingham "F-Series" Sauvignon Blanc, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light greenish gold in the glass, this wine smells of wet stones, cut grass, and cucumber. In the mouth, quite soft and silky textures, deliver deeply mineral flavors and green notes such as green apple, cucumber, and star fruit. The acidity is too soft for my tastes, and leaves the wine without enough bite, but the flavors are quite pleasing. Made in the natural style, without any sulfur additions except before bottling. 60% aged in steel, 40% aged in old oak. 1700 cases made. 14.0% alcohol. Score: around 8.5.

2005 Framingham Dry Riesling, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light gold in the glass with a distinct greenish tinge, this wine smells of paraffin and wet stones with hints of citrus. In the mouth, exotic citrus zest and wet stones mix beautifully with smokier paraffin and diesel qualities. Quite pretty, delicate acidity keeps the wine bright and lifted on the palate, while a stony quality lingers in the finish. 700 cases made. This wine was made until the 2008 vintage, but this is the current release in 2013. Dry. 12.0% alcohol. Score: around 9.

2011 Framingham "F-Series Old Vine" Riesling, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light greenish gold in the glass, this wine smells of ripe pears and apples with hints of citrus. In the mouth, the wine is quite beautifully textured, and juicy apple and pear flavors take on a mandarine orange quality as a deeper mineral quality creeps into the wine. Excellent filigreed acidity brightens the wine and makes for a wonderfully knit together package. Excellent finish. Dry. 13.0% alcohol. Score: around 9.

2011 Framingham "Classic" Riesling, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Pale greenish gold in the glass, this wine smells of honey and lime zest. In the mouth, stony notes of green apple and lime zest mix with a hint of tonic water. A dry chalky quality lingers in the finish. Excellent acidity. Faintly sweet. 1800 cases made. 12.0% alcohol. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $25. click to buy.

2012 Framingham "Select" Riesling, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Pale gold in the glass, this wine smells of honey and golden apples. In the mouth, bright golden apple and mandarine orange flavors mix with a quite pure clover honey quality that is quite charming. Very nice stony minerality underlies the fruit. Lightly sweet, the wine hews quite nicely to its Spatlese designation. Nice finish. 8.5% alcohol. Score: between 8.5 and 9.

2012 Framingham "Noble" Riesling, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Medium greenish-yellow in the glass, this wine smells of pure clover honey and a touch of canned mandarine oranges. In the mouth the wine is silky and sweet with flavors of honey, wet stones, and orange blossom water. Excellent acidity keeps the wine bright through the long finish. Perhaps not quite as complex as it could be, it is nonetheless damn tasty. Moderately sweet. 7.5% alcohol. Score: around 9.

2012 Framingham "F-Series Spatlese" Riesling, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light gold in the glass, this wine smells of star fruit and golden apples with hints of citrus peel. In the mouth, the wine has a wonderful lemon curd and bright mandarine orange quality that leans towards berry in its juiciness. Excellent acidity, this wine is broad and complex. Made similarly to the classic series Riesling, with the exception that there is some barrel fermentation in old oak, along with completely native yeast ferment. These have added some complexity and length to the wine that is quite compelling. Lightly sweet with a great finish. 8.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5.

2012 Framingham "F-Series Auslese" Riesling, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light to medium greenish gold in the glass, this wine smells of mandarine oranges and marzipan with notes of honey. In the mouth, flavors of candied mandarine and honey have a wonderful brightness to them thanks to zippy acidity. Wonderful stony notes, combined with the acidity mean that this wine tastes only lightly sweet. Long finish. Only about 400 half bottles made. 8.5% alcohol. Score: around 9.

2012 Framingham "F-Series Beerenauslese" Riesling, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Medium yellow-gold with hints of green, this wine smells of honey, candied orange peel, and marzipan. In the mouth the wine is voluminous on the palate, with flavors of honey, candied citrus, and white flowers. Quite pretty and floral, the wine lacks some of the acidity that would make it more dynamic in the mouth, but there is enough acid there to keep it from being syrupy. Lovely and long in the mouth, and aching for cheese. Very sweet. Only 200 bottles made. 7% alcohol. Score: around 9.

2012 Framingham Pinot Gris, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light gold in the glass, this wine smells of golden apples and hints of quince. In the mouth, flavors of quince, golden apples, cold cream and wet stones have a nice crispness to them. Delicate, lacy acidity is perhaps on the softer side, but it is enough to give this wine lift and brightness. A spicy quince flavor lingers on the front of the palate through the long finish. Quite pretty. 800 cases made. Slightly off-dry. 14.0% alcohol. Score: between 8.5 and 9.

2011 Framingham "F-Series" Viognier, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light greenish gold in color, this wine smells of dried and fresh apricots. In the mouth, the wine has a bright zippy quality thanks to excellent acidity, and a pretty flavor profile of apricot, white peach, and orange peel. There's a nice stony note underneath all the fruit and honey. Beautifully textured thanks to about 30% of the wine being barrel fermented. 60 cases made. 14.0% alcohol. Score: around 9.

2012 Framingham Gewürztraminer, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light greenish gold in the glass, this wine smells of rose petals and orange blossoms. In the mouth, the wine has a silky, weighty feel on the palate that conveys quite a sexy character. Flavors of rose petals, orange peel, and a hint of earth swirl in this silky purse of a wine. The acidity seems quite low, but that doesn't somehow matter for this wine, which lingers for a long time in the mouth with hints of ginger and lemongrass. Off-dry. 13.5% alcohol. Score: between 8.5 and 9.

2009 Framingham "F-Series" Pinot Noir, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Medium ruby in the glass, this wine smells of pretty cranberry and raspberry fruit. In the mouth, cherry, cranberry and raspberry flavors have an intense brightness to them that makes the mouth water. These are welded to forest floor notes and a nice cedary brown sugar finish that lingers for a long time. Excellent acidity gives the wines lift and faint tannins add complexity to an overall fantastic package. 14.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5.

2011 Framingham Pinot Noir, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light ruby in the glass with hints of purple, this wine smells of wonderfully bright forest berry aromas. In the mouth, wonderful cherry and raspberry flavors have a hint of caramelized brown sugar flavor mixed with a touch of cedar. Good acidity and very faint, almost imperceptible tannins linger through the finish along with a hint of earth. Quite pretty. 23% new oak. 13.5% alcohol. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $25. click to buy.

2011 Framingham "F-Series" Pinot Noir, Wairay Valley, Marlborough, New Zealand
Medium perfect ruby in the glass, this wine smells of beautifully earthy and woody notes on top of red fruit. There's even a hint of cocoa powder. In the mouth the wine is gorgeously bright with excellent acidity that lifts flavors of cherry, raspberry, and cranberry to dynamic and dancing heights. Faint tannins hang in the background and give some structure to the bright fruit, as does a deeper forest floor note that emerges on the finish along with hints of soy sauce. 14.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5.

Taste and win, indeed.

Even more telling are the number of these "eno savants" (to perhaps coin a phrase) that live in Friuli, in northeast Italy.

Once upon a time, there was no Italy, there was only the river Isonzo, winding its way down out of the Alps towards the Adriatic sea. From the high peaks it looped and loped, laying down beds of granitic gravel to make a sloping country that sprouted many things. Protected from the harsh continental weather by the Alps, and warmed by the humid breezes off the Adriatic, this mild region naturally attracted the various nomadic people that passed through the region, some of whom knew a good thing when they saw it, and settled down.

Some of the earliest settlers of the region were likely Celtic peoples who brought with them not only the skills of cultivating grape vines, but the inventive skills of aging their wines in wooden casks, a technology which surprised and delighted the Greeks and the various other Mediterranean cultures who came to trade in the 4th century B.C.

The region that would eventually become known as Farra d'Isonzo to those who live there, passed through the hands of many an empire before it settled down into the little nook of Italy that it represents today. But throughout the centuries Friuli has always been known for two things: grapes, and people who do things their own way.

Fulvio Bressan represents the 9th generation of winemakers carrying the Bressan name and working a small plot of land in the Farra d'Isonzo since 1726. And given the way he runs his winery, you would think that he might just be channeling all 9 generations of prior expertise, with little care for how the rest of the world might make their wines.

Bressan (shown above with his wife Jelena) makes only two real concessions to modernity: fermenting his wine in stainless steel tanks (sometimes cooled with his own well water), and occasionally adding a little sulfur dioxide at bottling time. Apart from these two acts, Bressan is as old school as you can get, down to the fact that he seems to run the family estate almost single-handedly.

The Bressan recipe for wine is as simple as it is maddeningly extreme.

Take about 45 acres of old vines growing various indigenous varietals, as well as Pinot Noir. Dry farm them with the most extreme methods possible, with no cover crops, to the point that each vine bears only one or two clusters of fruit. Pick after personally tasting every single cluster to make sure it is ripe, then cut off only the shoulders and the most perfect clumps of berries on those clusters and throw them into the tank, leaving the rest to be made into jam or grappa. In years when nature isn't kind, well, that's when you don't make wine.

Ferment the wine for months with only ambient yeasts after a month-long maceration period, letting the wine do its thing as long as necessary in the tanks, including malolactic fermentation after the juice has been pressed off the skins. After this secondary fermentation, transfer the wine to 2000 liter, ancient oak casks, where it receives regular battonage (a process where the particles of yeast that settle to the bottom of the cask, known as lees, are agitated and stirred around in the wine). Fining and filtration are also eschewed. All of the wines are bottled by hand, including a vintage date stamped by hand. Except for when Bressan can't be bothered.

The wines are released and sold when Bressan damn well pleases, and in minute quantities (as small as 20 to 40 cases for some wines) corresponding to the often depressed yields provided by vineyards that Bressan adamantly refuses to coax into higher yields. In fact, the DOC rules for Friuli now require producers to drop fruit, theoretically in the name of quality. Since Bressan won't be caught dead doing so, he bottles all his wines under the regional IGT designation, and leaves it at that.

Bressan makes anywhere from zero (years in which the weather doesn't cooperate) to about 3,800 cases of wine each year. 2002 and 2005 were both tough years, as was 2012, thanks to hail which reduced yields by 40%.

At VinItaly 2013 you could hear and smell Fulvio Bressan before you saw him. With a lit cigar clamped between his teeth and a hearty laugh, he and his wife were surrounded by a crowd of people eager to taste his idiosyncratic wines the first day I passed by his booth.

Not wanting to wade through a crowd, I came by early the following day to find the booth much quieter, and Bressan's cigar mercifully extinguished, though still clamped firmly in his teeth.

I got the opportunity to speak with his wife Jelena for a while about Bressan's iconoclastic approach to winemaking. Many of those who style themselves the voices of today's cutting-edge trends in winemaking would happily claim Bressan for their own. The natural wine movement and the biodynamic wine movements have both attempted to do so.

But Bressan is having none of it, disavowing any such alliance. There's almost certainly a much more eloquent and probably untranslatable Italian phrase to describe the rat's ass that Bressan doesn't give about such winemakers, most of whom he considers to be purveyors of garbage. With cigar in teeth it's no surprise that he brings to mind the famous Groucho Marx quote "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."

No matter the topic, as long as it is about wine, and Bressan seems to have a vociferous, if not outraged opinion on it. Luckily they are usually delivered with a smile or a twinkle in the eye. Except, of course, when Bressan preemptively threatens the life of anyone who might introduce cultured yeasts into his winery (whose new roof apparently has herbs mixed into the mortar so as to encourage the native yeasts). Don't mention cultured yeasts.

Larger than life to be sure, with far more passion than politesse, Bressan and his wines share a sense of unvarnished honesty that is refreshing, and even electrifying. The man and his wines are not for everyone, but frankly, that's just the way he likes it.

TASTING NOTES:

2007 Bressan Verduzzo, Friuli, Italy
Light orange in color, this wine smells like melted creamsicle, orange peel, and chamomile laden with honey. In the mouth juicy herbal flavors of chamomile and orange peel swirl in a beautifully textured package with a nice balance. 13% alcohol. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $45. click to buy.


2006 Bressan Pinot Nero, Friuli, Italy
Light garnet in the glass, this wine smells of black olives, sandalwood and deep dried fruit. In the mouth flavors of nicoise olives, cedar and dried cherries are wrapped in a blanket of find grained, supple tannins that seem to leave flavors of dried herbs in their wake. Good acidity, quite savory. 13% alcohol. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $45. click to buy.


2003 Bressan "Ego" Red blend, Friuli, Italy
Medium garnet in color, this wine smells of juniper berries, cherries, and cedar boughs. In the mouth, juicy flavors of cherries cedar, leather and earth are dusted with powdery tannins and lively thanks to excellent acidity. The fruity, woody flavors of the wine turn more herbal and take on that juniper herbal quality in the finish. Delicious. A blend of Schioppettino and Cabernet Franc. 13% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $40. click to buy.


2001 Bressan Pignol, Friuli, Italy
Light ruby in color, this wine smells of cedar, nicoise olives, and herbs. In the mouth flavors of nicoise olives meld beautifully with cherry fruit, cedar, and mulling spices. Suede-like tannins gently buff the tongue as the wine rumbles earthily through a long finish. Great acidity and balance. 13% alcohol. Score: around 9. Cost: $85. click to buy.


2006 Bressan Schioppettino, Friuli, Italy
Light to medium ruby in color, this wine smells of mixed herbs, juniper boughs, and tart, sour berries. In the mouth redcurrant and sour cherry fruit mix with freshly crushed green herbs and cedar shavings. Soft, supple tannins add depth and complexity to this intense wine, whose brightness thanks to great acidity is one of its great strengths. 13% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $45. click to buy.

Rainbow Rows
HEALDSBURG, CA: Hillside vineyards in the popular grape-growing region of Alexander Valley are viewed from the air near Healdsburg, California.

INSTRUCTIONS:
Download this image by right-clicking on the image and selecting "save link as" or "save target as" and then select the desired location on your computer to save the image. Mac users can also just click the image to open the full size view and drag that to their desktops.

To set the image as your desktop wallpaper, Mac users should follow these instructions, while PC users should follow these.

PRINTS:
Fine art prints of this image and others are available at George Rose's web site: www.georgerose.com.

EDITORIAL USE:
To purchase copies of George's photos for editorial, web, or advertising use, please contact Getty Images.

ABOUT VINOGRAPHY IMAGES:
Vinography regularly features images by photographer George Rose for readers' personal use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. We hope you enjoy them. Please respect the copyright on these images. These images are not to be reposted on any web site or blog without the express permission of the photographer.

With your eyes closed, even absent the screams of wheeling gulls, and the throaty slap of waves against the sand, you'd know where you are. The tangy scent of the sea is unmistakable. The flavor is equally familiar thanks to the crunch of seaweed, the tiny tidepools of oyster liquor that some of us slurp, or even the saline shock that accompanies an open-mouthed tumble in the waves. Isak Dinesen said "the cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea" reminding us of the affinities between our bodies of water. If we find the sea in us, then how hard is it to find it in wine? The Romans, never short on subtlety, were known for adding seawater to their finest vintages. Today we taste and smell the sea in tinier, more piquant doses — a whiff from a glass, or a trace on the tongue. The French, in their elegance, have repurposed the word iodé to capture the iodine tang of the ocean in wine, while others find crushed shells and kelp in everything from Champagne to Sherry. Like many of wine's more savory notes, a hint of the sea goes a long way towards another gulp, or even another glass.

Benanti "Pietramarina" Etna Bianco Superiore, Etna, Sicily
Sandhi "Rita's Crown" Chardonnay, Santa Rita Hills, Santa Barbara, California, USA
Chateau de Maltroye "La Dent de Chien" Chassagne-Montrachet Premier Cru, Burgundy, France
Cape Point Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc, Cape Point, South Africa
Weingut Franz Kunstler "Hochheim Hölle Erstes Gewachs" Trocken Riesling, Rheingau, Germany
Massican "Annia" White Blend, Napa Valley, California, USA
Domaine Sigalas Santorini White Blend, Santorini, Greece
Hajszan "Weissleiten" Gemischter Satz, Vienna, Austria
Charles Heidsieck "Blanc des Millenaires" Vintage Blanc de Blancs, Champagne, France
Ottella Lugana Superiore, Veneto, Italy
Domaine de la Pepiere "Granite de Clisson" Muscadet, Loire Valley, France

This is part of an ongoing series of original images and prose called The Essence of Wine

Eventually, in Cornelissen time frames, is about 10 years. It's all part of a plan he is executing with the frenetic passion of a man running across a burning bridge.

"I'm 51. I think I can do another 25 vintages," he says, his brow furrowed and jaw tense. "I have to focus and concentrate and cant lose more time. Every ten years around here you get a great vintage, and I can't blow it."

"I want to make, if possible," he continues, "the greatest wine on earth. That is my quest, and I have to focus."

If you watch Cornelissen's face, you can see the intensity of thoughts play across it, like clouds casting shadows on the earth, and any sense of hyperbole that you might find in a statement like that gets brushed aside by earnest passion.

Cornelissen is clearly a man on a mission, a mission that hit him like a bolt of lightning thirteen years ago.

Born in Belgium, Cornelissen fell in love with wine as a young man, and eventually began a career as a wine sales representative that led him to the single defining moment of his life: his first taste of a wine made from grapes grown on Sicily's Mount Etna. Within little more than a year of that first taste of what he believed to be the holy grail of terroir, he had become a winemaker.

Cornelissen began his odyssey armed with a deep and abiding love for Burgundy and the other fine wines of the world, and little else -- no formal or even informal training as a winemaker and no plan to speak of, other than a burning desire to pursue the flavor of "liquified rocks" that he tasted in that first sip of Nerello Mascalese.

At first, Cornelissen rented some vineyards on the slopes of the volcano, but starting in 2001, he began purchasing several small vineyard plots. One of these plots may be one of the world's most unique vineyards -- a roughly three-acre plot of own-rooted vines that pre-date the Phylloxera epidemic that wiped out most of Europe's vineyards. These near 140-year-old vines sit at about 3000 feet of elevation on the flank of Mount Etna. In the winter, they are buried under more than six feet of snow. During the summer they sweat through 100+ degree days, followed by nights that can dip down to below fifty degrees. The scraggly, head-pruned (aka alberello) vines, often anchored to nothing more than a sharp stick driven into the earth next to the vine, sit low to the ground and sink their roots through the shallow soil until they are brought up short by solid, volcanic rock. This is rock that was not so long ago, and may become any day again in the future, molten lava.

And what passes for soil on Etna is essentially more of the same rock, pulverized into tiny microscopic crystals called lapilli that fall from the sky incessantly, covering everything in a fine layer of black sand. Organic matter? Not much to be found here.

Cornelissen's oldest vines, gnarled and tree-like, often provide only a single bunch of tiny berries, resulting in yields per acre that are so minuscule as to be nearly commercially nonviable.

Cornelissen farms 26 acres of vineyards, spread over the upper elevations of the Northeast slopes of Etna. His farming methods make even biodynamic winegrowing seem luxurious. He adds nothing to his vineyards. No compost, no manure, no water, no copper, no sulfur, no herbicides, nothing. In between his rows and blocks of vineyards he has planted native fruit and nut trees, buckwheat, and wildflowers. Every vine is carefully pruned and managed throughout the growing season, and harvest is done on a vine by vine level, resulting in many multiple passes through the vineyards over the span of days.

Eschewing any and all additions to his wine, including sulfur even at bottling, Cornelissen practices a form of "natural" winemaking in the extreme. The wines are fermented with ambient yeasts either in big plastic tubs out in front of the winery, or in buried terra cotta amphorae lined with epoxy. You won't find a single wood barrel in the winery.

His white wines (really orange) macerate for weeks, even months, on their skins. All wines are bottled without fining or filtration. As a result both reds and whites have a lot of sediment, and some are just downright cloudy.

This obsessive focus on naturalness shouldn't be mistaken for a luddite approach to winemaking. Quite the contrary, Cornelissen is obsessed with utilizing technology, but only in ways that doesn't impact the wine. He disinfects with Ozone: "Working without sulfur requires an absolutely sterile cellar," and the new winery under construction will be a state-of-the-art gravity flow facility, allowing him to get rid of some pumps. He prefers expensive synthetic corks for all but his Magma bottling because they allow him to "perfectly control the oxygen exchange rate." The few thousand natural corks he does buy each year for that wine are "biosterilized with beta rays."

"It's about absolute attention to detail," he explains, rather than some throwback to tradition. "I love living in this era," he continues, "the only difficult thing with this period of time is that you have to make difficult choices. You have to choose what you want to do with your life, and what your expectations are."

Cornelissen doesn't hold back from criticism of some of the choices he made when he was starting his journey.

"It takes time, you know," he says. "I'm only in my thirteenth year. Everyone starts wherever they start. You make the decision to come out here, and you adapt to the place you have come, but you also come from a certain point of view. You take time, and you adapt the way you produce. Eventually it comes down to just two things: the wine, and the territory. Whatever technique you use, you can't have a fixed procedure for how to make wines. You try things, and if you feel you can express the territory, then you have ended up with what you wanted to achieve."

I have interpreted the place better and better," he continues. "So shoot me for having made oxidized wines to start with. I started provocative. But if I analyze my last twelve years, gradually I've turned into a producer who has a sensitivity for the soil, someone who is interpreting that in a good -- no not a good -- in a precise way. Precision. That's where I want to go."

But Cornelissen's plans extend beyond precision, beyond what he will be able to learn and achieve in the twenty-five vintages he hopes to be able to make.

"I have a plan for the next two generations, and what they will be doing," he says, as he drives us down the narrow streets of his village. "We will have more problems like phylloxera and other diseases, so I am working on trying to reproduce vines from seeds, breeding for grapes that might be resistant to some of these threats."

"My biggest challenge I think will be to convince our children of the importance and heritage of the land," he muses. "Right now, I'm just trying to buy as much land as I can. Even if it means not building my cellar and just renting one. Or if I have to build it at the age of eighty, that's fine. But land you cannot construct. It's there. If the opportunity is there, it is important to buy."

Cornelissen painstakingly produces about 2500 cases of wine each year with the help of an assistant, Pepe, and a crew of friends and family during harvest time.

His rosé wine is named Susucaru, which in the local Catanian dialect can mean either and both "they swallowed it" or "they stole it." This is what his vineyard workers shouted when it came time for Cornelissen's first harvest and all the grapes had, indeed, been carried off in the night. It is an unusual blend of both red and white grapes, and is bottled and sold as a non-vintage wine, despite being produced from a single harvest. Like many of his bottlings, Cornelissen prefers to label the wine with a sequential number. 2012 was his fifth year of producing Susucaru, so it is Susucaru 5.

"Susucaru is my first wine of the harvest and my most technical wine," says Cornelissen. "It's made in an excel spreadsheet. I need to know how much of the aromatic varieties, how much Nerello Mascalese, some ripe, some not so ripe, depending on what happens with the aromatic varieties."

The bulk of his production is a pale red wine he calls Munjebel, which is 100% Nerello Mascalese from a number of different vineyard sites on Etna, none of which host vines any younger than 50 years old. When I visited, the 2012 still hadn't completed fermentation, nearly five months after harvest.

Cornelissen also makes a small amount of skin-fermented white (or rather, orange) wine from a blend of indigenous grape varieties, that he bottles under the name Munjebel Bianco.

His crowning achievement, however, is a bottling known as Magma, which comes from that single, ancient vineyard high on the slopes of the volcano.

Interestingly, in 2012 Cornelissen decided to make single vineyard bottlings from several of the sites that normally go into the Munjebel bottling, and he offered me the opportunity to taste them as recently bottled "tank samples."

2012 was a hot vintage, and the wines achieved a level of ripeness that is somewhat staggering, and, to my palate, perhaps past the point of sanity, but Cornelissen has never been known for his sanity.

I like to say it takes a special breed of madness to push past the traditional borders and bounds of traditional winemaking into the uncharted territory that is capable of yielding pure genius. Cornelissen has been taking the measure of this territory for some time, without having fully mapped its potential. Buying and drinking his wines offers up the equivalent of a ticket to ride with him for a moment into places many wines dare not go because of the high risks of failure.

Not all of Cornelissen's wines are great. But when they succeed, they are simply breathtaking.

TASTING NOTES:
NV (2012) Frank Cornelissen "Susucaru 5" Rosé, Sicily IGT
Palest ruby in the glass, this wine smells of rose petals, red berries, a hint of juniper berries, and wet stones. In the mouth the wine has bright juicy berry and wet chalkboard flavors, and is quite intense, with a cream sherry quality to the finish -- a mouthcoating light tannic feel that lingers for a long time. This wine is a co-fermentation of red and white grapes: Malvasia, Muscat Petite Grains, Cattaratto, Chardonnay, and Nerello Mascalese. 13.5% alcohol. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $30 click to buy.

2012 Frank Cornelissen "Munjebel Bianco," Sicily IGT
Medium orange in the glass, this wine smells of wet leaves and orange peels. In the mouth, a lightly tannic texture mixes with wet stones, crushed rocks, bee pollen and dried orange peel flavors. Notes of white flowers and a hint of creaminess linger in the finish. A blend of Coda di Volpe, Grecanico Dorato, Cattaratto, and Carricante. 13.5% alcohol. Score: around 9. Cost: $45 click to buy.

2011 Frank Cornelissen "Magma," Etna, Sicily
Light ruby in the glass, this wine smells of crushed herbs, juniper berries, juniper boughs, and crushed berries. In the mouth the wine is nothing short of amazing. An incredible aromatic sweetness suffuses flavors of bright crushed berries, juniper berries, and pulverized rock, all of which seem to be held aloft by a supple, taut fabric of tannin. Bright acidity makes the fruit and mineral flavors all but leap off the palate, and they all linger with incredible length drifting on and on through the finish. Made from 100+ year-old, ungrafted Nerello Mascalese vines grown at 910 meters up the side of Mount Etna. 15.2% alcohol but you'd never know it. Score: between 9.5 and 10. Cost: $140 click to buy.

2012 Frank Cornelissen "Chiusa Espagnolo - Barrel Sample," Etna, Sicily
Light garnet in the glass, this wine smells of rich mulberry and raspberry fruit. In the mouth thick powdery tannins wrap around a core of ethereal fruit flavors -- a combination of berries and forest floor. The wine has a deep stony character, that melds with earth, and a hint of leather and it sails through a creamy, chalky finish. Almost 17% alcohol but you can't guess it. 100% Nerello Mascalese. Score: between 9 and 9.5.

2012 Frank Cornelissen "Vigne Alte - Barrel Sample," Etna, Sicily
Light garnet in color, this wine smells of mulberries, and forest floor. In the mouth powdered rock, supple suede-like tannins and rich and expansive berry flavors are massive in the mouth, and expansive. The wine comes across as slightly high octane -- it's actually 17% alcohol -- but surprisingly the wine doesn't offer heat on the finish. Grippy tannins. 100% Nerello Mascalese. Score: around 9.

2012 Frank Cornelissen "Monte Cola - Barrel Sample," Etna, Sicily
Light garnet in the glass, this wine smells of rich berry and brown sugar aromas. In the mouth this wine has broad forest floor and berry flavors, and less of the vibrating core of mineral at the heart of the wine, and more thick creamy tannins. Contains roughly 4 grams of residual sugar and clocks in at a whopping 17.4% alcohol. According to Cornelissen "It's like a goddamn port with a sense of wine. It's a one off, I hate saying this..." Score: around 9.

In addition to the above wines, Cornelissen produces a red table wine called Contadino, which is a blend of both red and white grapes. He has also been known to occasionally make a bottling of Magma Bianco and a sparkling version of the Contadino wine called Campagne, neither of which I have tasted.

Which is where the folks behind the Seven Percent Solution come in. These wine producers have organized themselves behind a claim that 93% of California's vineyard acreage is planted to eight major grape varieties, leaving seven percent for all the others. While my calculations differ (according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, thirteen varieties make up 87% of the wine grape plantings in the state) that doesn't make the charter of this group of wineries any less interesting.

Quite the contrary. The tasting that this group of seventeen wineries is putting on May 11th may well be one of the most interesting and exciting wine tastings I've encountered in California. The participating vintners are: Arnot Roberts, Bedrock Wine Co., Broc Cellars, Dirty & Rowdy Family Winery, Forlorn Hope, Idlewild Wines, Jolie-Laide, Leo Steen, Massican, Matthiasson, RPM, Ryme Cellars, Stark Wine, The Scholium Project, Two Shepherds, Unti Vineyards and Wind Gap.

For those less familiar with the names on this list, it's a veritable Who's Who list of many of the hottest small wineries in California. And by hottest, I mean those who are known and loved by wine geeks like me for pushing the boundaries of California wine.

And in two weeks, these wineries are getting together to show off some of their obscure grapes for the public. Grenache Blanc, Trousseau, Gamay, Refosco, Ribolla Gialla, Tempranillo, Verdelho, Touriga Nacional, St. Laurent, Semillon. These are just some of the grapes that these intrepid wineries have chosen to celebrate with their wines.

These wineries and their beloved grapes will be descending on a cute wine bar in Healdsburg Saturday afternoon for a tasting that is guaranteed to electrify your palate.

The Seven Percent Solution Tasting
Saturday, May 11th
3:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Bergamot Alley Bar and Wine Merchant
328A Healdsburg Ave
Healdsburg CA, 95448 (map)

Tickets are $40 and well worth it, in my opinion. Buy yours in advance online, as this event will probably sell out.

Green But Getting There
WINDSOR, CA: Chardonnay grapes ripen on the vine at Shiloh Hill Vineyard on in the Russian River Valley. Sunny skies and cooperating weather are contributing to bring a bumper crop of premium wine grapes throughout California.

INSTRUCTIONS:
Download this image by right-clicking on the image and selecting "save link as" or "save target as" and then select the desired location on your computer to save the image. Mac users can also just click the image to open the full size view and drag that to their desktops.

To set the image as your desktop wallpaper, Mac users should follow these instructions, while PC users should follow these.

PRINTS:
Fine art prints of this image and others are available at George Rose's web site: www.georgerose.com.

EDITORIAL USE:
To purchase copies of George's photos for editorial, web, or advertising use, please contact Getty Images.

ABOUT VINOGRAPHY IMAGES:
Vinography regularly features images by photographer George Rose for readers' personal use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. We hope you enjoy them. Please respect the copyright on these images. These images are not to be reposted on any web site or blog without the express permission of the photographer.

Sometimes we head off into the world searching for our heart's desire only to return home to find that what we needed was right in our own back yard. Like all literary tropes, this one has more than a grain of truth.

When Sam Weaver and his wife Mandy decided to move to New Zealand from their native England, they found themselves a pretty house at the base of a hill with a gorgeous view and a lot of big trees. Ten years later, after searching throughout Marlborough for a hillside vineyard to buy, Weaver realized he had been taking a walk through the vineyard site of his dreams for years without knowing it.

Clinging to the crest of the hill behind his modest house and the stand of trees that shade it from the mid-day heat, the vineyards of Churton Wines are among the most spectacular in New Zealand's Marlborough region.

"When I first came to Marlborough" recalls Weaver, "I thought it was bizarre that all the vineyards were on flats." He still does. After a career in the wine trade that took him all over the world, Weaver knew that if he were going to make wine it was going to be from a hillside vineyard.

"Once I realized that the best vineyard site I could imagine was right behind my house, I started digging holes in the ground to make sure I wasn't crazy" says Weaver. "I brought people out and took them up there to look at the holes and no one said I was daft. I actually think you can tell a lot about a piece of ground by walking across it. I had this innate feeling that this was a good piece of land."

Of course there was only one problem. Weaver didn't own the land. But when he approached the woman who did, she smiled and said, "I was wondering when you were going to ask about that." The two set up a long term lease with the option to purchase the property if she ever decided to sell. A few years later, when she did, Weaver was ready to buy. It was time to get back in to the family business.

"My family have long been architectural farmers, most recently in England, but going back two generations, three out of four grandparents were farmers in New Zealand" relates Weaver. "I developed a (very) early interest in wine, and alcohol in general, so when it came time to decide what to study, I naturally chose microbiology."

Weavers very first part-time job involved looking after the wine department of a supermarket, and after he graduated from university in 1978, he got a job with Berry Brothers and Rudd, but he wasn't quite ready to take it seriously.

"I strayed," he says with more than a little bemusement recalling his earliest days. "You know, you just do what you do at that age. I just bummed around the world, doing various vintages here and there, and came back to the serious wine world a couple of years later."

Weaver got connected with merchant and writer Remington Norman, and in addition to becoming friends, ended up becoming the managing director of his company. "My background," explains Weaver, "is really European fine wine. We were specialists in old and rare wines. I spent most of the Eighties traveling around visiting a lot of the top domaines, looking at vineyards, and buying from them."

One New Year's Eve, Weaver met a pretty young graduate student at a party, and fell in love with the woman who would soon become his wife.

"I was a bit of a bum until I met her," laughs Weaver. "She was the reason I settled down and started thinking that I had to do something serious."

Eventually Weaver's job with Norman "sort of came to an end" and he and his wife Mandy decided to take the plunge and move to New Zealand. It helped that Weaver's parents had already done the same thing.

"I had done a vintage at Hunter's in Marlborough, and when I came over, they asked me to come back as Assistant Winemaker," says Weaver. "That was my real introduction to winemaking. I've not done any formal studies, but having a microbiology background, and having done everything in the MW curriculum up until the theory, I was prepared to run with it."

After a stint at Hunter's, Weaver was well known enough in the area to begin consulting for various companies.

"I did a lot of winemaking for a lot of different people" says Weaver. "I still do. Though much less than I used to. But that is really what allowed me to start Churton."

After about a decade of making wine for other people Weaver wanted something of his own, but he knew he wanted it to be something out of the ordinary.

"My main problem as a consulting winemaker was always sourcing decent Pinot Noir," recalls Weaver. "When I was working for Corbins, we were making a fair amount of Pinot, from all sorts of different sites, and I wasn't really happy with any of them."

Nonetheless, in 1997 Weaver began buying fruit from the best sources he could find, while he looked far and wide for the vineyard site of his dreams. His first vintage of estate Pinot Noir was in 2003, and within a few years, all of his wines were estate grown. In 2007 Weaver planted a little Viognier, and more recently, some Petite Manseng, an aromatic grape largely unknown outside of its home in the Jurancon region of southwestern France.

When it came time to plant his hillside plot, Weaver planned for it to be farmed organically from the start. "My MW dissertation was called 'An Organic Vineyard in Action'" says Weaver, and I started getting interested in biodynamics during my time in Europe, when there was a lot of talk about it. When I came to New Zealand I compared what I had seen in southern France to what James Milton was doing in his vineyard, and I got more interested."

Weaver quickly transitioned to a fully biodynamic approach in his vineyards and hasn't looked back since. He grazes cows on the margins of his fields and makes both traditional composts, as well as utilizing the cow pat pits that a number of Marlborough biodynamic vintners have made popular. These small covered pits in the ground are filled with lactating cow manure mixed with crushed egg shells and pulverized basalt. Over the course of months, the mixture breaks down into a silky, clay-like compost that he spreads in the vineyards. Weaver, along with his son Ben, who has become his right-hand man in the fields and in the cellar, uses cover crops to enrich the soil as well as to encourage helpful insects to stick around. Weaver and his son follow the biodynamic calendar, and utilize all of the standard biodynamic preparations, which he makes cooperatively with a group of local winemakers.

Winemaking at Churton follows a regimen that would be familiar to most other biodynamic winegrowers. All of the Pinot Noirs are fermented with ambient yeasts, and while Weaver is beginning to "get freer" with his Sauvignon Blanc, for the time being the whites are made with commercial yeasts. The Pinot Noirs get an occasional fining with a single egg white, and while an occasional wine will get filtered through a very coarse filter, Weaver is moving to eliminate even this very minor step. The Sauvignon Blanc is fermented in large, old oak barrels, and after fermenting in steel, the Pinot ages in older oak for several years before bottling.

Despite his training as a scientist, Weaver doesn't have any issues with the biodynamic regimen. I asked him if he ever found the contrast between the two maddening.

"Yes," he replied without hesitation. "I had a difficulty for a long time with preparation 501 [pulverized quartz and cow horn that is buried in the ground], because you're not dealing with biology per se, but theoretically with chemistry and physics. I was trying to rationalize my way through the homeopathic aspect of it, and found it very challenging to understand."

"But ultimately," he continues, "I'm happy to suspend my disbelief. Biodynamics offers a system to deal with areas of science where we have no hope in our lifetime of being able to explain how things work. Biodynamics accepts this where science doesn't. The thing that gets people freaked out about biodynamics is that there are a lot of people who like to play in the land of make believe. They're trying to describe things in terms of metaphors, but then presenting them in a literal fashion and that takes people into all sorts of weird places and gets them labeled as 'fucking crazy.' For me biodynamics is simple and it's not dogma. It helps me look at things in a different way and it's all about the raw materials."

Weaver and his family now own all 120 acres acres of the hillside behind their home, and have planted about 48 of those acres to grapes. The produce about 10,000 cases of wine each year of which 3000 are a sauvignon blanc made for someone's private label.

I visited Weaver on a blustery day in early February, as the sun was flashing in and out of holes in the passing storm clouds. We braved some light showers of rain to sit for a while on his lawn and taste through his current releases and some older wines.

I found all the wines to have a wonderful poise to them that was elegant but not overly refined. They all shared a zippy brightness thanks to high acidity and generally low pH levels. These traits, coupled with the generally supple tannins in the wines (the exception perhaps being the brawny Abyss bottling from a special section of the vineyard) suggest that the wines will age beautifully, though, admittedly, I've not tried the older vintages.

Eventually the storm chased us back indoors, but not before I was able to savor the distinct pleasure that Weaver and his family are lucky enough to be immersed in every day -- namely the light, the smell of the earth after a rain, the wind in the trees, and the flavors of it all in my glass.

TASTING NOTES:

2011 Churton Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light gold in the glass with a greenish tinge, this wine smells of lemon and kiwi fruit with notes of wet stones. In the mouth, juicy lemon curd and wet stone flavors have a persistent length in the mouth with notes of stone fruit emerging through the finish. Lean and mineral, with a faint chalky tannic grip. 14% alcohol. Score: around 9. Cost: $23 click to buy.

2011 Churton Viognier, Marlborough, New Zealand
Palest gold in the glass, this wine smells of apricots and white flowers. In the mouth, wonderfully light flavors of white flowers, white peaches, and stony minerality are fantastically crisp thanks to excellent acidity. The wine dances across the palate in a way that Viogniers only rarely do. Excellent. 14.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $35 click to buy.

2010 Churton Pinot Noir, Marlborough, New Zealand
Medium garnet in the glass, this wine smells of stony and floral raspberry and huckleberry fruit. In the mouth, gorgeous raspberry, black raspberry, and huckleberry flavors are draped in a blanket of tannins that caress the edges of the mouth. Beautiful earthy tones seem to emerge from this soft suede blanket and linger with some bright forest berry notes in the finish. Excellent. 13.1% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $45

2010 Churton "The Abyss" Pinot Noir, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light to medium garnet in color, this wine smells of raspberry and black raspberry with a deep forest floor note. In the mouth deep earthy flavors tinged with crushed green herbs are shot through with veins of raspberry and black raspberry fruit. All of which lies on a thick hide of tannins that is quite muscular and forbidding. Excellent acidity This wine is a baby and needs some time to have the tannins settle into the wine and smooth out. The wine takes its name from a section of vineyard overlooking a steep drop. 13% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $45

2009 Churton Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light gold in the glass, this wine smells of kiwi fruit, green apple, and wet stones with a slight acidophilus tang. In the mouth deep stony flavors of lime zest, green apple, and mint yogurt have a wonderful electric brightness thanks to excellent acidity. The wine as an incredibly long finish. 13.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $25

2012 Churton Barrel Sample Petite Manseng, Marlborough, New Zealand
Pale greenish gold in the glass, this barrel sample smells of grapey star fruit and kiwi. In the mouth juicy green apple, star fruit, and kiwi flavors have a slight sweetness to them and an electric bounce thanks to fantastic acidity. There's actually quite a lot of sugar in the wine (70 g/l if you must know) but the acidity keeps the wine from tasting that sweet. Think of this as a Spatlese of Petite Manseng and you'll get the idea. Very interesting and quite tasty. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $TBD

2008 Churton Pinot Noir, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light garnet in the glass, this wine smells of black cherries and hints of raisins. In the mouth, flavors of black cherry, raisins, and forest floor have a light dusting of tannins. Good acidity and a lovely texture, but the fruit leans toward the ripe side, perhaps understandably so in this hot vintage. 14% alcohol. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $30 click to buy.

2009 Churton Pinot Noir, Marlborough, New Zealand
Light garnet in the glass, this wine smells of beautiful floral raspberry and forest floor aromas. In the mouth the wine has gorgeous texture, with beautiful powdery, mouth coating tannins and lifted persistent raspberry and cherry fruit. Gorgeous forest floor and even a mushroomy quality lingers for a long time through the finish. Fantastic acidity, great balance, a stunning wine. 13.5% alcohol. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $41 click to buy.

I have been carrying just such a flickering flame of hope for some time now, but life can sometimes be cruel. Today my hopes were dashed against the rock wall of reality, and I am back to resignation and despair.

At the beginning of March, the Transportation Security Administration announced that beginning April 25th, we would once again be able to bring corkscrews onto planes in this country. This news was like a shaft of light in the darkness, a bit of joy in a time of dreary economic downturn.

But today, the TSA announced they would delay their new policy, caving to pressures from flight attendant unions and those who believe that a 1.5 inch blade is all that might be required to bring down another airplane in this country.

How cruelly they toy with our hearts and our freedoms. How deeply they do wound innocent wine lovers everywhere. With such iniquity do they yet build higher their hoardings of laguioles and lever-pulls.

I had but one thing to look forward to this week, and they have stolen it from me.

Enough. I cannot dwell in these thoughts any longer, for fear that they drag me down to depths I have never known.

I have been cured of hope. It has been wrung from me like so much dishwater from a rag. I dare not hope again. Only seek to survive in a hostile time and place, to continue on against a tide of oppression.

Image of depressed guy courtesy of Bigstock