Oszkar Maurer - '1912', Kadarka, Subotica, Serbia (2021)

TASTING NOTES

Pouring a pale garnet, this ethereal and delicate wine is spicy with notes of wet earth and forest floor, savoury, herbal and bright, juicy light red fruits. This really resembles a beautiful Pinot Noir, perhaps from the Bourgogne appellation of Fixin. Elegant, luminous and utterly captivating.  

Grown in the Subotica region and made from 110 year old bush vines of Kadarka, untouched by Phylloxera thanks to the sandy soils it’s grown on. Generations of selection massale have created a super late ripening and delicate but resilient Kadarka that produces the lowest yields.

The grapes are destemmed and macerated for a short time. Fermented two weeks in ooen vats and aged in 500L old Hungarian oak barrels for 12 months. These vines yield wines that are very delicate and etheral but every year there is less of it as some the vines are dying off of old age. This was fantastic vintage for Kadarka. It is bottled unfiltered and with zero sulphur additions.

Oszkár is a 4th generation winemaker whose family settled during the 19th century in the southern part of the Kingdom of Hungary, most of which is part of Serbia today. He farms a total of 16 acres in two distinct terroirs of the country; 6 acres are located in Subotica, right on the Serbian-Hungarian border where very old vines of local varieties thrive on sandy soils.

The other 10 acres are farmed just south in the historic region of Syrmia on the slopes of the Fruška Gora Mountain, which faces the Danube river and was once, millions of years ago, an Island in the Pannonian sea - a near untouched natural land made of volcanic and sedimentary rocks. Oszkár, a pioneer of Serbia’s natural wine scene, works in the vineyard without any use of chemicals and guides his wines in the cellar without intervening too much, only old barrels and one racking at bottling.