Metro Wines Blog - Metro Wines Asheville
"It's a family business!" We spoke with Francoise le Calvez as she poured and discussed five of her wines under the Coupe Roses label.
Francoise and her enologist husband, Pascal Frissant, work Coupe Roses in the Minervois Appellation with passion and state of the art technology. But in the end, as Francoise reminds us, a "it's family business."
Francoise began her journey into wine with her father. The PH of the soil in the vineyards was not optimum. Her father found a soil researcher who concluded that "the roots were not going deeply enough to have the best expression of the soil." The problem was resolved but it is a constant labor of love. "We are always working on the soil," says Francoise, because when you get right down to it, "it's all about the soil."
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I met Bruwer Raats two years ago at a wine pairing lunch. His commitment to his winemaking was immediately obvious but, as the conversation went on, his commitment to his land, his community and his family were equally obvious. And by the time that last Cabernet Franc blend crossed my palate, you could say with certainty that RAATS Wines and RAATS were class acts.
We talked with Bruwer Raats on travel by SKYPE from Stellenbosch @MetroWines on April 2nd. He, with his son in tow, had pulled over on a tree lined road to take the call and talk with his fans. Now, that's dedication and just down-right nice! Bruwer lead us through a tasting of Chenin Blanc Original, Old Vine Chenin Blanc, Red Jasper, Cabernet Franc and his mega-HIT, Compostella.
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How does a bottle of wine go from a small French farm to a small retail shop in Asheville? Robert Fiore Kral of Robert Walter Selections tells all.
“Pairing wine with the right food and creating a total experience. This is my passion.” That’s what Robert Fiore Kral of Robert Walter Selections, an Asheville wine import company that focuses on wines from small family farms, said when asked why he does what he does.
Robert was always around good wine. “My mother is German and my father is Austrian. I was raised in Germany where wine is part of the fabric of the country,” Robert says of how his interest in wine started. “We traveled around Europe and wine was just part of life.”
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A significant number of wine customers as well as critics believe that winemakers just plain take themselves too seriously. It's not like winemakers are navy seals trying to capture ISIS leadership or emergency room doctors trying to save a child victim of a drive by shooting. Customers are starting to want to know more about who made the wine. So, what we try to do in Unfiltered is reach the real winemaker, to go beyond the wine tech talk and website dry goods, and let you know who made the wine.
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It is rare to sit down to dinner with a winemaker, even more rare the winemaker being Italian, and extraordinarily rare for your winemaking dinner guest to be a sixth generation Italian woman winemaker from Sicily, a place Eric Asimov called "one of the most exciting wine regions in the world."
But so it was on one recent night at Cucina 24 in Asheville. I had the honor and pleasure to share a bottle of Grillo and Frappato with Gaetana Jacono Gola, the owner of and winemaker for Valle Dell'Acate in Sicily. Gola divides her time between her home in Milano that she shares with her husband, an architect in the city, and "the farm in Sicily."
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