2024 Kadarka

This is the grape that brought us down into Serbia in the first place. The parent grapes are thought to be Papazkarasi originating from the border between Bulgaria and Turkey and Skardarsko which is native to the border area between Albania and Montenegro. Ottoman wars pushed Kadarka up into the Hungarian Kingdom and spread into modern Romania, Slovakia, and Croatia. At one point it made up around 60% of all red plantings but fell to below 1% by the end of Communism due to it not being fit for industrial farming. Oszkár and a handful of other growers like Heimann & Fiai, Bott Frigyes, Grál, Vaskapu, Sziegl, and others are bringing it back to life along with dozens of other pre-phylloxera clones. Maurer’s version is a benchmark for us. It’s essentially the youngest vines from years of massale selections from plantations dating from 1880-1912. Bush trained, very low yields (.5 kg), a touch of botrytis (which he embraces), destemmed, open vat fermented, two punchdowns a day, and then barreled down to 350 L used Hungarian oak for 12 months. Unfined, unfiltered, and with a small addition of SO2 (25ppm) at bottling.