Vigna Kastelaz: Elena Walch's Iconic Gewurztraminer Vineyard
Kastelaz has the prestigious additional denomination of VIGNA. It is an additional mention of a smaller geographical origin and designs the smallest historical / geographical unit of a vineyard. Every single Vigna must be officially admitted and registered within the regional government. It expresses the ultimate thought of terroir philosophy with the idea of a parcel wine from an exact plot and hence having a historical or traditional name.
Our next video takes place in one of the Elena Walch VIGNA: Kastelaz. This steep and beautiful vineyard overlooks the town of Tramin, which provides a basis for the VIGNA’s grape: Gewürztraminer.
See Elena Walch: the History in the Cellars for an overview of the winery and its history.
I hope you enjoy this five minute video.
Special thanks:
Karoline Walch of Elena Walch
Steve Noel http://childrenofthegrape.com
Transcript:
Note: Transcript was created by a third party service and I’ve endeavored to clean up the spelling of ‘wine words.’ There are also some Italian words that I have difficulty knowing how to spell. Any persistent errors are mine alone and not Karoline’s.
Or, watch the video. It is awesome.
Karoline Walch:
See, If you look down there, the trees down there, that's the border. This is the vineyard. Can you see? This is the Vigna Kastelaz.
So now we're on the Vigna Kastelaz. We're just overlooking the town of Tramin that you can see down here. You see the church down there. So we are really overlooking this historic town of Tramin. And not surprisingly, on the Vigna Kastelaz, our major variety that we plant is Gewürztraminer.
Gewürztraminer is the name of the variety. Gewürz, meaning, in German, spice. It's the spicy grape of Tramin. Tramin, which is the town we're in. We feel like we have everything, and we have the right to call this our variety. Almost, our indigenous grape variety. It's really like the birthplace of the variety, Gewürztraminer.
Vigna Kastelaz is a very unique site and really unique in Alto Adige, and you can see that right away because it's one of the very, very few vineyards in the area that is completely south facing. Generally, you have the vineyards following the valley and hence are facing southeast or southwest, but this vineyard here is like a pyramid turned around, completely south facing, so meaning that we get the sun all day long. But again, at nighttime, we have those cold falling winds coming down from the mountains. The mountains are covered in clouds, so you can't really see but they go up as high as 2,000 meters, so around 6,000 feet, so huge temperature fluctuations between day and night. It's nice and hot during today, but at night we get those cold temperatures coming down, those cold falling winds. So huge temperature fluctuations, meaning we can bribe the primary aromas to the fullest yet retain the acidity.
This brings me to my next point. There is a second wind that this vineyard is very much affected by, which is the so-called wind called Ora. Ora is a dry wind that comes from Lake Garda, and it comes really literally during growing season every day at around 2:00 PM and goes until 9:00 PM. And it's this dry wind that comes from Lake Garda and hence dries out our vineyards. So two winds, the dry wind from Lake Garda, and at night, as soon as the sun goes down, the cold falling winds from the mountain.
Finally, it's the steepness of this site. So we're talking about 63% of steepness on the Kastelaz vineyard, meaning, obviously, that it's all terrace, as you can see, and everything we do here is done by hand. So it's really an extreme vineyard for several things: its southernly exposure, its steepness of 63%, of steepness, and the winds, the two winds, the cold falling winds and the dry winds, and hence makes this a unique place for growing vines with hot and dry days but cold nights. And hence, it's a unique place to be planting and growing our Gewürztraminer, and hence, our Gewürztraminer Vigna Kastelaz really is a very distinct style of Gewürztraminer, completely dry, so fermented to dryness, but preserves this freshness, this acidity, and almost this mineral character driven, or minerality, that this wine is famous for.
It's calcareous soils. It's calcareous soils that we have here, so harder rocks but it's all calcareous soil. It's very high in calcium carbonate. And that's, again, what you see in the wine, very mineral-driven. Very mineral-driven wine.
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