Our wines in Tokyo
Wine is no longer just a European affair. It is also popular in Asia, where our Danube won the Grand Gold Medal this year. Wine guru Ján Krampl revealed more in an interview with the daily Pravda. You can read the entire interview here: https://bit.ly/vinocomadrzinadvodou
You send your wines not only to the Wine Prague Trophy, where you became the top foreign winery last year, but also all the way to Tokyo. What makes this wine destination so attractive?
Wine was a cult drink of the Western Christian world, but today you can find it in wine bars all over the globe. The world is globalizing and Eastern cultures, you can see it not only in the Japanese, but also in the Chinese, want to taste what the Western world smells and tastes like. Wine is one of the representatives of ancient ancient culture, and even before that, there were cradles of civilization in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Caucasus. People drank wine everywhere there. It is a drink that accompanies humanity and cultivates it. That is why it also attracts people from Asia. The new moment is that wine has long been no longer just a man's affair. Women also drink, create and evaluate wine. Sakura in Japan is a competition where the world's best wine connoisseurs taste wine. This year, our Danube received the Grand Gold Medal there, it is a recognition of the qualities of the first Slovak red variety.
What if the reviewers knew that there was a woman behind this wine?
In the digital age, you type a question into your computer and you get an answer right away. Competitions always evaluate the originality of the expression of wine, the genius of the winemaker lies in the fact that a new variety captures the environment into which he breeds the variety. He has succeeded. You have to be ahead of the times in order to express the desires and expectations of new winemaking generations in the variety and then in the wine - in principle they do not change, but each decade still has its own tastes, aromas and ways of consumption. All of this must be taken into account when creating a variety and wine. With wine, you can best see how the world is changing.
How has it changed during your lifetime?
Ján Smrek once wrote a collection of poems that he called Galloping Horses. Those poems expressed the spirit and time of my youth, it was still the time of hoes and horses, even in vineyards. In Rača, there were stake vineyards everywhere. Since the time of German colonization, when German winegrowers arrived under the Little Carpathians, the cultivation of vineyards seemed to have not changed for several centuries. The support for the shrub was an acacia stake, the main working tool was a hoe, later a horse became an assistant. Until the mid-20th century, the vineyards resembled an endless spider's web of bushes planted in squares, winding around the vines. Then everything changed radically, stormily every decade, and the rapid changes continue to this day.
Don't the wines of the past speak of an extraordinary wine-growing area that produces wine of exceptional quality regardless of the era?
Wine really needs to be assessed in a broader context. The French have compiled the Grand Atlas of French Vineyards, where they described all the wine-growing areas. Slovakia would also need something like this to appreciate its vineyards more. During my career, I was not only engaged in management work, but when we were establishing vineyards, I described in detail in my doctoral thesis the parameters of the area and the vines that we planted there. Hon Krivé with Frankovka Modra, or Žajdlík, where excellent Tramin is produced, are unique properties comparable in many respects to top French vineyards. The difference is that Slovakia and its governments have not been able to create the kind of social climate for wine in recent decades that it enjoys in France or neighboring Austria.
