The question was, what are the main
differences in style between Slovenian, Austrian and Hungarian expressions of
Furmint? It got me thinking.
I’d spent a large part of the day tasting
wines from the Easternmost parts of Slovenia, the North Western European part
of Turkey and form both the Greek and Bulgarian sides of the Thracian lowlands.
All wine regions where, I’d argue, the wine makers have more in common with
their neighbour’s over the boarder than they do with the rest of the country. This got me thinking about the Balkans and
the way that a semi-homogenous group of people was broken up by the early 20th
century mania for drawing boarders between nation states.
I guess that in Europe we did marginally
better than in the near East where wars seem to ravage the region with a
disturbing regularity (mind you I did taste quite a bit of Serbian and Croatian
wines and there have certainly been wars in their part of the world in living
memory). But still, growing up in the UK where for better or worse we’ve had a
pretty firm set of boarders for most of our recent history it’s hard to really
understand the mind sets of regions that only partly reflect the nation within
which they’re located.
So how exactly do I think about and
categorise these liminal zones? Do I keep them within my existing mental
country maps or do I redraw my own map of Europe, boarder free with all the sensible
wine regions existing as their own autonomous states within my mental
geography?
I’ll be honest, it’s the latter, I’ve
always based my geographical understanding of the world on where wine is grown
and really countries have only ever been a small part of it. After all, anyone
who’s ever been to the Sud Tyrol will know that it’s about the least Italian
part of the world you’d ever expect to find within what we understand as Italy.
