Solano Cellars
Friday, April 25th
5-8pm
6 wines for $25 ($15 Club)
Oszkár Maurer is built different. He needs to be, to pull off even half the crazy-on-paper, brilliant-in-execution ideas we've come to expect from him: leaving entire vineyard blocks untrained so that the leaves shade the clusters ("the mother takes care of its babies," he told us earnestly on our last visit), planting new vines next to adolescent walnut trees to help them grow steady and straight, launching a Michelin-level restaurant at his winery in the tiny village of Šupljak (run by his self-taught and outrageously talented wife), just to name a few.
To call him a mad genius would be putting it mildly; but above all, he's a passionate protector of old vines and heritage varieties, from the sandy home soils of his Subotica vineyard to the highly volcanic Fruska Gora forest. Oszkár's personal background, the wine he makes, and the influence he has on winemakers in the region is a testament to the long, important vinous history of this slice of Central Europe: he's a proud Serbian, Hungarian speaking, and from an Austrian family, doggedly committed the propagation of the hard-to-pronounce, easy-to-love varieties indigenous to the area, and generous enough to share his insight and vine material with like-minded producers (including from his '1880' Kadarka vineyard, the oldest known planting of the grape anywhere in the world). Without people like Oszkár, most of the varieties he works with would go extinct (Bakator, Mézes Fehér, Szerémi Zöld, to name a few). That would be a monumental loss to lovers of great wine across the world; while they lack the name recognition (and pronounceability) of more traditional, western varieties, they are utterly singular, and entirely delicious.
On Friday, our friend Brian Stapleton of Danch & Granger will be behind the bar to pour through a lineup of Oszkár's greatest hits, including the highly coveted 1880 Kadarka. It will serve as another reminder—don't sleep on Serbia!
*No reservations necessary