Part philosopher, part farmer, Joško Gravner is the godfather of orange – or what he actually calls ‘amber’ – wines on Italy’s north-eastern border. After becoming disillusioned with the generic, international wines of the late 1980s, Gravner resurrected long-forgotten old school methods and began to experiment with long maceration on the skins, defying critics who thought he’d lost the plot. With long fermentation and ageing in Georgian clay qvevri, these are complex, full-bodied textural wines that almost require a new vocabulary to describe.
