The first time I visited Gravner, about eight years ago, Joško Gravner was very much the host. He spoke almost not a word of English – his daughter Mateja translated. He sat at the head of the table and answered questions slowly and deliberately, ‘in a fluent, almost incantatory voice’, I noted at the time.
This time, Joško is there in spirit but not in presence. We dine in Mateja’s private apartment where she lives with her partner and two cats, one ancient and immobile, the other a bold marmalade tom who observes us dispassionately from a high windowsill. Joško and his wife Maria, and two dogs, appear as we’re finishing supper. At 72 he looks lean, tanned and fit. That’s the only time we’ll see him on this two-day visit. Gregor Pietro, Mateja’s 30-year-old son (and the fifth generation to work at the winery) is taking over various operations.

There’s a definable shift in the centre of gravity, a hint of things becoming a bit more practical. But there’s still an otherness about Gravner. There’s work going on at the winery: ‘that’s Joško’s qvevri garden’, Mateja says. He’s experimenting with open-air ageing and has buried 22 qvevri on a terrace outside the chai. ‘We won’t know the effects for another 20 years,’ she adds with a smile. They are also testing different ageing materials. In the winery is a 10,000-litre EnoKube, a severely beautiful black-glass-and-steel construction that looks like a steampunk freezer. They favour glass for ‘its qualities of inertia, resistance and ease of cleaning.’ How do they think it will affect the wine? Mateja shrugs. ‘This is an experiment’.
There’s still an otherness about Gravner
The Gravner family, which has been in the town of Hum in Slovenia for 300 years, bought a house and two hectares of land in Oslavia in Friuli in 1901 in the steep, wooded hills of Collio. They now have 18 hectares of vineyard. Forty per cent of the vines are over the border in Slovenia. During the morning we cross and re-cross the border several times.
We tramp the vineyards. They are dramatically sloped, sharing their space with pastureland and domestic buildings – white villas dot the hillsides. We’re in the eight-hectare Runk vineyard, the first Gravner planting, in 1919 (it was replanted in 2003). The steepness of the slopes and the intense sunlight give the impression we’re much higher than the mere 160m above sea level that’s the actual elevation. It’s an idyllic spot. The terraced rows are punctuated with olive trees, cypresses, apple and rowan; the plump Ribolla berries glow in the early September sun. There’s a newly dug pond dense with lily pads; the only sound is the odd plop of a jumping frog.

As he began to take over from his father in the early 1980s, Joško was content to make white and red blends from Ribolla Gialla and a slew of international varieties. His epiphany came on a 1987 trip to the US, where he tasted 1,000 wines in 10 days and became ‘totally disillusioned’ by their conventionality. He knew he had the best land in the world for Ribolla Gialla and he couldn’t work out why their wine was not better. Then he realised the secret was the grape’s thick and aromatic skin. Take Ribolla off its skin and it produces neutral wine. Age it on skins for six months and it is transformed into spiced, saline, extravagantly textured wonders. Then he went to Georgia and discovered qvevri and he never looked back.
His presence is everywhere. I remark on the stone sculptures dotted throughout the vineyards, towering menhirs roughly etched and drilled. ‘Joško is in love with stones,’ Mateja says, adding that now he’s stepping back from everyday duties, ‘he feels freer, he can be more artistic. Winemaking is not an art.’

But still. At dinner we discuss Joško, his intuition and how that will be handed down to the next generation. He is one of the handful of winemakers around the world whose wines make no sense: ‘Some of the wines he made, if you had analysed the phenolics, you would never have made wine from those grapes,’ Mateja says.
‘There’s a bit more stability now. Joško is artistic but not organised,’ Mateja says, implying that Gregory will sometimes overrule his grandfather – especially when it comes to harvest times. The two visit the vineyards daily and confer on every important decision but there’s more logic now. ‘Joško would harvest whatever the weather and had been known to lose a third of the crop. Gregory is more focussed on the weather and the workers.’
To taste Gravner’s wines is liberating – they have no point of reference
In the qvevri cellar there’s a single wooden chair on a platform in the middle of the earth floor, surrounded by the round mouths of the 47 buried amphorae. It looks bare as the set for one of Samuel Beckett’s more austere plays, and smells elementally of clay and earth. The formula for vinification (‘it’s not exact’) is four times six: the wine spends six months on skins, six months off the skins, six years in barrel and six months in bottle before release.

To taste Gravner’s wines is liberating. They have no point of reference: the superbly tannic amber wines of Georgia are the most obvious comparison but the Gravner Ribollas are of a different order. They are powerful, with layered aromas of nut, dried fruit and amontillado, the mid-palate a symphony of quince and spiced pineapple, the tannins finely textured and gently washed with juice. ‘The diversity in the vintages is fascinating,’ my colleague Isabel Salamon later says over WhatsApp. ‘Years like 2007 and 2012 are wildly different. It’s a pure celebration of the year experienced.’