Just ten wines form my Recent Wines from July. If you saw my “Holiday Wines” article, you’ll probably understand why. We will still go for two parts, short and sweet. Here in Part One, we have wines from Gols in Burgenland, the Adelaide Hills, Gutturnio in Lombardy, Rioja Alavesa, and, geographically at least, Achaia in the Peloponnese. We are very much riding a summer vibe with these wines, but not all summer wines are white. In fact, half of the wines across Parts One and Two are some shade of red. All of them, white, red or pink, were served chilled in the hottest Scottish July I can remember, hot but not too hot.

Puszta Libre 2023, Claus Preisinger (Burgenland, Austria)

Claus’s modern winery is on a hillside above Gols and its upper deck looks down a gentle slope towards the eastern shore of the Neusiedlersee, almost certainly my favourite lake in Europe, though also possibly its shallowest. Claus was a very young man when he began farming here, but he was the first in the new generation of natural wine makers in the region, though one where natural wine had long been a reality among certain forward-thinking producers before it was made fashionable.

I can’t remember when Puszta Libre was first released, although I know that when I first tasted it, this cuvée seemed to encapsulate absolutely perfectly the essence of what joyful natural wine from the Neusiedlersee’s shores gives us: a slaked thirst and a glass bursting with fruit. That feeling is even right down to the label design, reminiscent of a 1920s local lemonade bottle (pre-partition of Austria-Hungary).

I also read that Claus feels that in his search for perfection in the early day his wines were a little “aggressive”. Nowadays he says he’s more “laissez-faire and intuitive”. Making this wine I am sure helped him hang loose, as they say.

The blend here is Zweigelt and St-Laurent from the northern side of the lake (I think there has occasionally been a little Pinot Noir, but it isn’t listed for the 2023). The recipe is simple, ferment for fruit. It’s packed with red cherries and berries, made biodynamically. Easy drinking, chilling is a must. It’s like fruit juice. You don’t even think about sophistication, yet it takes some skill to make a wine this good. The 11.5% abv is spot on for body. I couldn’t imagine a summer without it.

This bottle came from Communiqué Wines in Edinburgh, c £25. Newcomer Wines is Claus Preisinger’s importer for the UK. There’s also a white and a “Rosza” now in this series, but I don’t think Newcomer has them (yet!) for the UK.

Surfer Rosa 2023, Ochota Barrels (McLaren Vale, South Australia)

After the untimely passing of Taras Ochota I didn’t see these wines for a while, but then I discovered that the journey Taras and Amber set out upon, to make natural and “holistic” wines in South Australia, is continuing, and with absolutely no decrease in quality at all. I know Jamie Goode has very recently praised the Ochota’s “Green Room” Grenache, which I myself wrote about back at the beginning of April. like Green Room, Surfer Rosa is made from Grenache sourced in McLaren Vale (Amber and the team work out of Basket Range/Adelaide Hills).

The vines are more than fifty years old in most cases, grown organically on clay over limestone. The fruit is fermented in stainless steel using wild yeasts before a short five months ageing in used French oak. The name is a double nod, first to Taras Ochota’s surfing passion and the pink hue (albeit a darker pink) of the wine, but also to one of the Pixies’ finest albums of the same name. However, it’s not a wild wine. Nor is it remotely prim and proper, but is does have a certain elegance along with its bright, crunchy, red fruits (I was getting a lot of cranberry). It’s totally dry. Someone told me there is a dash of Gewurztraminer, around 3%, in there alongside the Grenache, but I can’t verify that. It definitely has some lift to it. Only a tiny bit of SO2 was added in an otherwise totally natural wine.

This was another purchase from Communiqué Wines (£27.50). Indigo Wine imports Ochota, and I have seen it in The Sourcing Table in Peckham Rye. This producer is really hitting the spot for me at the moment.

Gutturnio Frizzante 2024, Il Poggiarello (Emilia-Romagna, Italy)

Gutturnio is one of several DOCs in the hills south and southwest of Piacenza. It is gaining a bit of a reputation for its Barbera/Bonarda still reds, but this wine blends the same varieties into a traditional frizzante red wine. I tasted it, poured by winemaker Jannet Iathallah, at Cork & Cask’s Summer Fair back at the end of June. It took about one sniff and sip to know I was going to buy a bottle.

The fruit is macerated at a constant 23 degrees, fermenting slowly. The second fermentation takes place in a pressurised tank rather than in bottle, ie the Charmat method, but the wine is packed with fruit. It smells like summer pudding, majoring on sweet but tart blackcurrant, yet it also has a savoury edge. The colour is as concentrated as the fruit, and tiny bubbles carry that dark fruit towards a bitter finish. Think artisan Lambrusco, but with different grapes. With 12.5% abv, this disappears in no time. So good! Chill right down, like you would a white sparkler.

Imported by Moreno Wines, £20 from Cork & Cask, who also stock five other wines from the same producer.

Rioja Alavesa Blanco “Solar de Randez Barrel-Aged” 2023, Bodegas Las Orcas (Rioja, Spain)

White Rioja is definitely flavour of the year for me. Raimondo Abando is the third-generation winemaker at Las Orcas, based at Laguardia, a car-free 12^th century small town in Rioja Alavesa. Due to the proximity of the Cantabrian Mountains and the cooling Atlantic breeze, Alavesa is, despite being known for its Tempranillo, a great place to make white Rioja.

Las Orcas makes a zippy white wine that sees no wood, from Viura. This barrel-aged version was commissioned by their UK importer as something more in the traditional style. What we have is a wine made from the fruit of eighty-year-old bush vine Viura off chalky clay soils, up at over 500 masl. The fruit is sourced from a single site, north-facing at the top of the vineyard. The fermentation was in stainless steel, with indigenous yeasts, but ageing took place in new French oak, on fine lees, but for just four months.

What you get is tropical fruit on the nose, lots of pineapple and lemon citrus, with creaminess from the toasty oak. The oak doesn’t dominate the wine because of the fruit, but oak is integral to it. As the description says, it “adds breadth and texture”, but I would add not at the expense of definition. Only 1,150 bottles were made. I was quite surprised how much I liked this, considering it cost just less than £20 from The Sourcing Table, the importer being Indigo Wines. I think they have now moved on to the 2024 vintage.

Although plenty of White Rioja is now quite expensive, some merchants who know the region well, as Indigo does, are finding some bargains.

Malagousia Natur 2024, Tetramythos Estate (Achaia, Peloponnese, Greece)

Greek wine doesn’t get the attention it deserves in the UK, but the wines of this well-known boutique estate are quite well represented here. They have around 14 hectares of vines between 450 and 1050 masl on the slopes of Mount Helmos, a ski area in the AOP region of Achaia. We are in the Northern Peloponnese here, not far from Patras.

Malagousia (aka Malgouzia) is an aromatic variety, making often excellent dry white wines. Greek whites are not all about Assyrtiko! This cuvée is cold-macerated for thirty hours, which helps to retain all the perfume of lime juice and mountain flora when this variety is grown at altitude. The result is fresh and crisp, but also saline, with a mineral edge. You will sense a very slight nod to Riesling. The palate has more a mix of grapefruit and nectarine flavours, its finish being very much like the bergamot of Earl Grey Tea. It is not an AOP Achaia though.

As the label suggests, this is organic and, as far as I can tell, pretty much a natural wine, using “sustainable” viticulture, natural yeasts etc. I found this at The Wine Society for £13.50. The bottle has an importer sticker from Keeling Andrew, and they do indeed list a number of other wines from this estate in their Shrine to the Vine shops in London. But for the Wine Society’s price this is remarkable value. As one retailer bemoaned to me, they can’t even get it wholesale that cheap. It is currently in stock at TWS.