Pieter Colpaert
speaker
122 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Pieter Colpaert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Thanks for having me, Jordan. But don't call me a wine expert. I think I'm just a regular guy who loves a good glass of wine now and then and who started wondering why a lot of the good stuff is so damn expensive.
Well, I think my origin story is I was drinking this beautiful Sicilian red wine from a natural winemaker in Sicily, who's actually a Belgian guy, just like myself. His name is Frank Cornelissen, and he produces some really incredible wines on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily. So I was trying his Susu Caru, which is a favorite of rapper Action Bronson.
Yeah, exactly. He compared the joy he felt drinking that wine to when his mom bought him the NBA Jam Tournament Edition for PlayStation when he was a little kid.
Well, first of all, the wine itself. I mean, it's just, it's amazing. Like it's somewhere I'd say between like a light red wine and a rosé. It has a beautiful ruby color, like a nose full of red fruits and herbs. It's not too jammy, just like a very unique, vibrant wine. The kind of wine that I want to be drinking all summer. And also, it's a natural wine.
There's unnatural wines, apparently? Well, I mean, natural is kind of a catch-all term. In this case, it means the winemaker tries to intervene in the fermentation process as little as possible. So they're only using indigenous yeasts. They're not adding any chemical or commercial yeasts. They're not adding additives or sulfites to the wines, as more traditional winemakers would typically do.
Yeah. I mean, I hope I'm not that cliche guy, but a lot of natural wine is a little too funky or like weird for my taste because I don't want my wine to smell like a horse stable or I don't want my wine to taste like kombucha.
Well, this wine that I was talking about, it had none of that kombucha flavor. This winemaker, his goal was to let the grapes and the character of the Etna volcanic territory shine through in his wines. And you know, the best part of it is it sells for maybe like $30 a bottle in the US, which, you know, it's quite expensive. It's no like barefoot or two buck chuck.
But for a wine of that quality, I think it's a steal. Because also, you know, there are risks to the natural winemaking process.
So, you know, winemakers typically will be using commercial yeast and additives to prevent spoilage and to have a more stable and consistent product. So, you know, not a commercial, but this guy Cornelison, he has to be super diligent in his winemaking process, in the grapes he selects, how he stores the wines, etc.
So there's some irony there, you know, it's not intervening in your wine is more expensive and more difficult sometimes than tinkering with it.
Yeah, I mean, those are great comparisons. It's exactly the same where, you know, like with these commercial wines, you're adding a bunch of stuff. So you have a more consistent product. So it all kind of tastes the same. But that is because you're adding all these flavors to it by adding commercial yeasts.
And also, you know, it's the same with like, it's the reason why organic food is more expensive than non-organic food.
Yeah, I mean, there's some truth to that because to kind of continue my love story with the Susukaru, this wine, after I drank it, I started talking about it with my local wine guy. Of course, you've got a wine guy in every area code. I mean, you don't. They're really useful. I mean, so anyway, we were chatting about Frank Cornelison's wines.
And this wine guy mentioned to me that Frank produces what some people consider the holy grail of natural Italian wines. It's called the Magma. You know, the grapes are being grown on the side of a volcano. Clever. Yeah. And it's made from a single vineyard of 100-year-old Nerello Mascalese vines. So there's only a couple hundred bottles produced each year.
And the most recent vintage retails for, I think, around $350 a bottle in the U.S.
You know, it's the same as any luxury product, really. There's the rarity factor. Because with such limited production, the magma is just simply much harder to come by. And then there's also the age of the vines, because the magma comes from a single vineyard of pre-Phylloxera vines. Pre-Phylloxera? Sorry, sorry. So this is pretty technical. Time for some wine history. All right.
The Phylloxera was an insect pest. in the late 19th century, and it caused this huge epidemic, which destroyed most of the vineyards for wine grapes in Europe, especially in France and Italy. So winemakers started ripping out most of the infected vines, and then one of their main solutions was to plant imported bug-resistant rootstocks and graft new vines onto them.
But so around the slopes of Mount Etna, the little bug, the piloxera, didn't make it past a certain altitude. So there, they still have a fair amount of ungrafted vines from the original rootstock that are more than 100 years old. So those are vines that are super rare and distinct. And then also, you know, these old vines, they produce grapes with more concentrated flavors, more complexity.
Listen, I will gladly admit to waxing poetically about this wine. So let me wax on for just a little bit longer. Another important factor is the aging process. because the Susukaru is a wine that you're supposed to enjoy when it's young. And then the Magma is aged for one and a half years in special epoxy tanks, and then another one and a half years in the bottle.
So that allows it to develop even more depth and nuance. So that also means more flexing to whatever company you happen to be in at that particular moment in time.
Showing 1–20 of 122 · page 1 of 7
Next →