 Hello, welcome back to Exotic Wine Travel. I'm your host, Matthew Horky. Hi, I'm Sharon Tan. Welcome back to the show. We have a special, special guest today. As you can see, there's somebody different besides Sharon and I. Let me see, my Polish is gonna be terrible. So, Isabella Kaminski. It's perfect. Oh, from the YouTube, Polish Wine YouTube channel. Alevino. Alevino. I do watch it, but it's in Polish, so I've watched it before, but it's in Polish, so. Yeah. Sometimes some episodes are in English. I know, I noticed that, so. We'll put a link in the description box anyway. Yeah, so welcome. We're here at the 2019 Modrile Noir, an event dedicated to Pinot Noir here in Slovenia. This is Sharon and I's second year here, some wonderful wines, Slovenia, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia. Before we even get into Poland, that's what we were really interested in. What do you think of the event so far? I love it, I love it. It's such a small, nice festival in a beautiful place. I really like it and I think that this is really a good selection of winemakers and wineries from this region, I would say. Before we get into the market, can we just give everybody a little, like a short bio about who you are, what you're doing, how you're in wine? Okay, so I work in wines since 2010 and before I was, you would not believe that I was a French teacher at the university for eight years of my life and now I'm just doing tastings and I have my channel Alevino and I write for different magazines and teach about wine. Ah, okay. The Polish market's something we're really interested in actually, right? We have been working around Poland so I mean we have been to most of the countries around Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, North Macedonia and what is interesting is that all the places that we go to often, they rank Poland as one of the key export market and when you dig deeper, it's also super interesting because it's not just the economic side of things where the middle class people with money to buy bottled wine is growing rapidly but the feedback that we get is Poland and their wine drinkers are very open-minded. Yes, that's true. I think that in general in countries which are not wine countries, people are more open-minded to wine because they don't have any, you know, things they learned from their parents. They just drink whatever you give them and they have like, everything has a wow effect for them, I would say. Yes. Very often I'm doing a lot of tasting in Poland and actually I try to promote, you know, all kinds of wines or also natural wines, different wines from different countries, orange wines, pet nuts, et cetera and people are really always open to them. Yeah, the market's really open, right? Is there a specific key trend happening right now? Is there a specific style of wine that they really look for? Yes, actually, so I said something very optimistic but actually, of course, there's some problems as well because this is an open market and this is a growing market but still most of the people outside big cities, they just want to buy quite cheap wines, so like five, six euros. Just get pounded, like, exactly and actually if I'm working with people outside big cities, they prefer wines in the style of, I know you don't like this grape, Primitivo. Oh, I actually like it, but is that right? I love that you remember. Of course I remember, I watch these guys. So, yes, so yeah, in Poland, you know, if you have to deal with a client who didn't taste so much wines, this client would prefer something like Primitivo, big Syrah, you know, Chilean, Carmenera, et cetera, so a little bit more sweetness, more alcohol. Easy to drink and stuff. But in big cities, everything is possible. Ah, you do have some quite, some pretty nice large cities. That's the interesting thing about wine drinkers all over the world because Poland has that open-minded, growing aspect but when you go down to the very bottom, like the baseline of wine drinkers everywhere in the world, five euros is that spot where people want and every, like again, the entry level, people who just started drinking why always like Primitivo, because it's brown, it's fruity, it's generous, it's normal. Let's get into the Polish wine industry. We've tasted a few before, but before we get into this wine in particular, can you tell us a little bit about the Polish wine industry, how many producers there are? Uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay, so we have around 300 producers now and 600 hectares. Whoa, 300 producers. Yeah, but you know, 300 producers, 600 hectares, these are really like tiny, tiny producers. For example, this one, Rafał Wozowski from Vinicius Góstrzewickich. Can you say that three times fast? I will. I'll put it on the screen. I will teach you later. But this guy, for example, has just three and a half hectares and the biggest winery is around 30 hectares, so. Well, that's more produce. Wow, that's a lot of more producers. Is it hybrids, vinifero? Okay, a lot of hybrids, actually. We started in the 80s with hybrids. Actually, we had vineyards, you know, in the can, where Poland is now, there were vineyards in middle ages. Yeah. But actually, with modern winemaking, we started in 1982. Okay. And we started with hybrids, different hybrids like Solaris, Rondo, Regens, et cetera. But now, a lot of these winemakers who started with hybrids, they learned how to do wine. They also selected maybe better vineyards, better sites. And now, they can finally start to play a little bit with Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Gris, for example, Gerustraminer, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what we're gonna taste today. Essex, the 16, actually, if there's enough here. So, pronounce the winery for me. We have the Pinot Noir, 2016. Yeah, the name of the winery is here, actually. So, and this is. Winice? Yes, Winice, it's winery. And then, Zgusz Szabnicki. Zgusz Szabnicki. Szabnicki. Wow, let's get in. You know, actually my mother is, I'm adopted, so my mother is Polish. Really? Yeah, but not, I mean, third generation American, you know, not, but so, let's get into this. I only have a little bit, but I've tasted this before. So, you two are a little bit more, we're towards the end of the bottle. Sharing his car. So, 2016, Pinot Noir from Poland. Crazy, crazy, it's later colored, obviously, so they, obviously it's, I mean, ripeness, you're so far north, ripeness is always at a premium, 12% alcohol. Actually, like the 16, I think, what did we taste in the master class last night? Maybe 16, right? 15. 15, I think I like 16 a little bit better. So, for me, you can identify that as Pinot Noir. That's the good thing. Yeah. You do get the sour cherry notes, you know, a little bit of this kind of rhubarb, strawberry, earthy type of notes. And what else do you, what do you do? Yeah, but rhubarb, it's interesting, you are saying that because we, yesterday in the evening, we tasted 14, and 14 was so much rhubarb, if you can say it. It is, yeah. Rhubarb, yeah, so rhubarb. A little bit sometimes of flowers, violets, you know, and sometimes a little bit of smokiness. Let's give this a little bit of a help. For me, the encouraging thing about this, have you given this to me as like you, like I just first tasted a Polish Pinot Noir yesterday? I'm very happy to know that, you know, it's Pinot Noir. It's well made with the, it's kind of the grapes they have. Is the most stellar, most complex Pinot Noir in the world? No, it's not, but it's good. It's serviceable. And is this drinkable? Is this is like the, for Polish reds, I know it's probably tougher, or the weed talking about this is the mid type range, higher end, lower end. Like we're, yeah, quality wise. We're about as pulling with the reds. Okay. So in Poland, I think we have problem with reds. Of course. With, you know, with the polyphenols, with the maturity of the grapes. So for example, 2018 was really good for us, because it was really a hot year in Poland. So this would be decent, and maybe like few others, but I would say like maybe five others, wires, particular wires, labels would be the best Polish reds. Reds, okay. So this is one of the best Polish reds, for sure. Anything that you want to, you're the Pinot Noir person. I'm not about the... I think what's interesting is we're just, I was just talking to a group of people, right? And we said that if we have this wine in front of us right now, and for those who attended the tasting, I think most of us would be able to distinguish and say, oh, this must be the Polish Pinot Noir. And I love that sort of signature. I definitely can smell that it's a struggle to ripen the grape, which is, but it's actually not bad, because it appears as green tannins, a little bit of abatious note, and the rhubarb smell, but the rhubarb is not overwhelming here. It kind of serves as a background to the wine, so I appreciate about it. And on the palate, there's this candied raspberry taste, which makes it very accessible. I think this is a wine that you need to know what you're getting yourself into. If you chill it down a little bit, have it for lunch, the perfect setting, you would enjoy the wine. Like I said, this is not, and for instance, I think this is very sal, I actually think this is very sal, I've tasted a lot of Pinot Noirs, most of the time Pinot Noirs are terrible, right? We all know that. But I would definitely be bringing this into some kind of blind tasting, say, hey, you wanna try a Polish wine? That's what I think I find so cool about this. So thank you for showing us this. Is there anything you wanna talk, sign off about? About Poland, the Polish market, Polish wine? You know what is interesting is that, actually people think that we are making wines only on the South, but we are making wines everywhere now. Like even in the Northern part of Poland, so really the wineries are like, popping up all the time, every year we have more and more wineries. And also I wanted to say that after these 30 years of playing with the winemaking, the winemakers today are also playing with wines, so we are making also Petna's. We are making also fantastic sparking wines, I mean, fantastic. They start to be really good, really juicy, great, high acidic wines, and we are making also orange wines, actually. And even in Crevy. Oh, so to find out about those, we'll have to, I'll put your YouTube, I'll put Isabella's YouTube channel in the cards right there, you'll check it out, it's half Polish, half English, right? There's some English episodes, some Polish, that's what they'll find out about some of these wines, and wines from all over Europe, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well thank you for being on the show, I appreciate it. Thank you for that, I actually love the camera. We saw you earlier in Loire, right? Loire this year? Yes, Loire, yeah. So check out her YouTube channel, if you like this video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel, Exotic Wine Travel, we will see you at the next episode. Cheers! Cheers! What do you say in Polish? Na zdrowie! Oh, na zdrowie! Yeah!