 Welcome back to Exotic Wine Travel. I am your host, Matthew Horkey. We're going to taste some very interesting, minimal intervention wines today, natural wine today. Before we get started, I have to apologize for the color. Everything will kind of in a makeshift studio. We're in between trips right now and the lighting might be funny, but I'm doing the best that I can. So let's get started. Today we're going to actually talk about one producer. One producer only called Givé Bino is headed up. It's owned by a man called Duchenskava, Skubac. Let me see if I got that right from Slovakia, from the small Carpathian region, the Malo Karpatska region. Really interesting. We spent a few days with him. Really great guy. First of all, he also organizes a live natural wine fair in Slovakia called Givé Vina, which means live wines. And then his, which is plural, and then his winery is called Live Wine as well. And we met up with him actually at Uadama Wine Bar in Bratislava, and we went through a tasting of 2015 wines, natural wines from both Czech Republic, Morava and Slovakia. Really awesome. It's a great place. It's just about to open in Bratislava. You should check it out if you're in the area because it's near the central train station. And the next day, he actually took us to Morava. We visited Krasna Orda. We visited a few other producers, some vineyards. Before we went to the cellar and tasted his wines, and we're going to taste two of them today. He only makes four wines, a Blanc, an orange wine, which was actually featured in Simon Wolfe's brand new book about orange wines called Amber Revolution. He also makes this very unique wine that we're going to taste today in between a rosé and a red, and a red out of Blau Frankisch. Very interesting guy makes only about 15,000 bottles a year in the basement of his house, the cellar of his house. Like I said, spontaneous fermentation, no finding, no filtering. He farms all the small amount of vineyards that he owns, really, really is dedicated to wine. And like I said, we had a fantastic time tasting with him. He also makes honey-meat and cognac, interesting. Not my cup of tea, so let's just stick to the wines. Let's get started. The first wine that we have is the interesting wine I was talking about. This is the Givet Vino 2015 Rijak. Now why is this interesting? This is actually a blend of white and red or black grapes, fermented together, 14 days on the skin, spontaneous fermentation. It's a field blend, so even on his website, even when he told us, I don't even know what the heck it is. All I know is it's darn delicious. I have tasted these wines before, but not in a neutral setting like I am about to now. So as you can see, it's got like this cherry, Pinot Noir color. Really interesting color. Let's give this a sniff. Very interesting. It's not Pinot Noir, like it's like red berry juice, basically, like a lot of red fruits. I wouldn't be surprised if there's trauma in there. It's a little bit floral, just flat out delicious. Red fruit, flowers, a little bit of mineral. Let's give this a go. This wine's not complicated, it's just straight up delicious. Like I said, red fruit, you're getting cherries, strawberries, cranberries for days, texture, a little bit of acidity, no tan on level, really just juicy, easy to drink, super clean for people that don't like natural wines because they think sometimes they can be anything. Super clean. I'm going to say about 4.1 out of 5 on this. I think it's beautiful wine. Really, really nice stuff. Let's move on to the next one. This is the wine that was actually featured in Simon Wolf's book, Orange Crush. This is the Orange 2015. This is a blend of Riesling, Welsch Riesling, and Traminer, also known as Gewürzgerminger. 14 days on the skins, not super, super orange, as maybe you can see here. Kind of got a light apricot, like yellow peach type of tint. You want to find it unfiltered. Both these wines were aged actually one year in oak and acacia wood. Let's give this a smell. Very, very pretty nose. The Traminer jumps out at me right away with the yellow flower. Really, really nice. Apricot, yellow flower, sweet peaches, almost like when I was a kid, I used to love canned peaches, actually, and that's what I get sometimes when I smell some of these orange wines made out of floral grapes. Welsch Riesling I think makes up the backbone of this wine, which I think is a fantastic grape for all types of wines, but especially orange wines, because it keeps juiciness when you macerate them. Let me give this a go. What jumps out, some people that don't like orange wines, don't like the bitter tannins that come with it. This is straight up freshness. Straight up floral, citrus fruit, sweet stone fruit, some pineapple notes. It's just juicy, delicious. Just a touch of tannin, not much, probably about the tannin level of, say, like a big oak white wine. So, tannins are super, super low, really easy to drink. I think this is damn good, sorry, excuse me, we don't swear on the show. I think this is darn good for me, 4.2 out of 5. I'm really impressed tasting this now because we tasted this when we did a tasting with him at Uadama Wine Bar, and I didn't want to be influenced by him, but his wine was my favorite that evening, out of all the white and orange wines, and this is showing up really nice. So, nice job, Dushan, a really fantastic guy. We spent a day with him. You can tell he's very serious, takes winemaking seriously, takes what he's doing very seriously, is working on making the wines as clean as possible, and it's evident in these examples too. Shireen is also a big fan of the red wine made out of Blanc Frankish, so you should check that out. Good job, Dushan. Wine showed better than I expected, and notice we talked about 4. Dushan doesn't like when people spit on caramel, notice I swallowed the wine, so anyways, guys you should check them out, they're just starting to be exported around Europe, you probably have to be in Bratislava to find them, but maybe whoever knows, maybe he blows up and you start finding these wines all around the world. So check it out, lots of good stuff happening in Slovakia. This is the second trip that Shireen and I went through, and we actually found lots of gems, a lot of interesting wines in that country. So guys, if you like this video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel, Exotic Wine Travel. I will see you at the next episode.