Okr
Ochre Ochre, Burning Bright / In the Forests of the Night
Our wines have been gradually shifting towards less skin contact and more nuance – we use shorter and shorter maceration times and a much smaller proportion of skin-contact wine in the final blends than before. But I still like to enjoy a well-made skin-contact wine from time to time (especially when they come from my beloved Collio / Brda area).
In short, skin contact wines still have their place in my heart and cellar, and creating an amber brother to our dear Běl & Nach liters was kind of a no-brainer. All these salt-of-the-earth fellas share the same “everyday easy drinking” vibe. This means no hardcore tannins or long macerations, but rather a fine, normal skin-contact wine with great energy, distinguished aromatics, and only a hint of the “orangey” character. (Full disclosure: I'm not a huge fan of the term orange wine or its ubiquity.) Okr is vivid, fun, and just enough talkative for it to be the best of companions.
We chose to name it Okr (ochre in Czech) not only because it follows the concise, colour-themed concept of its siblings Běl and Nach, but also because ochre is a natural pigment with a long history of use by humans – pieces of the material engraved with abstract designs have been found in South Africa and dated to around 75,000 years ago. And ochre literally is earth, precisely a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand, with colours ranging from yellow to orange or amber. Voilá the perfect symbol for where the wine comes from, and which hues & glints you can expect in your glass...
The 2024 vintage brings a bit of a makeover, as you see. This time, the change is not coming from me, the eternal tweaker, but from a bottle shortage: the production of the previously used “plumpie” was discontinued so we had no option but to find another pretty liter bottles (no small feat, btw). Together with our long-term designer collaborator Klára Zápotocká we then also created a new future for the label – a minimalist black and white affair that emphasises the wines’ signature simplicity, purity and everyday vibe. (We kept the liter volume, of course, as it's an important part of Moravian wine heritage. Or you can call it “minimagnum”, like my Montréal friends.)
Wanna drink this? These are the guys to ask where to get my wine in your country, or get it as part of our tasting packs.
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