Lan Kristančič is on his first visit to Taiwan, but I’m almost certain we’ve met before, though maybe not…

Lan is the 9th generation scion of his family, producing MOVIA wine on the fractal boundary between Italy and Slovenia for more than 200 years.

He summarized his family history this way: His family have lived and made wine in the same place since 1820, and so it was that Lan’s Great Grandfather carried an Austrian passport.

After the 1st World War, Lan’s Grandfather held an Italian passport. Lan’s Father still has an old Yugoslavian passport, and now Lan travels on a Slovenia/EU passport.

Nevertheless, through more than a century of political and military turbulence, MOVIA has continued to produce outstanding wines.

I looked up some references that Lan made to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Lan said that the SOČA River (known in Italian as Isonzo River) runs through Goriška Brda, the same subregion as MOVIA.

The river is not mentioned directly with reference to wine, but it does feature often in Hemingway’s personal account of the war between Austria and Italy.

Hemingway served as an ambulance driver on the Italian front and was wounded.

Clearly, MOVIA’s region was right in the thick of the war, and when it ended, MOVIA was part of Italy.

After Fascist Italy picked the losing side in WWII, Europe was carved up again at the Congress of Versailles, where the Allies set the new border between Italy and Yugoslavia right through the middle of MOVIA’s vineyards — just 100 meters from the MOVIA winery.

For a time, to get to the vineyard meant driving 25km to and from a border crossing, and it was a tough journey for their pre-war tractors.

About one third of MOVIA’s vineyards still lie in Collio, Italy’s top region for white wine, along with Alto Adige.

The family kept faith with their land and their wines.

During the communist era, when the Yugoslavian government ruled that all grapes must be processed in huge cooperative wine factories, MOVIA simply refused.

Lan declares that MOVIA never sent a single grape to the co-op.

He tells how things got easier after some high government officials discovered how much better MOVIA wines were than the co-op plonk (happily gone forever), and these hypocritical communists chose to collect and drink MOVIA themselves, even serve MOVIA at state occasions.

After Yugoslavia dissolved in 1992, Slovenia was the first former province to declare itself an independent nation, and immediately they began suing to enter the European Union.

Slovenia joined the EU in 2004 and adopted the EURO in 2007.

Naseem and I visited Slovenia in 2005 and had the wine adventure of our lives, visiting wineries in an old Skoda — but that’s another story.

MOVIA is ahead of the curve.

Recent years have seen radical transformations in the wine industry as more and more producers free themselves from chemical farming to embrace organic and biodynamic methods.

The market is very different now, with most of Europe hurrying to embrace the low-intervention winemaking practices that MOVIA has maintained for generations — but MOVIA too is innovating.

Like so many producers around the world, MOVIA now ages some wines in concrete eggs to encourage convection without the need for manual remontage.

But even more bravely — and perhaps uniquely — MOVIA has developed a new style of oak cask with elliptical ends.

Lees collecting in the bottom of the ellipse spread over a much broader area, increasing lees contact with the wine, which protects it from premature oxidation.

With Petnat gaining market share everywhere, again MOVIA has its own approach to sparkling wine made with a single fermentation.

For their premium sparkling, PURO, they have even designed an opener that you use under water (the long shaft helps keep your hands dry).

MOVIA sparkling wine is shipped with all its sediment, and it is sold in a special container that stands the bottle upside down.

The sediment collects in the neck of the bottle so that when you open it upside down, the first thing that emerges with a big POP is the plug of dead yeast.

It’s a kind of DIY dégorgement.

You quickly turn the bottle upright, losing surprisingly little wine, and away you go.

The wine degorged this way pours close to clear and smells and tastes beautifully autolytic, perhaps a little earthy, having aged 7 years on its lees until the moment you just opened it.

The technical point is that the lees protect and preserve the wine.

Anyway, it tastes like aged Champagne, and the natural carbonation of the 2018 we tasted had not slipped much — perhaps to a little more than 4 bars, or just a little less fizzy than young Champagne.

Lan says they bottle at 7 bars, but depending on storage, each year the internal pressure slips about 0.3 bar.

In my opinion, the 2018 still had room to develop, say for another 3–5 years.

About 30 years ago, Lan’s father Aleš Kristančič began producing MOVIA’s white wines with very long skin contact (what people now call ‘Orange Wine’, though MOVIA’s whites aren’t orange).

Long skin contact — 2 weeks in a chilled, anaerobic container — before pressing turns Pinot Grigio to pale rose.

This wine is extraordinary, unlike any Pinot Grigio I’ve ever tasted, and there are some great ones in Collio.

Its texture has mouth-filling density, bringing it much closer to Alsatian Pinot Gris, but still this wine is completely dry.

You have to try this one too, and with its fresh acidity it will age forever.

We also bought LUNAR, their premium white — 100% Rebela, picked on the full moon, barrel-aged in specially crafted new-oak barrels, and then bottled unfiltered after 8 lunar cycles in 1-liter bottles.

Lan says they use 1L bottles because the wine has loads of sediment, and they want to make sure you get at least 750ml apart from the lees.

This wine was well shaken up when Lan invited me to decant it. Who cares? It was delicious.

But for my own, I’m going to keep it standing still for a year and decant it carefully to see what it tastes like with less material in suspension.

I’m sure it will be amazing.

The sediment protects the wine from oxygen so that they are able to bottle without adding any sulphur.

This wine is layered and complex, beautifully balanced.

But all the wines from MOVIA are amazing, full of character and soul, and none of them are funky, like so many natural wines.

Kyle and John from Wolfpack are bringing MOVIA to Taiwan, and Naseem and I have already promised to visit Lan in Slovenia, as early as next fall.

To close, here is a quote from TWDC, who bring the wine into Singapore:

“Movia is more than a mere wine label — it is a way of life, life in all its purity of nature and sincerity of the author.
A brand beyond time, Movia’s supreme standards are why they are sought after by so many wine connoisseurs around the world.
From light classics, through a range of mature wines with good ageing potential, they are widely considered as one of the world’s finest.”

P.S. I explained to LAN that in Mandarin his name has at least 3 different meanings, depending on the tone.

Third-tone Lan means lazy; fourth-tone Lan means rotten.

I recommended that he pronounce his name carefully with second-tone LAN, where it means BLUE.