Pieter Walser from BLANKbottle has got to be one of the most interesting, inspired, and avant-garde winemakers I’ve ever come across anywhere in the world. His wine career began during his undergrad at Stellenbosch University in South Africa when he was driving by a winery that was having a sale on unlabelled wines. He had just enough money to buy 3 cases that he resold to friends at a profit and was the beginning of a fairly lucrative side hustle. This is where the winery name originated, from the blank bottles that Pieter would buy and resell to pay his way through school. Then in his final year, the practicum was making their own wine, which he did out a friends garage with purchased grapes. He’s never worked for another winemaker or had a direct mentor, so everything he did was without rules or boundaries, making only what inspires him.

He no longer operates out of his friend’s garage, but rather from a cellar he rents in Somerset West where he works with over 60 different vineyards making over 40 different small lots of low intervention wine. Since he owns no vineyards he’s not beholden to any one thing, he pivots from year to year with different wines that are inspired by different farmers and grapes that he has access to. And I don’t mean just in the usual way, like a winemaker being inspired by a particular terroir, his inspirations are usually broader than that, stemming from odd chance encounters, happenstance, or serendipitous interactions.

Pieter Walser hooked up to neuro-transmitters for his 2015 “Limbic”

One of the most famous examples is when he met a neuroscientist on a flight and they decided to do a project together where Pieter was hooked up to censors that measured his brain activity and pleasure receptors. He then blind-tasted samples of 21 different white wines he had in barrel and created a blend based entirely off of his subconscious pleasure sensor reactions read through his neuro-activity. Then, as a control and for comparison, he created another blend consciously knowing what he was tasting and blending. This resulted in two very different wines and both were extremely delicious. They called the sub-consious wine made by data from his neuro-transmitters “Limbic” for the unconscious part of the mind, and they called the conscious blend “Orbitofrontal Cortex” for the decision-making part of the brain. And while Limbic has long sold out (that was a one-off collaboration from 2015) Pieter has continued to make the Orbitofrontal Cortext and we currently have some of this in stock as part of this feature. But that’s the kind of thing that happens at BLANKbottle.

Also, you may have noticed that the bottles aren’t blank bottles anymore…quite the opposite. Pieter has always designed his own labels, and up until 2013 the labels were fairly plain, designed on Microsoft Word with some cool fonts being about as dynamic as they got. But in 2013 Pieter suffered a series of 3 severe epileptic attacks which left him unable to look at computer screens for very long and really changed his ability to design. It also seemed to have changed something in his brain that gave him a much more artistic ability. Apparently as a child he couldn’t really draw at all, and he thinks those epileptic attacks changed something in his brain and now it came naturally to him. So all his labels are done by hand and transferred to bottle in old school print shop style. His interesting wine came before the interesting labels did, but I always say these wines are as delicious and interesting as they look.

On top of all that, his website is also one of the most interesting I’ve ever seen of a winery. Each wine has the bottle shot, the tech sheet for the wine, the whole story behind the wine, and most even have an audio file of him telling the story behind the wine. These wines are so fun to look up on his website before pop them and hit play to hear him tell what kind of (sometimes crazy) circumstances came about to have him making that wine. Each wine deserves it’s unique and interesting story, but I won’t bother paraphrasing them here, they’re best told by him, so I’ll just link each of this week’s feature wines to his own website and let him tell you all about them. Literally, with an audio file you can listen to. It looks like not all of the 2020 wines are uploaded yet, in which cases I’ll link the most recent vintages, which will have the same story, but maybe slightly different vintage details.

“AIR CARROTS OF PAGNOL” 2020
$42 per bottle at Byward Wine Market or $35.99 x6 from Lifford Wines
https://blankbottle.co.za/blank_bottle_wines/air-carrots-of-pagnol-2018/

“MOMENT OF SILENCE” 2020
$34 per bottle at Byward Wine Market or $29.99 x6 from Lifford Wines
https://blankbottle.co.za/blank_bottle_wines/moment-of-silence-2018/

“NOTHING TO DECLARE” 2020
$38 per bottle at Byward Wine Market or $33.99 x6 from Lifford Wines
https://blankbottle.co.za/blank_bottle_wines/nothing-to-declare-2016/

“ORBITOFRONTAL CORTEXT” 2020
$45 per bottle at Byward Wine Market or $39.99 x6 from Lifford Wines
https://blankbottle.co.za/blank_bottle_wines/orbitofrontal-cortex-2020/

“EMPIRE STRIKES BACK” 2020
$55 per bottle at Byward Wine Market or $49.99 x6 from Lifford Wines
https://blankbottle.co.za/blank_bottle_wines/the-empire-strikes-back-2020/

“RETIREMENT AT 65” 2020
$50 per bottle at Byward Wine Market or $44.99 x6 from Lifford Wines
https://blankbottle.co.za/blank_bottle_wines/retirement-65-2020/

“PSEUDONYM” 2020
$59 per bottle at Byward Wine Market or $52.99 x6 from Lifford Wines
https://blankbottle.co.za/blank_bottle_wines/pseudonym-2018/

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The Byward Wine Market is fully open for in person shopping, as well as online orders offering curbside pickup or local delivery within Ottawa. And just a reminder that the order deadline for Friday case deliveries is Wednesday before 9:00am. Reach out if you have any questions, and check out the archive of past FEATURES if you’re interested in other recommendations. Lastly, please feel free to forward this to anyone in Ontario who may be interested in home wine delivery and follow us on Instagram for daily wine content at @bywardwinemarket!