Giorgio Clai

The Climb

White wine became the clearest register of Giorgio Clai’s work once he moved from the restaurant industry in Trieste into winemaking at Clai Winery in Krasica, Istria, Croatia in 2001. The shift brought a hands-on mode of making into focus: direct, close to the work, and shaped by the demands of a craft that leaves little room for distance. Before that, the restaurant trade had already trained him in service, timing, and the practical discipline of hospitality. That change in role also marked a change in scale. As winemaker at Clai Winery, Giorgio Clai built a career around white wine and kept the method tightly connected to the place and the work itself. The identity that emerged there was not broad or ornamental. It was made through repetition, judgment, and persistence inside the winery rather than around it. The first response to those wines was not approval. Giorgio Clai described it plainly: “People were saying I am crazy. That my wines are terrible and nobody wanted to drink them.” For an artisan, that kind of reception can become a pressure test. In his case, it appears to have fixed the terms of the work early: conviction on one side, resistance on the other.

Today

Since 2001, Giorgio Clai has served as winemaker at Clai Winery. White wine remains the center of that practice, and the work is defined by a direct, handmade approach rather than distance or presentation. The emphasis is on doing the work closely, with the sort of attention that keeps the process visible inside the final bottle. On that handmade approach, Clai said, “No one is producing wine by hand like that since Ottocento.” The line places method and lineage in the same frame, treating Ottocento as both reference point and naming logic. When he added, “And there it was - the perfect name for our wine!” the name reads less as branding than as a craft judgment: the right word for a method already in use.

Signature

Giorgio's signature dishes include Ottocento Bijeli, Clai Bijele Zemlje, and Refošk Brombonero.

In Their Words “People were saying I am crazy. That my wines are terrible and nobody wanted to drink them.” “No one is producing wine by hand like that since Ottocento.”