Winemaker Notes
Open and approachable on the nose, highlighted by ripe yellow apple, white pepper and underlined by delicate citrus peels with a touch of smoky tobacco; on the palate beautifully balanced with a crisp acidity which results in an elegant and powerful body, juicy exotic fruit flavors, plenty of spices and dry herbs dominate the palate that is long and full. Smaragd wines are dry, full-bodied, and complex wines with plenty of finesse and great aging potential.
Served well chilled directly from the fridge, Grüner Veltliner Smaragd Terrassen is a versatile companion.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Salty and yeasty, with a fruity mellowness to its flavors of verbena and yellow apple. Shows restraint on the chiseled palate, offering notes of warm hay, iodine and briny tang. Shows good length and balance. Drink now through 2030.
Fun to say and delightfully easy to drink, Grüner Veltliner calls Austria its homeland. While some easily quaffable Grüners come in a one-liter—a convenient size—many high caliber single vineyard bottlings can benefit from cellar aging. Somm Secret—About 75% of the world’s Grüner Veltliner comes from Austria but the variety is gaining ground in other countries, namely Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the United States.
As Austria’s most prestigious wine growing region, the landscape of the Wachau is—not surprisingly—one of its most dramatic. Millions of years ago, the Danube River chiseled its way through the earth, creating steep terraces of decomposed volcanic and metamorphic rock. Harsh Ice Age winds brought deposits of ancient glacial dust and loess to the terrace’s eastern faces. Today these steep surfaces of nutrient-poor and fast draining soil are home to some of Austria’s very best sites for both Grüner Veltliner and Riesling.
Wachau is small, comprising a mere three percent of Austria’s vine surface and, considering relatively low yields, represents a miniscule proportion of total wine production. Diurnal temperature shifts in Wachau facilitate great balance of sugar and phenolic ripeness in its grapes. At night cold air from the Alps and forests in the northwest displace warm afternoon air, which gets sucked upstream along the Danube.
Its sites are actually so varied and distinct that more emphasis is going into vineyard-designated offerings even despite grape variety. Grüner Veltliner and Riesling are most prominent, but the region produces Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc (Weissburgunder), Pinot Gris, Sauvignon Blanc and Zweigelt among other local variants.