Winemaker Notes
This wine offers aromas of cherry blossom, anise, and flint. On the palate, it is lively and zingy, with dense, minty minerality. Light yet surprisingly full, it is richly flavored and layered.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
A smoky, dense version, with a bone-dry profile that leads with flint, smoke and petrol overlaying quince, pear, sweet fennel seed and snap pea. Verbena and lentil notes add earthiness. Theres a liberal dusting of fleur de sel on the precise finish, which rings with mineral intensity. Drink now through 2032. 500 cases imported.
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James Suckling
Citrus rind, apples and chopped chives on the nose, followed by a medium-bodied, juicy palate with a lightly salty, herbal freshness. From biodynamically grown grapes with Demeter certification.
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Vinous
The 2023 Grüner Veltliner Hefeabzug comes from various sites and is, in fact, the same wine as Zwickl, but filtered. Reduction is similar, though the fruit is more subdued. The palate is smooth and slightly smoky, yet equally snappy.
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.