Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Complex dried-pear, fennel-seeds and bread-dough nose. However, the best thing about this wine is the fascinating interplay of pithy texture and crisp texture on the palate. Bottled February 2021. From biodynamically grown grapes with Demeter certification. Drink or hold. Screw cap.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Im Weingebirge Grüner Veltliner Federspiel (Late Release) was bottled from an old 69-hectoliter oak vat in February this year, so after five years of barrel aging. The wine is bright and clear in color and opens with an intense, crystalline and finely yeasty bouquet of perfectly ripe fruits and crunchy stone aromas. Round and juicy on the palate, with rather mild acidity but a firm mineral and phenolic structure, this is still a rich and powerful wine with fine tannins and mouth-filling volume. It is still too young to unfold all its talents but will refine with further bottle age. 12.5% alcohol. Tasted at the domaine in June 2021.
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.