Winemaker Notes
Prager’s stylistic signature is that of aromatic complexity coupled with power and tension. High density planting and long hang times ensure ripe fruit flavors and concentration, yet allowing leaves to shade the fruit lend vibrant aromatics of grasses, herbs, and wildflowers. Minerality is a constant feature of any Prager wine.
Grüner Veltliner Smaragd is a robust and full-bodied dry white wine. Its intensity of flavor and ripeness of fruit make it ideal with high-integrity ingredients such as seared white fish or sautéed spring vegetables. Grüner Veltliner is a classic accompaniment to Wiener Schnitzel.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This has attractive peach and pear aromas married with grilled rosemary and flint. Creamy and full-bodied, with a chalky freshness and pithy texture that gives plenty of mouthfeel. Cool and mineral finish.
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Wine Spectator
Lush and salty, offering fresh agave and lilac flavors layered with warm lentil and chalky mineral notes. A yeasty accent cascades through the richly styled palate as lemon-lime acidity firms up the complex, savory and herb-laced finish, which is rich yet bone dry. Shows impressive texture and length. Drink now through 2032. 700 cases made, 40 cases imported.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Prager's 2022 Ried Achleiten Grüner Veltliner Smaragd has a clear, spicy and dense nose of ripe stone fruit, and it's dense, very taut and spicy on the palate. Despite its power, it is currently ascetic and fresh but still not very stimulating.
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Wine Enthusiast
Voluptuous, this wine has plenty of baking spice surrounding a refined mix of apple, ripe citrus, green tea and almond flavors. The long finish is pure tasting, with zesty minerality and crunchy texture.
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.