Winemaker Notes
Grüner Veltliner is the signature grape of Austria and produces a dry white wine with savory aromas, spicy flavors, and good acidity. Grüner Veltliner Smaragd from the Wachau is a full-bodied wine and is rich in style with notes of stone fruit, lemon, radish, and arugula.
Grüner Veltliner’s bright acidity and savory character make it an ideal partner to mildly spiced Vietnamese, Thai, and Chinese flavors. Fish and shellfish are accented by Grüner Veltliner’s citrus and mineral profile while its acidity cuts the richness of pork or ham. It can also work well with foods that are difficult to pair such as bitter greens and asparagus.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
This races across the palate, showing incredible purity for this aromatic variety. Offers a rich mix of baked apple, dried pineapple, daisy and roasted peach flavors that are full of exotic spicy accents. Displays wonderful integration and harmony between the power and acidity, keeping this elegant and energetic, separating it from its peers. Best from 2022 through 2032.
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James Suckling
A very striking nose with flinty crushed stones, wild herbs, light white pepper and white peaches. The palate has a very smooth delivery of fresh-pear, pear-pastry and chalky flavors. Long and seamless. Very composed. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Ried Achleithen Grüner Veltliner Smaragd is darker-toned and flinty on the pure, deep and complex, rather stony nose. The palate of this full-bodied but very elegant Achleithen is lush and refined, with intensity, depth and filigreed structured grip and lingering salinity on the long and refined, very elegant finish. This is a beautiful Achleithen. Tasted at the domain in September 2019.
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Wine & Spirits
From Achleithen’s steep, windy gneiss slopes, this feels extravagant, a riot of fruit and floral aromas. The flavors are just as exuberant, almost oily in their concentration, with a citrus pithiness to the extract that gives it grip. Cool and tense, this will benefit from aging.
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Decanter
When first tasted a year ago this wine was lean and almost filigree, but with time it has taken on more weight and sucrosity. There's tropical fruit on the nose, with lush apricot and mango aromas. Clearly very ripe, it also exhibits a slight sweetness despite less than 3g/L of residual sugar, and this reflects the moderate acidity and fairly high alcohol. It's more open than the Achleithen Riesling, with a silky texture and lingering stone fruits on the finish. Its opulence makes it somewhat atypical for this estate, yet there's no lack of juiciness and upfront fruit. Drinking Window 2021 - 2035
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.