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
-
Wine Enthusiast
An impressive and definitive expression of gruner with fresh herbs, grasses, light peaches and yellow plums. A parsnip note, too. The palate has a smooth, fleshy and fullish build of fresh, white-peach and melon flavors in an elegant, long mode.
-
Wine Spectator
Shows a deep color and good ripeness, unraveling the apricot, jellied citrus and tobacco hints, with an underlying salinity that adds to the overall harmony. Features an opulent texture that makes this flow like silk. A slight grip takes hold as this unfolds, keeping all the elements sharply defined and lingering on the finish. Best from 2021 through 2031.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Ried Kollmütz Grüner Veltliner Smaragd is somewhat reductive on the flinty/crystalline and still discreet nose. Lush and round on the palate, this is an elegant and juicy, refined and balanced Veltliner with fine grip on the refreshing and sustainable mineral finish.
-
Decanter
Produced from vines that are more than 40 years old and planted on steep terraces, this shows ripe apricot aromas. It's rich and creamy on the palate, full-bodied and spicy, with good weight of fruit and a firm structure, leading to a long, tangy, dry finish. Previous vintages of this wine have had more tension and grandeur, so this may be going through a muted phase.
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.