Winemaker Notes
Rooted in steep stone terraces, vines more than forty years old yield wines that couple exacting minerality with complex fruit flavors. 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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James Suckling
The intensely flinty nose drags you inexorably into the stunningly concentrated and expressive palate, where there’s almost supernatural energy. Staggeringly fresh, mineral finish. Only just beginning to open up! Drinkable now, but better from 2023.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Ried Kollmütz Grüner Veltliner Smaragd is very spicy and fresh on the wild and herbal, extremely reductive and flinty/stony nose, with lemon rind and herbal, partly minty and lemony aromas. Round and elegant on the palate, this is a juicy yet delicate, well-balanced, finely tannic and piquant but also fruity Kollmütz with a fine gneiss character. Tasted in June 2021.
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Wine Spectator
Aromatic, this Grüner Veltliner exhibits elder flower, peach, white pepper, mineral and a fleeting hint of wild herbs. This has some viscosity to match the blazing acidity. Fine length. Drink now through 2025.
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.