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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James Suckling
A very attractive gruner veltliner smaragd with a ripe-melon nose, together with notes of white flowers and pink grapefruit. Generous body with only a hint of creaminess, but plenty of tangerine fruit, the dry-mineral side growing steadily in intensity as it flows over the palate. Drink or hold.
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Wine & Spirits
This is a relatively gentle introduction to Pichler’s style, a multivineyard selection from younger vines (20 to 40 years old). The 2020 Smaragd layers juicy peach, mango and papaya fruit over a chickenfat richness and savor that makes the wine drink almost like a meal. It’s deserving of cellar time, or a roast chicken with some herbed butter slipped under the skin.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2020 Grüner Veltliner Terrassen Smaragd is precise and pure on the nose that reflects the weathered, sandy gneiss soils of many terraces where this wine was sourced but also the reductive style. Full-bodied but fresh and with a firm mineral character, this is a straight and not overly fruity or massive Smaragd that will gain even more finesse and generosity with bottle age. Fine tannins on the finish. 13.2% alcohol. Tasted in June 2021.
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Wine Enthusiast
Hoppy notes open up this extremely floral and fine white, which features a light, lively frame. The core is filled in notes of mint, shiso and white raspberry. The acidity is high, but well-integrated, providing balance and focus.
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.