Winemaker Notes
Delicate play of fruits reminiscent of red currants and white nougat. Many details, immediately prefiguring finesse and depth; fullbodied and sprightly, above all shows fine details in spite of its power. Very fine nuances, highly elegant and polished, purist premium Veltliner with great length.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This has an attractive, fresh and vibrant feel with very ripe peaches, white pepper, paprika and fresh pears. The palate offers a core of very smooth white nectarines and peaches. Fresh and composed.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Kammern Ried Lamm 1ÖTW displays an intense golden-yellow color and opens with a deep, clear and complex, remarkably refined and elegant, crystalline and flinty bouquet of crushed stones, herbs and ripe Veltliner fruit. Full-bodied, lush and intense but fine and elegant on the silky-textured and well-balanced palate, this is a perfectly round and sweet, lush and ripe, pretty generous Lamm with a long and elegant, beautifully balanced but tensioned and stimulating salty finish. Tasted at Schloss Grafenegg and Schloss Gobelsburg in September 2019.
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Wine Enthusiast
Very aromatic notions of ripe, yellow pear fill the nose and pervade the palate with their sense of juicy ripeness. Ripe yellow plums also join in this mellow, rounded fruitfulness that has a mild edge of freshness. This is mellow, smooth, superfruited and still beautifully balanced. It is on the finish that some salty creaminess comes through.
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.
Climbing north and slightly east of the Kremstal region, Kamptal has very little vineyard area bordering the Danube River (unlike Wachau and Kremstal, whose vineyards run along it). The region takes its name from the river called Kamp, which traverses it north and south. Kamptal’s densely planted vineyards represent eight percent of Austria’s total.
The area experiences wide diurnal temperature variations like the Wachau but with less rain and more frost. Its vast geologic diversity makes it suitable for various experimentations with other varieties besides Grüner Veltliner and Riesling, such as Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc (Weissburgunder), Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, St. Laurent and Zweigelt.
But the region is probably most noted for the beautiful and expansive terraced Heiligenstein, arguably one of the world’s top Riesling sites, as well as some of Austria’s most extraordinary Grüner Veltliner vineyards. Kamptal’s soils, which are mostly loess and sand with some gravel and rocks, make it suitable for Grüner Veltliner, so much so that actually half of the zone is planted to that grape.