Winemaker Notes
Reflection of its terroir; concentrated and yet elegant at the same time; complex aroma profile – mostly with tropical nuances; velvety, juicy on the palate, yet gripping and lively.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
A touch of savory yeast slowly emerges on the closed nose. The taut but concentrated palate then adds its yeasty, salty, crushed dandelion flavors to the picture. This is bright and fresh, wonderfully tight and concentrated, just waiting to unfold layer upon layer of salty umami pleasure. Slender, tight and full of promise, it ends on a flash of citrus.
Cellar Selection -
Decanter
The ‘Loibenberg’ single-vineyard sits halfway up a hill, sunny and warm with deep loess soil. The Grüner Veltliner is more golden in colour than the ‘Ried Steinertal’ from the same producer. A ripe nose of stone fruit, yellow pear and green apple, garnished by a hint of crushed stone, dusted by nose-tingling pepper spices. Smooth and oily in texture, with lovely concentration of yellow fruits, grapefruit, bitter lime peel and green apple, a savoury undertone follows to a long, spicy finish.
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Wine Spectator
Offers some high-toned elderflower, beeswax and tropical fruit aromas, along with grapefruit and legume flavors. Intense and complex on an elegant frame, with a bracingly long finish.
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.