Winemaker Notes
Medium yellow, silver reflections. With a touch of meadow herbs underlaid nuances of fully ripe honeydew melon, delicate smoky-tobacco notes, notes of orange zest. Juicy, powerful, ripe yellow tropical fruit, mineral and salty, subtle honeymoon in the finish, good development potential.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Quite a powerful dry white, but with wonderful elegance. The balance of Mirabelle and fresh-herb aromas and fresh acidity is spot on. Ripe and lively finish
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Wine Spectator
A succulent style, boasting peach, yellow apple and melon notes, while celery and fleur de sel details add another dimension. Open but also a bit firm, with a texture that caresses the palate, while the minerally backbone imparts a bit of a grip in the end.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Spitz Grüner Veltliner Smaragd Rotes Tor is very delicate and elegant on the nose. Rich, lush and powerful on the palate, this is an intense, firmly structured and persistent yet elegant Veltliner with lots of tension and impressive length.
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.