Grape comebacks: Austria's Grüner Veltliner
When I began work on my first book on Austrian wine in 1991, I encountered Grüner Veltliner, the green grape that still makes the majority of Austrian white wines. It had established its hegemony in the 60s and 70s because it adapted well to the new high trellising, thereby displacing Sylvaner and others. Grüner Veltliner also liked a bit of damp, favouring the moister years when other grapes (Riesling is a case in point) found it hard to cope. As I later discovered, it is generally best grown on loess. Loess soils soak up rain and store it, feeding the vines in hot continental climates like Austria.
I had never tasted Grüner Veltliner before and was pleasantly surprised. Picked slightly unripe from the clay soils of the Weinviertel region, between the Danube and the Czech border, it had a slightly vegetal character that reminded me of lentils cooked with bay leaves. Fully ripe, it tasted of pineapples with a twist of black pepper. More sophisticated versions came from up river, in the Kamp, Krems or Traisen Valleys, the loess ridge of the Wagram; or better still, the granite scree of the Wachau. The drawback seemed to be that it didn’t keep so well, and developed an orange-like, musky character at around three years, but then again it was no hardship to drink it young.
Austria was still new to bone-dry wines. They shifted the emphasis away from half-dry and half-sweet after the wine scandal of 1985 (when an anti-freeze chemical was found in some wines). In the 1990s, Grüner Veltliner kept getting better. Picked from good sites in November and vinified at a hulking 14% or more, often with a smidgen of Botrytis cinerea (the kindly rot that shrivels the grapes and concentrates its sugars – in this case meaning there was more sugar to ferment, thereby more alcohol) the wines became quite baroque – heady and luscious without being at all sweet.
These wines began to take the wine world by storm. In the mid-90s in the Hotel Bristol in Vienna they put a few of them into a blind tasting of the world’s best Chardonnays. A jury largely familiar with Austrian wines spotted them, and gave them top marks. Later that year in London, the Institute of Masters of Wine had a go too and mistook them for so many Montrachets and Meursaults. The Austrians realised they were on to a winner.
There were still a good many sceptics, not least in Austria. I remember Helmut Rome, publisher of the venerable Austrian wine and food magazine Falstaff , telling me that Grüner Veltliner was intrinsically bad; nothing good would come of it. I disagreed – above all, it went well with Austrian food. Austria was still a culture where white wine accompanied meats like chicken, pork and veal, and the dishes tended to be heavy with cream and cheese. A hefty, baroque Veltiner had the weight to deal with that and the lighter versions – summer wines – were perfect for the usual muggy summers, while a rare Grüner Veltliner Eiswein could be wheeled out to deal with sweet apricot dumplings and other native puddings.
At an Austrian tasting before the millennium you always checked two benchmark wines to see how the Grüner Veltliner had fared: Franz Hirtzberger’s Honivogl Smaragd from the Wachau and Willi Bründlmayer’s Alte Reben from the Kamptal. There were others too – growers like FX Pichler, Emmerich Knoll, Toni Bodenstein and Rudi Pichler in the Wachau; estates like Schloss Gobelsburg or Ludwig Hiedler in the Kamptal or Ludwig Neumayer in the Traisental. Wachau wines tended to be the raciest and best structured, those grown on loess in the Danube Valley had plenty of weight and there were still those cheerful light wines from the Weinviertel.
Then, at the end of the first decade of the new century, attitudes began to change. In one of those puzzling volte faces arising from wine fashion or health worries, prominent Austrian winemakers decided that the alcoholic levels needed to come down below 13% on their Grüner Veltliners. This meant picking earlier, often avoiding all contact with the Botrytis, that gave the wine its endearing baroque character. The wines became thin and the typicity hard to discern. A walking metaphor appeared to be the grower Bernhard Ott, a very big man making even bigger wines on the Wagram. All of a sudden Ott was seen riding a bicycle. He shrank, and the wines went down with him.
In some parts of the Wachau there has been a resistance to this desire to enforce lightness and lower alcohol content. The younger Emmerich Knoll agreed with me that the grape variety does not actually perform below 13.5%. When I was in Austria last year, however, I saw certain signs that the contagion was spreading, and even to the Wachau’s hallowed ‘Smaragd’ wines.
In exceptionally warm, ripe years like 2017 or even more so 2018, growers actually have a problem keeping the alcohol low. One solution is to halt the fermentation, but if you do that you will leave unfermented sugar in your wine. The wine will taste half-dry, a bit like the wines that went out of fashion in 1985. Tasting some 2017 Grüner Veltliners in London in February I noticed some evidence of this. If that was true of 2017, there will be a hell of a lot more sugar in the 2018s.
Still, there is hope! At that same London tasting, redemption came in the form of the 2017 Ried Liebenberg Smaragd from Josef Jamek in the Wachau. Jamek was one of the pioneers of dry white wine in Austria, but his wines dipped a bit at the end of his life. Now his family seem to be making up for lost time: this is great Grüner Veltliner – toast and ripe pineapples, rich and good. Jamek is sadly not yet available in Britain, so I shall recommend a good-value claret online from Aldi instead: Moulins de Citran Haut Médoc 2009 (£13,99) is the second wine of the respected Château Citran and an excellent vintage. It has the classic Cabernet smell of blackcurrants and is at its peak now.
