MICCHI Moosbrugger is a brave man. He allowed a group of Master of Wine students free rein in one of Schloss Gobelsburg’s best vineyards in Austria’s Kamptal to practice pruning.
The icy January rain that had been teeming down all morning relented just long enough for us to hack our way for an hour or so along several rows of prize Grüner Veltliner vines.
Grüner Veltliner is Austria’s pride and joy and most widely-planted variety. Its crisp, dry wine is exciting more and more wine lovers here too. Part of its appeal is that its spicy lemon and crunchy green apple flavours enhance the flavour of lots of different foods. It’s little wonder that it sells especially well in restaurants.
It is such a success that growers in other parts of the world are now looking to get a slice of the action. Some terrific examples have been made in New Zealand in the last year or two, but Willi Klinger, the head of Austria’s Wine Marketing Board isn’t worried about competition. “New Zealand Grüner Veltliner isn’t a threat to our flagship wine,” he told us. “It’ll just help to put us on the map and give folk in the southern hemisphere an idea of how to pronounce it.”
He has a point. Grüner Veltliner is far easier to drink than to say. But it’s really no harder to get your tongue around than Cabernet Sauvignon and is usually abbreviated to just ‘Grooner’. You might even call it Groovee. And some do.
Grüner’s rise to fame is recent. In the post-war years it proved capable of producing a small lake of cheap, light, wine, of no great complexity, but ready appeal. If you’re old enough, you might just remember a brand called Schluck, that sold very well here, especially before the Austrian wine scandal of 1985 – a sadly undeserved setback for the producers, the trade, and above all, for wine lovers.
Cheap, light Grüner is still produced in Lower Austria, with quite a lot exported to Germany, but the best growers had always known that it was capable of far finer things. One of them, Willi Bründlmayer, who took over his family estate in 1980, explained. “We began to see that Grüner Veltliner has the potential to be much more than an easy-drinking wine. It could become one of the greatest wines in the world: as great as the finest Chardonnay and Riesling. The only problem at the start was that although we knew that, nobody else would believe it.”
They do now, not least on the evidence of Bründlmayer’s own wines, which have a bewitching balance between lingering, spicy complexity and mouth-watering freshness.
The wine made from his share of the Lamm vineyard, a stone’s throw from the site of our pruning class is sensationally good and is capable of developing even more character with bottle age. “Making great wine from Lamm has been my personal ambition,” said Bründlmayer, “I’m convinced it has the highest potential for maturing.”
While I was in Austria I was lucky enough to try a few examples of Grüner from as early as 1981 and can now understand why Jancis Robinson once wrote that fine old Grüner can almost assume a Burgundian richness.
Grüner’s origins remain something of a mystery. DNA profiling has revealed that one of its parents is Traminer, which helps to explain its fine, spicy aroma and relatively full body. The other parent is unknown and it seems that Grüner has nothing at all to do with a number of other Austrian varieties that have the suffix ‘Veltliner.’
It is tolerant of a wide variety of soils and sites, but its best wine seems to come from quite rich soil. Both Bründlmayer and Moosbrugger plant Riesling on the warm, stony soils of the hill of Heiligenstein with their Grüner reserved for the deeper soils of Lamm, just below it. “Grüner needs more water than Riesling,” affirmed Markus Huber, another leading producer. Huber’s own wine, from limestone-rich soils unusual along the Danube and its tributary valleys in eastern Austria, has an almost salty mineral character. “We’re the Chablis of Austria,” he quipped.
This variety of styles and an ability to reflect the nature of the soil and site on which it’s grown is further justification of Willi Bründlmayer’s claim that Grüner is capable of true greatness, not only in its most typical style, but also in the small number of rich late harvest wines that Bründlmayer and others occasionally release.
Good Grüner is quite easy to find here. One of my favourites, Willi Bründlmayer’s Kamptaler Terrassen 2010, from a big vintage, with rather higher acidity than usual is delicious, with a real wake-up call of an aroma: spicy green plums and green apple and then a very juicy green apple flavour, tailing off into a dry, lingering finish (available from both Majestic and Waitrose from £14.99). See Wine Extras (right) for more recommendations.
New Zealand Grüner is still in short supply, but I found one in Gosforth, made by the very gifted Tamara Washington of Yealands Estate in Marlborough. She’s excited by it, as am I. It’s my wine of the week.
WINE OF THE WEEK
Yealands Estate Grüner Veltliner 2011, £12.49 Carruthers & Kent
The best New Zealand Grüner I’ve tasted: it has a mouth-watering spicy lemon smell and a dry, creamy flavour, with a lovely, lingering salty finish. Try it with a spicy prawn dish.
WINE EXTRAS
One of the best value Grüners around is from Marks and Spencer: 2010 from Rabl (£7.99) It's crisp, apple and lemony fruit is just right. The Wine Society also has a fine bargain in their Rieden Selection Grüner Veltliner from the riper 2011 vintage. It’s quite a big mouthful, but with deliciously clean lemony fruit and a salty finish.
The Domäne Wachau is a superbly managed co-op, with some fabulous, historic vineyards. One of their top wines, often said to be one of the most salty-mineral of all examples of Grüner Veltliner: Achleiten Smaragd 2010 is available from Carruthers & Kent and Waitrose from £17.99. It combines almost mouth-puckering acidity with intense, spicy fruit.
Majestic’s Pfarre Weissenkirchen Grüner Veltliner 2011 is another very good wine at £9.99, or £8.99 if you buy two bottles and Waitrose have one of Micchi Moosbrugger’s wines: Schloss Gobelsburg 2010 (£9.99), which is again both marked by fresh lemony fruit and an almost savoury spiciness.