WEINGUT HIRSCH, KAMMERN, KAMPTAL

This admirably compact portfolio avoids the sprawl that affects so many other Austrian wineries. It is only Grüner Veltliner and Riesling, and not a huge number of each. I don’t by any means insist this is a virtue, but it is a noteworthy convenience for anyone who encounters this estate.

I hadn’t tasted these for a while – at least not at home. At the winery we were too busy schmoozing to do more than glance at this-and-that. So let’s tuck in to (in many cases) multiple vintages, especially of the Crus.

The first time I tasted them I did it by site vertically, i.e., same site, different vintages. The next time I did one vintage at a time, across the various sites.

The wines divided themselves into two groups, which I’ll call the “well-behaved” and the “ill-behaved.” As a rule the entire collection was better-behaved than it was, say, five or six years ago, when some of the dubious flavors of the natty world were starting to creep in. Flavors and structural lines are purer now.

Yet some wines were chipper the moment they were poured, while others – prominently everything called “Heiligenstein” took up to 30 minutes just to release themselves from funk, and as many as 4-5 days to really show their honest natures. If I walked innocently into a room where those wines were waiting in the glass(es) I’d have written differently than I actually did. And so you have to say that very good, even excellent wines are in those bottles, incipiently and eventually, but while these things are true they are also useless, unless you open the wine to drink it many days later.

If I follow that thought where it leads, it can seem subversive. I’ll show you what I mean. If there’s a difference between wine as it is “tasted and judged” and wine as it is “drunk and used” Then to confine ones notes to tasting and judging is to tell a partial story. If we agree, then we have to ask what use are tasting notes. If you aren’t someone who’s fascinated with the ultimate details of a wine and the process by which these are gleaned, then I am communicating something you aren’t interested in knowing. I will defend writing about wine as I do, as essays and (if I may say so) as literature. I was a merchant, but never a “journalist-taster” reporting on wines so you can decide what (or if) to buy. I do not seek to guide buying choices anymore; I did it for a long time, and have had enough of it.

I’d also defend the notion that it is meaningful to write along lines of “Some of the wines were dubious when freshly opened, but all of them were perfectly tasty over the following days.” I say that, knowing full well that almost no one who owns the wines will take that into account. I mean, nobody’s more geeky than I am, but even I wouldn’t open a wine on Tuesday to drink on Saturday. I write as I do to try to apprehend a fuller truth of a given wine, a given group of wines, and the actual way a winery seems to express itself. But sometimes I wonder whether it makes any sense to describe flavors at all. It’s just one man’s impression from a given bottle opened on a given day with all the variables you can never repeat, and I can never repeat, yet if my notes are too vague then someone inevitably will say “He doesn’t tell you how the wine tastes…”

That is valid, at least partly, if you want an intricate description of the trees and not a sense of the forest. I find these days that I’m more drawn in to a wine’s umami, its indirect elements, its self and not its statistics. Anyhoo, those are my preoccupations in the waning days of 2024.

Some of the wines were a mixed bag with many high spots, generally best among the Rieslings. Having in most cases three vintages to contrast, I landed on a theory that texture was the most decisive component. Taking the GV (Kammerner) Gaisberg as a test-case, it is in essence a radishy wine full of vim and….not precisely “pepper” but certainly with a minty sting. It can be elevated by citricity and resinous herbs as well as “sweet” herbs (woodruff, wintergreen….) – and let’s agree that’s the basic material.

In a year like 2023 which is already sharp in its attack and prone to astringency, the brilliance of flavor is compromised by an excess of such brilliance as to constrict the pupils. The mid-palate umami that might have softened the blow is absent, and this persists into an admonishing finish.

Yet in a juicier vintage like 2022 – which by most reckonings is probably the “lesser” year, the signal keenness of Gaisberg shows wonderfully against the more succulent backdrop. That is one alluring, captivating wine! Yin plus yang, one could suggest. Bass, midrange and treble ideally balanced for the wine’s “acoustic environment,” a.k.a. your palate.

With 2021 one would seem to have the best of both worlds. They are tremendous wines to taste, evaluate, and marvel over. And in small-ish doses, to drink also, yet their very intensity can make them pall when you’re into the second glass. They are splendid wines and they are not calm. They are exciting, but how much excitement can we absorb?  I am aware that it’s three years on now, and the primary fruit will have been shed, and that baby-fat could have made them awfully heart-rending in the first year (when everyone was tasting them and “awarding” their “scores”) and I’m sure I’d have succumbed also (sans scores) but this TYPE of vintage warrants something of a gimlet eye if you’re thinking long-term.

Still, there’s a tangible sense of comeback at Hirsch based on this collection. Details in the tasting; impressions as they were formed, and if my impressions shifted I added to the note rather than changing what I’d already written.