Weingut Glatzer
2024
2021 Zweigelt (Carnuntum DAC) glug-glug-glug!
There are many ways to do a basic Zweigelt, and Glatzer’s is usually the most purely and addictively fruity. In contrast, Gobelsburg’s and Setzer’s are more Claret-like, and even the fruit-forward Sattler is “warmer” in its profile. At times, whether due to the vintage or to Glatzer’s wish to make more “serious” wines, this gorgeous being has flirted with earnestness. I can “do” earnest but there is nothingI love more than a heart-rendingly pretty wine you just can’t stop slugging.
I’ve written that Zweigelt in essence is like scraping the topmost layer of fruit from Syrah, so that you get all the dark fruits and leave the smoke and leather and animality behind. To that I would add, if you’ve had any non-oaked Tempranillos, you’ll find a cognate here.
It prefers the Riedel Chianti Classico glass to the Jancis, in which the variety’s innate (and agreeable) bitterness is too insistent. Don’t quake at “bitterness,” because all your favorite gulping reds – at least those that used to be gulpers, e.g., basic Beaujolais, Dolcetto, Barbera, etc. – entail a bitter edge, which is why they slide down so temptingly.
When we think of complexity in a red wine we usually imagine it’s a mélange of fruit, tannin, terroir, umami and evanescence. But a wine like this can show that complexity is possible with fruit alone, and even “simple” fruit can entail many facets, as can be seen in this wine’s lovely and interesting finish. Why insist on more? This isn’t a TED-talk of the N-th degree of intricacy; it’s a superb comedian with great material of which she is in perfect command, and all you do is laugh and laugh and laugh.
It is if anything even more many-faceted and interesting three days later. If I could give out stars for sheer admiration (not to mention joy) this wine earns an entire galaxy.
2020 Zweigelt “Rubin Carnuntum” +
Without numbing your mind with arcane detail, this is the mid-range in the group. As such it’s either unavailable or barely available in the States, as mid-range wines tend to disappear conceptually, being neither the “great value” or the “best quality,” but living instead under the eternal curse of simply tasting good.
That is a great shame in this case, as the wine is Zweigelt-with-substance without sacrificing the gleaming fruit that makes the variety so charming. In the Jancis glass it begins to have notions of texture and a more resonant complexity.
Think Beaujolais Cru and you’re in the ballpark. Not the stern ones like Julienas or Morgon, but the comely ones like Fleurie or Regnie. But however you think of it, if you live in the U.S. think of what you’re missing, because this is a grown-up beauty from a grown-up vintner, that makes no great demands but merely offers a charming interplay of lavender and blackberries and violets and some sense of the lacquer on Szechuan spare ribs.
Drinkers within Austria are cordially invited to pour a glass, face west and go nyah nyah de nyah nyah!
The wine in fact is much more civilized than I am. Actually it makes me sad, that we so often approach wine based not on how it tastes but rather on how we “position” it conceptually. (In this regard the trade is even guiltier than the consumer.) I get it; there are eleventy-three bazillion wines in the world, but I can’t fathom one single person whom this wine wouldn’t make thoroughly and deliciously happy.
2021 Zweigelt Ried Haidacker (DAC Erste Lage) +
(Bottle’s a little heavier than it needs to be, strictly speaking….)
“Smoky oak” enters the frame now. The site is a clay-ey loam with gravelly subsoils, on a bed of clay. The wood in general is 20% new barrique.
Look, I don’t despise the “international” style and I respect this wine’s ambition. While it’s rather anonymous aromatically, it’s seriously impressive on the palate. It has an adult approach to tannin (present but not clamorous) and it manages a finely dusty texture without burying the fruit a mile underground.
If it isn’t quite “distinctive,” it also doesn’t remind me of anything else I can call to mind. Honestly I find it beautiful, in a familiar way but one that steers clear of the glom of affected red wines that might have come from anywhere. In fact I don’t know how you can render a “serious” wine any better than this, and if you consider the articulation of violet (a varietal signature) with refined dusty tannin with a subtle earthiness with the calm yet buoyant gestalt, you have to be happy to drink such a wine.
With air a gentle smokiness arrives, along with a scent of fresh-ground nutmeg. A keen florality makes for a tasty top note. Is it too oaky? May I have seconds on the arancini?
2019 “Gotinsprun”
This (in effect) “super-Tuscan” wine is usually a cuvée of Merlot, Syrah and (mostly) Blaufränkisch, and in the ripe 2019 vintage we have 14% alc with which to contend. That, plus 70% new barrique….so you know the language already.
Much as I find this genre generally tedious, I confess, with great and terrible shame, that I’d drink this for pleasure. I actually like the oak, as it doesn’t taste like it was grafted onto a wine that didn’t need it, and to my great surprise, the 14% alc is entirely absorbed and well integrated. (Though less so in the inconveniently expressive Jancis glass…)
The question of whether this sort of thing is an expired dialect is always worth asking. Though this wine is an unusually agreeable example of such things, it’s my least favorite among the quartet. This will surprise no one who knows me. I’d enjoy the single glass I’d have before it starts to pall and I’d want something less ponderous and more light-footed. Glatzer knows this about me, with what degree of rue I cannot be sure. He did good work here, though, and his patience with my contrary and ridiculous taste is proof of his good nature.
The wine remained steady three days later, and this is a good thing, because I feared the fruit would fade and the alcohol come on. Neither thing transpired.
2021 Blaufränkisch (Carnuntum DAC) +
Few things have impressed me more than Glatzer’s sudden emergence as a serious producer of this wonderful variety, because I’d taken him to be a “Zweigelt guy,” and figured the BF was ancillary.
I first tasted the two varieties on different days, but when I revisited them I had one big flight, and this followed the Zweigelt Haidacker. The first thing I noticed was the variation of color – Zweigelt is red like cherries, and Blaufränkisch is blackish-red like blackberries.
This entry level wine is a high-acid grape in a high-acid year, and it’s both a winner and a steal. If you like the variety it’s all here in a perky sort of form, lively and giddy with its puppy energy, yet in this most playful vibe it also has every basic reason to attend to BF.
That reduces to “pepper, herbs, scrub and berries.” It’s like picking blackberries beside the path and you scrape your hand a little as you push through the thorns. Yet this being Glatzer, the wine is replete with fruit so “sweet” it might have been ladled over the gorse with a great big spoon.
There’s such a thing as small-p profound, and here it is, dramatically and convincingly, in an ostensibly little wine that shows such palate length you wonder if will ever fade. A hint of tannin arrives like crushed leaves. And in case you’re thinking Sure, this is Terry’s kind of wine, but ease up dude… yup! I admit everything.
But then you’ll have to explain why I shouldn’t be amazed by a wine so pleasure-giving and also so focused and refined. When was the last time you had the utmost clarity and the utmost hedonism in the same glass? You really want to insist this is commonplace? I’ve been tasting wine for 45 years and here’s a news-break – it isn’t.
2019 Blaufränkisch Göttlesbrunn +
The village-wine. And now we have a wine with some attitude.
Compared to the totally tickleish “basic” wine, this one’s more broody. More of a “serious” affect. It’s a riot of complexity from the Jancis glass. It has the umami-sweetness of a warm ripe year.
And it is masterly. Once again, it unites elements usually disparate, so that we have a parmesan-type “sweetness” with a porcini earthiness with a mint sauce and with the lamb with which you served it. And again, you have depth with focus and fruit-sweetness with a gougere savor, and you have verticality with roundness – and what you have, in a wine I’d never insist is “great,” is most of the paradox that makes a wine great.
And all that’s before I tasted it from the Jancis. Here it does a truly ridiculous improbable thing; it offers a group of flavors we sometimes taste in Riesling, especially along the green line – wintergreen, oolong tea, linden, aloe, sorrel….how exactly can this be? TRINK magazine co-editor Valerie Kathawala (whom I interviewed for this site a few years ago) was taken aback when I said “It isn’t Pinot Noir that’s the red Riesling; it’s Blaufränkisch,” and this wine is a test case for my outré little theory.
We have curious relationships to the simple pleasures in wine. We seem to think we ought to despise their simplicity, because wine is exalted blah blah blah. A wine like this confounds the matter even more, because it appears to be simple but it’s actually quite detailed and complex. I don’t recall when I was ever tempted to write “raspberries and brown butter” in a tasting note.
It will suffer from being an “in-between” wine; hell, it will suffer from being Blaufruankisch and for that matter, for being Austrian red wine. <sigh>…..you can’t possibly imagine what joy you’re missing.
For me it is the keenest joy right when you open it. My second look was a day later (and at a slightly higher temp) and the wine leaned just a little toward anonymity – delicious anonymity, yes, but I liked it best when it was more stubbornly particular. I’m not convinced that judgment is reasonable….
2019 Blaufränkisch Ried Bärnreiser (erste lage) ++
The back label adds “Höflein” which is the village whence Bärnreiser hails.
Really I just wanted to use “whence.”
Now we have the behavior of an “important” wine, though it being Blaufränkisch there’s the irrepressible lift of this most buoyant variety (Can anyone remember a Blaufränkisch being referred to as “ponderous?”) In effect it does what such wines are supposed to do. It accomplishes the mission. It jumps through all the hoops. It would appear to be predictable.
Why, then, is it so compelling? I think it has to do with a dark, dark stab of mint and pepper – specifically of Dak Song pepper – that arrives about 70% of the way along the palate, after you’ve registered the hedonic sweetness and the well-known elements of wood, everything familiar, basically. Then bam, something comes along that isn’t familiar at all. It’s analogous to the Etna twang, a pleasant sharpness that makes a wine bite like a lover.
Continuing my batshit ravings, you could imagine la Rioja Alta making a wine like this if they had an outpost in Austria. (And why not, you ask…) The wine is so successful in its idiom that I’m tempted to swoon, but can’t quite – and that is because while I register it as the “even-better” wine than its predecessors, I don’t love it more, only differently. It has the signal virtues of Blaufränkisch turned up two notches, but with a single exception it doesn’t add a new virtue.
The exception? A vivid minerality the previous wines only hinted at. This lovely thing, which takes 10-15 minutes to show from the glass, may be the spark plug, the gear-shifter that displays not only a larger wine, but a newer one. In the end, when you think you know it, or know its “type,” it ambushes you with a pile of salt and steel, and you’ve been walking through the vestibule and now you can enter the house.
In fact this was quite the flavor explosion on day-2, and as always occurs at such times, I find myself wanting to do away with description and just say, “It’s effing marvelous wine and it shows why Blaufränkisch is such an effing excellent variety.”
2020 St. Laurent “Alte Reben”
This is downgraded from “DAC Carnuntum” to the more general “Niederösterreich” (lower-Austria) presumably because St.-L is not a permitted variety for the DAC. Oh-kay…. Nor do I know if this is the wine that used to be called “Altenberg” after the vineyard, because maybe that vineyard isn’t officially recognized? Or? Oh I dolove wine laws.
Ancillary though it is, Glatzer seems to be able to “tame” this difficult variety, especially its tendency to (let’s say) a vibrant reduction in the glass. That said, this is a little brett-y (or “animal” if you like that sort of thing) and it isn’t his finest vintage – though he’s made a great many pretty gorgeous wines from our disruptive friend.
This gamey little critter is good, maybe even better than many others, but it’s not among Glatzer’s triumphs. No matter; he’s had more than his share of them! Perhaps it’ll be feral enough to appeal to our friends in the “natural wine” community.
They can be advised to wait a day or two after they open it, because my bottle was seriously stinky when I tasted it a day later. Oddly enough, the palate was borderline-acceptable, but the aromas….kinda farty. (And I’ll bet Andrew Jefford never used “farty” in a tasting note.)
2022 Grüner Veltliner
Stainless steel, on the fine lees until bottling in March.
A bit of reduction to start – our friend the screw cap again – but it flits away in less than a minute.
What’s left to say after all these years? (Nearly 30 since I first offered Glatzer!) The wine is a textbook GV; depending on vintage it’s more or less peppery, more or less vetiver-like, more or less legume-y, and in a few great years it rises above its genre.
Here with this ’22 it’s on the money, effective, tasty and typical and useful. For drinkers who find many GVs too sharply peppery, this one shows the varietal profile in a tenderer form.
Sincerely, any further verbiage over this appealing and expedient wine would be squandered. Pour-drink-repeat!
2022 Grüner Veltliner “Dornenvogel” Göttlesbrunn
It has the “village-wine” designation, but it’s in fact the best GV material, positioned as the “prestige” bottling, on its fine lees until June in stainless steel. Screwcap reduction again.
It’s frankly delicious. As it usually is! In my merchant days I’d compare it to a Wachau Federspiel and find it preferable in a dollars-for-flavor calculous. Except for the top of the Federspiel class, I’d do it again. The wine is lees-lush and grainy like farro or barley or even spelt. It has impressive cling and is both substantive and drinky.
What it is, is the equivalent of the Michelin bib gourmand category; good ingredients respectfully and well prepared, without the ambitions of the “starred” places. In some vintages the wine surmounts those limits, but ’22 is above all an unfussy sort of year. If you study this wine you’ll arrive at ginger and bee balm, but you may be precluded from those details by the sheer ease-of-drinking on display here.
2022 Weissburgunder (Carnuntrum DAC)
Fine-lees contact until April in stainless steel.
This has always been tasty in ripe years, and a little constricted in less ripe ones. Lees contact helps, and this is what I’d call a tasty little wine if that didn’t seem so dismissive.
Put it this way; the variety can make crisply neutral wines (such as the quite-good Hexamer I tasted last week) and it can try to stretch upward to a white-Burgundy profile, and it can also occupy a satisfying middle ground as this one does, and once in a while it can be quite the little terroir beast (see Dautel…) and it can also be a “modest” wine with a ton of leesy charm (see, again, Dautel!) – so where exactly does this fit?
It sits in a space among Pinot Blancs of moderate size and moderate ambition, and that excel by dint of their drinky-ness, which entails the leesy charm I keep going on about. It’s less “sweet” than Dautel’s basic bottling, a bit more broad-based than Darting’s insanely tasty wine, and what I’d call this vintage is “appealingly neutral and fluffy,” adding that it's among the better ones.
Time was, such a wine might have been depicted as “of local interest.” The problem was, these were also the kinds of wines people adored when they were over there, and wondered why the hell they couldn’t find them when they got back home. Why indeed?
What compels a Yank to go into a shop and ask for an everyday wine that tastes kind of like brown rice and oatmeal? Cheap white wine is a crowded field, and getting a buyer to focus on a wine like our guy here is mostly a matter of luck. He needs a glass pour, you happen to be there, this wine is open, it tastes fine – send me five cases for Friday. The wine will crush it with the beer-battered fish & chips, but when the buyer wants to re-up, the distributor is out of stock, because they didn’t buy much, because it is Austrian wine which is a hard sell.
It's hardly tragic that a pleasing modest wine like this is DOA in this market. So are a thousand others. But I know this guy.
2022 Sauvignon Blanc glug-glug-glug!
Again declassified to “Niederösterreich,” this is the basic SB, the “top” one being a single-site (no longer admissible, entailing the creation of a new name), and when I tasted them both last may while visiting the estate, this was the one I liked better.
I still like it! Sometimes you want a Sauvignon Blanc that just Sauvignon Blancs at your thirsty ass, and this one does in the most engaging way, full-throttle but tilting away from crudeness and toward finesse.
In the best way, this doesn’t insist on the Nth degree of description. You got your gooseberry and you got your litchee and you got your redcurrant, but what you don’t have to put up with are any of the often vulgar assertions of this variety.
So, spicy-spicy-spicy and drinky-drinky-drinky and we all go to bed happy and our night burps taste like hyssop.
2026
2024 Weissburgunder (Carnuntum DAC)
The “basic” wine has tended to be snappy over the years, but both the vintage and the man have tricks up their sleeves…
The extract-dense ’24 cannot quite subsume the usual snap, at least until the (always) surprising length of finish. Even more surprising; the wine is better from the Jancis glass, which can sometimes offer a rather stark interpretation of “crisp” wines. In this instance it’s so aromatic you wonder if the last wine in the glass was Sauvignon Blanc and you failed to rinse it enough.
You get the mussel-y side of Pinot Blanc at Glatzer, with few flourishes except to make you jones for a slab of pike-perch. A tic of sourness on the sides of the palate is actually agreeable, not to mention it’ll go with your arugula side-salad. From the Jancis it expresses like the slightly burnt crust of a piece of toast.
The wine is effective. It has no wish to command attention. It has a job to do and does it impeccably and honorably. Insisting on more is greedy, and irrelevant.
2022 Weissburgunder Göttlesbrunn
In effect the current “reserve” bottling, and a village wine in the DAC schemata.
A “Burgundian” fragrance offering age, cask, and greater fruit concentration. The question, always, with such wines is whether the oak is deft or clamorous. Here it’s on a razor’s edge, but often such wines advance their fruit with air. Let’s see.
The Jancis glass articulates more, and as it does it both pushes the non-wood flavors forward while also separating the wood and making it feel added-on afterwards. It was not, of course. It simply demonstrates the risks of wood.
That said, I don’t disavow the “corn and lime” I wrote at the estate last April, though corn in this case is more masa harina, taco shells. Though it freshens with air, it remains a mature wine and now’s the time to drink it. Nor is it surprising that air knits the elements together, so that the “wood” becomes a faint caramel flavor. The texture is like an aspic made with saffron. Or chanterelles (plentiful now) sauteed in ghee.
2024 Grüner Veltliner (Carnuntum DAC) +
Again the “regular” wine (with all of 12% alc). I’ve always liked it and I do again now. It’s been a vintage-responsive wine, such that it over-achieves in ripe years and reverts to its norm in a year like this one.
Aromas are pure vetiver and legume. In effect it’s the variety abstracted from terroir, and it is also a primo vintage for this old standby. Somehow it’s avoided the sharp angles of many ‘24s and arrives almost juicy, full of flavor, and stupidly long. It’s like a one-class upgrade, and I’m not sure how he did it. The sheer lushness is atypical, and for all its ostensible modesty, this is a seriously good GV.
Now bear with me; I don’t know how Glatzer made such a yellow wine in such a green vintage. Because this is thoroughly the Viognier side of GV, calm and golden. I’d have sworn it was the reserve bottling, a luscious and almost sumptuous wine with no precedent I can recall from here.
2023 Grüner Veltliner Göttlesbrunn “Dornenvogel” +
To remind you, “Dornenvogel” (thorn-bird) is the term for his top wines, a metaphor for the birds who swarm over the vineyards when the grapes are very ripe. I’m glad the authorities allowed him to keep using it.
Interesting to look at a ’23. The fragrances are suggestive, enticing, a little shy. The palate has the high-relief of the vintage, all the way to the rasp at the end. It’s a more intricate flavor – or arrangement of flavors – and it tilts toward the mineral. (It was done in stainless steel.) Indeed what it most recalls is good Aligoté, as vinified by one who respects it and wants to coax it onto the stage with the other “serious” wines.
There’s a lot of middle here, and the wine almost visibly awakens in the glass. It’s worthy of comparison to the GVs we approach more earnestly; it wouldn’t shock you to taste it in a flight of Gobelsburgs. It does have the boxwood-y mustard-green thing, the nettle and marjoram resins.
And even if it’s an artifact of the vintage, it’s still as refined a GV as Glatzer has made.
2024 Sauvignon Blanc Niederösterreich
(Declassifed appellation as the variety is excluded from the DAC, which is sometimes prescriptive as opposed to descriptive…)
Glatzer always made at least one excellent SB each year; sometimes this one, other times the “better” one. We never knew which one I’d select. I’d have selected this one!
It’s the aromatic profile I prefer with this variety; green, herbal, verbena and Sencha and woodruff. Not much red pepper, and no vulgar vegetality.
It’s good Sauv-Bl – what can I say! This clamorously assertive variety can go wrong in so many ways, and even when it goes right – as it does here – it’s still SB. (Yes I know the nobility of SB and respect it profoundly, but there are times you just hope it doesn’t stink of broccoli water.) It’s too good to glug yet I could drink it any time all the time. And relish it because its angularity is interesting.
It's a sort of Bib-Gourmand of the variety. I’d be glad to have it as my “house” SB.
2023 Sauvignon Blanc “Weisser Schotter” Niederösterreich ++
This reserve wine is named for the white gravel on which it grows, and is once again declassified by you-know-what.)
Now this is a fine SB aroma. It leads to a surpassingly fine wine. Did I buy enough for my cellar?? I hope so.
It may be the best white wine Glatzer has (yet!) made. It has all the qualities of the better (best?) Loire wines – except silex – and it’s more interior, more searching than those lovely Styrians. (At least the ones I know; time to get my ass back there…) It’s seductively juicy and salty and fervidly herbal yet with notes of ginger and apricots and matja and Makrut lime (I’m not being precious; I have a source for it and have it in the pantry). Heard enough esoteric associations? How about Timut pepper? And no, I didn’t squirrel it back in my luggage after a journey to Nepal – my Whole Foods sells it.
Refined aromas of red pepper, and flavors of compound salts, and a finish of a dozen herbs, and the portrait is complete. What a beautiful wine.
2023 Zweigelt (Carnuntum DAC) +
A perfect varietal aroma.
I adore Zweigelt when it’s like this. It can feint in a peppery direction sometimes – one of its genetic parents is Blaufrüankisch – and sometimes a grower who wants to make “important” Zweigelt will force it into earth-and-blood – and its other parent is St. Laurent. Zweigelt can be intensely blackberried also, but I love it most when it’s like this: cherries and violets. Quoting oneself is unseemly, but I can’t improve on this image; if you scape the top layer of pure fruit from Syrah, leaving the animality and smokiness behind, you have Zweigelt.
It may be the ’23 vintage and it may be Glatzer’s recent wish to make more dimensional wines, but even this sensational beauty has angles and depths. I’d like to glug it but it’s too good. From the Jancis glass it nearly shrieks with spiciness. It is ideal from my other, improbable glass, the larger of Spiegelau’s white-wine stems. That glass it too large for most white wines but it’s perfect for fruit-driven reds.
The texture has just enough cream and just enough dustiness, and the finish lingers improbably for an ostensibly “basic” wine. If it were a restaurant it would be a Bib Gourmand and you’d think “Who needs stars when you can eat this well?”
2022 Zweigelt Rubin Carnuntum +
The term may be used by any Carnuntum growers who observes its criteria. It stands for medium bodied wines with more depth than the entry level and less power than the top. It permits oak aging but doesn’t require it. Commercially, at least in the States, it lived in a no-mans-land that suffocates so many of these in-the-middle wines. (Another reason we grope for clues for the decline in wine consumption; we’re too busy selling “categories” and “concepts” and not busy enough selling flavor and authenticity.)
Zweigelt at this level adds carob and even chocolate notes to its basic varietality. It can be truly irresistible, richer than its predecessor but not so concentrated as to preclude lusty drinking. The Jancis offers more peppery precision, and from either glass the finish is outrageously seductive. It is very rare for a wine to offer such gloss atop such structure, and this is in many ways a “perfect” wine, squaring the circle between rampant yumminess and stuff-to-think-about.
Take a bow, Walter (and Doris) Glatzer. With a wine like this you stand on a summit very few people have ever stood on, or even know the way to.
2022 Zweigelt “Dornenvogel” Göttlesbrunn +
You could imagine young Rioja smelling this way, even the new-wave bottlings. In a certain way Zweigelt could easily be a cousin to Tempranillo or Schiava.
Technically a mere Village wine it comes in fact from the oldest vines and the ripest fruit from three sites: Hagelsberg, Eisenberg, and Stuhlwerker. It sees around 18 months in barriques, 20% of which are new.
The wine has intensity and grace. In its context it may seem rather earnestly “significant” but on the other hand, why shouldn’t it be? Over the years Glatzer has learned to tame oak flavors, which play the supporting role one wishes they always did. At first strong and sumptuous, as it visits the entire palate it grows rockier and more tangibly solid. (Emphatically so from the Jancis…)
It's implosive rather than extravagant. It has a transparent buoyancy from the Spiegelau (whereas a Riedel Chianti Classico made it overly somber). Glatzer is solving the problem of ratcheting up the intensity while preserving the essential Zweigelt fruit. As an achievement this is more than laudable, but the wine I’d want to be infused with is the Rubin.
2022 St Laurent (Niederösterreich) ++
The wine sees no new wood but a good sojourn in used.
More often than not, Glatzer can amaze you with this challenging variety. And again he does it in his particular way. St-L can be reductively stinky, especially when it’s made to be archly fruity, and it can also be overdone when forced into a power it cannot often support.
But this wine? This wine had me yelling the words “fucking amazing” into an empty kitchen as if anyone could hear me. It is criminally delicious! You call your attorney to make sure it isn’t illegal and then you call your priest to make sure it isn’t a sin. (It could easily be both….) For all the hassle and bother we lovers of the grape encounter just finding one we don’t have to “allow for,” Glatzer’s making it look easy-peasy. I can’t fathom how.
Other than the typical black-cherry thing, I must ask you to fantasize a blend of around 65-70% red Burgundy (Santenay or Chassagne rouge) with 15% Julienas and finally 15% of Mourvedre. More than just a triumph over adversity, this is a stupid-delicious wine and yet with grip and articulation, precisely ripe enough, just enough vertebrae to offer “structure,” and more than enough sheer tastiness to satisfy and but the most insolent and sulky imbiber.
2022 St Laurent Alte Reben (Niederösterreich) ++
They allowed “Alte Reben” but not the origin-vineyard Altenberg. I’m probably one of seven people in America to whom this matters, but to the other six, it’s the same wine.
An evanescent reduction blows off in seconds. Right away there’s more “minerality” (or its simulacrum) and I have to try to write in the stiff wind of a helpless thrall, because I love this wine with a heart I may have mislaid, or never knew I had.
There is more here than in the last wine, but the “more” is more interior, more unfolding, more angularity….if you play or listen to jazz they’ll tell you about “outside” notes, those not inherent in the underlying harmony but that seem to stretch it so that it’s surprising without being dissonant. So, along with the greater mid-palate density there are also all these notes – smoke(s), resin(s), rock-dust, lavender, and all this with the pliant candor of this angel’s red wines.
And all that with a balletic leaping energy that lets you sip and sip and sip again.
Want to know why wine consumption is declining? Because we don’t pay enough attention to wines like these. I promise you, if you served this to any of your pals who weren’t “into” wine, they would clamor to know “Where the hell did you get this?”
(Meanwhile you’re serving them tiring over-alcoholic over-extracted wines that got “high points” some-fucking-where, or else some sweaty bog shrimp “natural” wine stinking of low tide and broccoli farts because this is the wine “the best” people drink….)
2023 Blaufränkisch (Carnuntum DAC) +
Glatzer’s development as a red wine maker is most dramatic with Blaufränkisch. And it is dramatic.
When I first got to know these wines, the Blaufränkisch was an innocuous wine seemingly meant for customers who found the Zweigelt “too fruity.” The change took place perhaps five years ago. It was striking, almost quizzically so. I might have said “Dude, what’s up with these?” or some such thing. Walter smiled slyly in response.
You won’t get a full-frontal Sarawak-pepper sting from these, nor will you see the minerality as starkly rendered as you might at Krutzler, Schiefer, or Prieler. Instead you get a pipe-smoke warmth astride an allusive crush of rock and a smidge of wild herbs. And you get all this here, with the “basic” level. But that’s not all you get.
You receive a lingering salty finish with a shocking suavity and juiciness. You get transparency and remarkable fullness of flavor for a medium-weight wine. You also get the perfect gesture of cask, in this case 2000-liter giants in which the wine was aged for a year.
You also receive – or I do at any rate – a level of satisfaction that cannot be surpassed. If I “scored” on a curve based on my rich delight in drinking, this would be supreme. It is a ne plus ultra of its kind, an amazing amalgam of articulation, charm and intricacy. And it comes closer to the special nature of fresh Tuscan extra-virgin olive oil than any other wine I know.
The upcoming wines will deliver such things as they do as we “ascend” to their level. They will have more power, density and profundity. I know I’ll love them, but this one? This one I adore.
2022 Blaufränkisch Göttlesbrunn +
By now you recognize this as the village wine, the mid-range in the chain. Usually, the orphan. It’s denser, burning-leaf smokier, more licorice, more Kampot peppercorns.
More dark chocolate too, and more overall seriousness. More affect and intentionality. Yet even as it makes the statement one anticipated, it does so with grace and courtesy. It is more nocturnal but by no means broody. It’s chewy but you chew through vinosity rather than tannin.
Firmer, richer, yet not opaque, it draws closer to what one assumes a significant red wine would be. Nor am I praising it faintly; I think the wine is outstanding. And I know its ilk very well.
2020 Blaufränkisch Ried Bärnreiser (Höflein) ++
This single site (Cru) grows on a poor soil of gravel and limestone with a loamy topsoil. It’s typical vinification would entail open-top fermentation in a 560-liter hogshead, followed by sixteen months in 500-liter casks, half of which new.
<Whew!> And it smells like a million bucks. But it doesn’t yell.
The palate splits the difference between Pomerol and robust young Rioja. It’s almost luridly seductive, at least at first, and knowing such impressions are often fleeting.
It was made for the Jancis glass, or vice-versa. Here its ripe sweetness is tempered by all manner of peppery/mineral/resin diction – and I do mean “diction,” since a wine this rich doesn’t tend to explicate itself as finely as this wine does.
I own some and will decant it when we drink it, but now it’s straight from the bottle. I’ll taste it again in 2-3 days and it will have spread its wings. (Meanwhile it sits in a cold cellar at 52º.) But even with a few minutes in the glass it starts to show the improbable flowery notes this vastly underrated grape can show, and which age into flavors curiously aligned with Pinot Noir. If the first wine was beautiful, this wine is gorgeous.
And surprising. Where the village-wine firmed up with air, this one seems to sigh itself open, growing not “soft” but pliant. One could cavil that we’ve entered the world of a certain type of European red wine at the expense of the particularity of Blaufänkisch, but if that is true – and I’m not convinced that it is – that’s an issue solved by aeration.
A second surprise is that the Riedel glass is more expressive than the Jancis, especially when sniffing them both empty.