Wachau Nikolaihof
2024
GRUNER VELTLINERS
2022 Hefeabzug Grüner Veltliner
LABEL NOTE: for reasons either unknown or obscure to me, this wine is “downgraded” to Niederösterreich (from Wachau), but is still estate bottled. Presumably there are grapes from another region in the cuvée.
Should you have forgotten, this is a tank-fermented and vinified GV that’s bottled in the early Spring, off its gross lees. It’s in essence a “Steinfeder” (itself a vanishing species with global warming) with 11.5% alc. And yet for all this, it has a freaky capacity to age for many years.
Remember also, the bio-dynamic regime usually creates physiologically ripe grapes with less sugar ripeness, so that “11.5%” doesn’t denote a scrawny wine. And while this wine is atypical of the wines of the domain, it is quite typical of the overall mentality of this singular property.
This ’22 is a forthcoming and seriously charming vintage of this oyster-shell leesy beast. In this case the lees are brisk and saline and the wine has always been like liquefied Belons. While vintages don’t really vary that much, the ’22 has the open-armed greeting of the vintage, and the mid-palate is rather more rugged than usual. If you’ve liked it before you may like this vintage particularly. It is also surprisingly lingering for such a light fella.
The wine is sui-generis in some ways. Muscadet is made from a lower-acid variety, and apropos of “variety” this guy isn’t all that typical for “Grüner Veltliner,” so that it becomes just a WINE for oysters to drink at their birthday parties.
Just a whiff of funk two days later when I tasted it again, but no matter. Coming soon to a seafood tower near you….
2022 Zwickl (Grüner Veltliner)
This one’s in “cask” (which can also mean “tank” as it’s used in German) for six months on its fine lees, and is bottled unfiltered. This means you get two wines in one bottle, because if you stand it up for a few days the top 1/3rd is clear – so you pour out a clear wine and then shake the bottle to disperse the lees, and presto: Two wines. (You can also shake the whole bottle before you open it, but what’s the fun of that?)
Effectively a fraternal twin of the Hefeabzug (and also with 11.5% alc) it has always tasted different to me, especially the “clear” segment. That said, even the cloudy segment isn’t too murky, nor is the wine terribly outré, though I’m familiar with the flavor from tasting thousands of pre-filtered cask samples over the years.
In this case the lees are sweetly herbal, giving a denser mouthfeel to what remains a relatively light wine. It’s in keeping with a core value for Nikolaihof; the principle of drinkability, of usefulness, all in keeping with a larger ideal of wholesomeness.
We have more green here, more fennel-frond and tatsoi, and the lees confer an improbable hint of nutmeg along with a phenolic element you may or may not like. While I like this wine, I find it more of an “idea” and less of a glass of something drinky. For that I’m reaching for Hefeabzug.
2022 Grüner Veltliner Federspiel
I’ve sometimes found this to be a quintessence of Nikolaihof, not their “best” wine but the one most imbued with their soul and identity.
This is a classic example of a theta-wave wine. You have to wonder how a wine with so much energy can induce so much calm. It’s hardly a glass of wine any more; it’s a glass of pensiveness, or reflection. Sure, it shows flavors of green beans and maitake, but these matter less than the feeling tone. The wine is gentle but it isn’t soft. It has an allusive fragrance that makes you think of the cellar in Spring when all the barrels are full.
In a crucial way it elides the usual ways we “evaluate” a wine. It’s perfectly good if it comes to that. Just don’t expect it to put on a show for your senses.
Don’t drink it too cold. Leave some white space around it. Let it keep you company in its discreet way; it’s not so good that you need to “study” it obsessively. It’s a dog with its head in your lap, comfortable with you.
The wine can be “used” in the predictable ways, with green veggies and cruciferous things. It’s almost too demure for asparagus. The thing I love most about it is, it’s the smell of being itself. Imagine you have brown jasmine rice cooking, and you start registering the wonderful aroma that’s filing your house, and if someone demands that you tell what it “smells like,” you can’t answer because you can’t know. It smells like what it is! Its brown rice, dude; leave me in peace.
Before tasting it again we drank a glass while dinner was cooking. I still think that any noise detracts from the wine’s sub-audible music. As I “taste” it again now, it reverses the typical development of a Nikolaihof wine, and seems to break apart somewhat, so that an aldehydic rancidity arrives – at least in the Jancis glass. Yet this is nowhere to be seen on the palate, so I guess we have a little fleeting burp of something or other, that needn’t trouble us.
The finish is a flowing stream of green beans and nut-butter.
2018 Grüner Veltliner Smaragd Ried Im Weingebirge +
The current release is a relative brute with 13% alc. It’s an enigmatic being, about which I’ll make a wild (and probably inaccurate) guess….
I suspect the slight naphthalene aroma is bacterial in origin and I suspect in turn that is had to do with limitations of space in the old small cellar, whereby certain wines were bottled not at the best possible moment, but when they needed the barrel for the next vintage. Again, I may be way off base.
Regardless, there’s a duality of impression here, one being the lovely personality of 2018 (that savor! Like cooking farro in a really good homemade stock) along with the echo-y floweriness along with the porcini aroma when they’re sliced but you haven’t put them into the hot pan. And with all this salivating yum, there’s a teeny off note. Re-tasted after two days, an oxidation manifests as well.
The finish, though, is searching and free of doubt, and since you know that aftertaste matters hugely to me, you’ll get it when I say I’ll drink this wine for pleasure and easily overlook what *might* be a technical “issue.” And like many Nikolaihof wines, this one improves with air. Its very umami seems to offer a kind of spiritual umami that doesn’t leave you with a fortune-cookie “insight” but invites you into reverie with no purpose other than to be calmly human for a little while.
And most curiously, there’s a tooth-scraping texture that wouldn’t seem possible for a wine with such a tender impression, but ‘18s could be phenolic, I recall, and this wine does have its “edges”. No Yanni-wines here….
2012 Grüner Veltliner Steinterassen
After 12 years in large cask this was bottled in May 2023. It comprises part of a series of long-aged normal wines of the type that no one ever ages. Note: the variety only appears on the back label.
These things can go right (in which case they are rapturous) or go wrong (in which case they are merely strange), but I like the ’12 vintage and my hopes are high.
It is subdued at first, and the first aromas to show are the sous-voile scents that came to live in this cellar around 7-8 years ago. With that in mind, the palate is (happily) shocking, even powerful, and in any case full-throatedly expressive. It connotes a masterly wine that sits under a transparent veil, and I have two thoughts. One is, I like the sous-voile flavor, and two, I know where to go to taste it, and that place isn’t the Wachau. If you like, you can reduce it to “Terry happens to think this flavor is foreign to the Wachau, but we all know what a pill he is.”
What’s really surprising is how much energy and torque this wine has with just 12% alc.
Let’s come at it from a different angle. Wines that sat in cask for many years are often perturbed (if not dismayed) by bottling, and they may need a few years before retaining their equilibrium. The best I can do is give this bottle a week or so, to see what mysteries have embedded themselves in its inscrutable depths. For I am deeply intrigued, yet anyone in whose hands I placed this glass would say “Jura” when sniffing; the doubts would enter when tasting.
With a second look – having had a glass with dinner in the interim – I find the wine compelling, if strange. The Jura note is gone, but in its place is something oddly coarse – but only aromatically. On the palate it shifts to “rustic” in a rather pleasing way. For a Nikolaihoif wine, it walks with a heavy tread. Yet when I took the wine outside (on a 23º day; I suffer for my art, dude) it grew suave and gracious. And the empty glass smells beautiful.
So? Don’t ask me; I just work here.
OTHER VARIETIES
2022 Gelber Muskateller +
The minute they started making this, it became a huge favorite of mine, and (In my view) one of the most singular Muscats in Austria.
But this is interesting. It has a flavor I also tasted in many of the ‘22s from Merkelbach, which I recalled from the 2014 vintage, and which is derived from a parliament of rots and mildews. This dubious flavor is less evident in the Jancis glass, which suggests it may be fleeting.
Taken outside to taste, it starts to show its elderflower and melon flavors, finds clearer lines, indicates the minerality I love about this wine, and waves a few fronds of mint under my nose. The questionable scents are nearly vanished – but where to, and how did they arrive?
I’m not an enologist, but I’ll hazard a guess. The thing I smelled and thought was/were rots were actually volatile substances reminiscent of rots but actually fleeting compounds that dissipate in oxygen. Pouring again from the screw-capped bottle, all was well.
Indeed all was very well. A vein of wintergreen and verbena came along to partner the elderflower, and the tactile crust of mineral remained, and the wine became beautiful. I can’t explain it, but I’m glad it happened, and even gladder to have been mistaken.
I had essentially the same experience the second time through. The close study given by a professional will identify the bit of H2S, which most normal drinkers won’t register. Neither would I, on the many occasions when I’m just another normal drinker, and what I would register are all the fresh charms this wine shows so generously. The question is, what “flaws” are forgivable, and why?
2022 Neuburger
All of 11% alc now. The variety runs nutty and umami-driven and can give a rare and forthright happiness if one’s brain hurts from trying to suss the Rieslings and GVs.
Just so you know, I’m tasting this right after the 1997 Riesling “Vinothek,” (keep reading!) and when that happens the shock of freshness in the young wine can cause one to overrate it. Aware of that, I can still claim…..
If this variety shares a bread-like character with Chasselas, Neuburger tastes like it was in the toaster an extra three minutes. Or, that it was a whole-grain bread with no white flour. In any case, what you’ll smell here is the aroma of a “fresh, young ’22,” rather than anything more specific – and that’s just fine. It has the lovely anonymity of the best Gemischte Satz in a slightly lower register.
The wine is completely drinky, and I see no reason to demand more of it.
1987 Burggarten Grüner Burgunder ++
It is actually Neuburger Federspiel. I think it is a gift-bottle, because they know how intensely curious I am about old wines.
The vintage was cold – maybe the last cold one before the climate altered? The color is shockingly young – it still shows chlorophyll. “I’ll bet Terry never tasted this,” I can imaging Nikki saying as he looked for a bottle to fill the case.
But did he know how fond I am of the “green” vintages? And how sad I am that so few of them remain? For this is an absurdly delicious and fascinating wine I wish I had twenty more of.
Okay, ’87 is grassy on the surface and vegetal below the surface, but not yucky-vegetal but rather like good parsley root and burdock and salsify, and there were fifty ways this wine could have gone wrong and yet here it is – the one perfect way it could have gone right. If I’d had this on the usual tasting trip, I’d have recalled it as one of the highlights of that trip – one of those ridiculous unforgettable wines that basically shouldn’t exist and yet they do.
I’m sorry you won’t get to taste it. Really! If you had, you’d have been a little put-off if you don’t relish brassica notes.
RIESLINGS
Quick note; if there’s a Riesling Federspiel (which there usually is) it wasn’t included in the sample case, so we begin with the current vintage of Smaragd, which is….
2017 Riesling Smaragd Ried Vom Stein +
A pure aroma from this “delicate” (and regionally atypical) Smaragd with just 12.5% alc. Relatively speaking “Vom Stein” is the weight-lifter while “Im Weingebirge” is the dancer, and here we have the essential smoke and ruggedness of ’17 – and yet the initial impact is refined and allusive. In effect there’s nothing in the fruit-and-flower family but everything in the spice-and-herb community.
It's a classic Nikolaihof, redolent of antiquity, wholesome yet infinitely evocative; even its length is tactful. Yet none of this especially applies to the expressiveness from the Jancis glass, in which the wine is dramatically more explicit and detailed. So I went back to my “control glass” (the little Spiegelau) and now there’s new things emerging, mirabelles and even white peaches. I’d forgotten how diffident these wines could seem at first glance, and what depths are incipient in their quietude.
Does the wine ask for quiet around it, or does it actually supply quiet? It asks, with careful politeness, for oxygen and time, because after I insist there’s nothing flowery in it, in fifteen minutes it blazes with osmanthus and flowering hyssop. In effect this wine teaches you to be patient. It’s never wise to jump to conclusions. Mull it over, why don’t you. How important is it to always take a stand? Listening is an imperiled art.
Yet for all this wine invites absorption (and rewards it) it’s also just a glass of wine to drink, as is done in the estate’s restaurant day after day, with all the distractions of food and conversation and conviviality, and what’s the wine’s job then? This is a circle I can’t seem to square. My limitations notwithstanding, I’m in a kindly and quiet thrall to this tenderly introverted Riesling.
The next day, I’m tasting it again. I notice the burnished color, maybe a little darker than it should be. Again the aromas dance around in and out of key and shade, and if I’m really severe I’d say that it dances close to the line between hale and….doubtful. This changes from sniff to sniff. Yet – the sips are another thing entirely. Here we have a firm, convincing mélange of facets, enacted in this estate’s typically analog way.
At the end there’s a redcurrant and currant-leaf finish that’s like a marl-grown Sauvignon Blanc, one that’s less pyrazine-y and more earthy. It takes a good fifteen minutes, but there’s a lovely glass of wine laying in wait.
2017 Riesling Steiner Hund ++
A Kremstal wine from a supernally great vineyard, and a wine that has often been great but has recently been troubled.
This bottle does not appear to be troubled. It has all the druidic mystery of these Rieslings at their (infrequent but haunting) best.
If I go back a bunch of years into my catalogues I can find a text about the Steiner Hund paradigm that…wasn’t bad at all. I sort of grabbed it. Having done it well, my choices are to do it less well here or to copy myself, and I’m not pleased with either. So I’ll start over.
Steiner Hund can present a concatenation of minerality and herb that expresses fervently but not aggressively. The result is “esoteric” in the truest sense of the word. It defies logic and seems to ask you to suspend your assumptions about possibility and even “reality.” It has that in common with Bründlmayer’s old-vines Heiligenstein, though that wine is more muscular and this one’s more lithe and sinewy.
A teensy bit of sous-voile shows from the Jancis glass and I’m glad to forgive it for all the other things that glass makes explicit. For this is a wine, if you seek to reduce it to words, that will kick your ass all over the tasting room, and the Jancis sincerely tries to help. Still, these herbs and salts and even this tiny surmise of sweetness taste as though they emerged from an isolated island with its own flora and fauna.
At the end there’s a lanolin waxy note that makes me think of Chenin, or even Semillon, but neither of those varieties has the riotous clamor of every green thing you can eat on this earth, striding arm in arm over huge piles of rock-dust and scree.
The wine was, impossibly, even better after a day open. It’s the best “young” Riesling from Nikolaihof for quite some time.
2016 Riesling “Klause”
This has had several names over the years, most saliently Klausberg. It’s a near neighbor to Steiner Hund, and was a favorite spot of Nikki’s father, who had a little shack there where he could rest if the sun was too hot. The 2008 was one of my most beloved wines of the estate.
This ’16 has the oxidative aromas the vintage begins to show, and that have taken up residence in the estate’s cellar in recent years. It’s the first wine in the group to show those aromas, which I happen to find decadent, but maybe that’s just me.
In any case, the palate is fresher and livelier, and so there’s a schism between the “old” aromas and the lively, even frisky activity on the palate. It seems to be a wine without a single “truth,” but rather one with several truths that do not congrue. And with all that accounted for – I like drinking it. I like the spearmint and lemon grass and ginger and I love its puppy-energy and honestly, I can’t make as lick of sense of how that all coexists with the decadent aroma, unless that aroma is not in fact decay, but instead is something else.
Because it is never wise to decide you know a Nikolaihoif wine, unless it is blatantly dubious or amazing. What showed decadent at the outset is now showing a candle-wax fragrance like certain Furmints, not to mention this spastic chamomile, and if I was showing it to my wine group – as if I’d ever have a “wine group” – and I said it was Chenin, no one would say “It can’t possibly be Chenin.”
Much of this was true the following day, though the wine is, let’s say, tenuous in its stamina. It stretches upward for the first 15-30 minutes but can’t sustain the effort, and then retreats somewhat wearily. But catch it at its apex and you will have some fun.
1997 “Fass Severin” Vinothek (Riesling) ++
Bottled after twenty five years in cask (the so-called “Severin” barrel) in February 2022, this continues a series that began with a 1990 wine offered a decade-plus after the vintage.
When these wines are good – and more often than not, they are great – they have such an improbable freshness it’s as though they’d been embalmed. With two years in bottle, this is still holding its cards close, as though it had actual eternity to unfurl itself.
Curiously, for an estate that makes so many “antique” tasting wines, this one isn’t one of them. It’s less wizened than even the 3-year Tradition wine from Gobelsburg. Decanting would help, but I don’t like to shove such a wine along, because I have the time to see it wake up as it prefers to.
I write as impressions follow one another, and later ones may contradict earlier ones, but right now I’m finding puff-pastry and patisserie overtones here. We’re not discussing “mineral” but we are, kind of helplessly, trying to identify just what’s going on here. It doesn’t small obviously of cask; it doesn’t have the “cellar” smell; it has an echo of the purple aromas of the ’97 vintage (iris, lilac, violet, wisteria) and what it really has is the taste of STRUDEL just at the point you can smell it baking.
This appears to persist until a lava-flow of ester and mineral pushes up from the lower layers so that finally you have a savory porridge on a bed of buttery rocks. And I am quite aware I’m tasting maybe 40% of what this wine will finally reveal. I knew there was a reason I cleared a whole week to taste Nikolaihof….
Indeed the wine is more visible a day later, though what one sees is a clearer picture of what one already saw. I’d still describe it as “patisserie with spices” and there’s even some dried peach and butterscotch in the mix, though the wine is dry. It offers a sort of sutra of complexity built upon a lavishness of good will. I can imagine, if I try really hard, a “greater” wine than this, but I can’t conceivably imagine a wine more loving, or more quietly gorgeous.
2025
GRUNER VELTLINERS
2023 Grüner Veltliner Hefeabzug
Sur Lie, as in Muscadet, this vintage sports a markedly generous 12.5% alc. And apropos vintages, I’ve known this wine over 32 of them, and some have been superb. At the winery, this didn’t seem to be one of them, so I asked Katherina to send a bottle along to see if my impression was a fluke.
It is and it isn’t. This wine is far more brash and assertive than usual, and it strikes me as ungainly – as it did the first time. If the wine is usually a parfait of oyster shells, this one’s like a stock you sought to make from soaking the shells but someone left the flame on overnight and the result is kind of vulgar. Other tasters will relish the explicit flintiness, and not care that the volume’s turned up to 11. There’s also the finishing rasp of ’23, and all in all it’s a wine that doesn’t use its “inside-voice.”
On the other hand it’s salty as all get out, and there’s a ferocious minerality swimming up to the surface from the mid palate. So the things I find crude are things others might find expressive.
2023 Grüner Veltliner Aus Den Gärten Federspiel +
I take it this is the wine formerly called “Im Weingebirge,” and I also take it the change had something to do with DAC strictures. Regardless of that silliness, the wine is in excellent form, showing why it’s a consistent sentimental favorite of mine. Because when it shines – and it shines often – it shows all the virtues of discretion while singing a delicate and evocative complexity.
It has a fundamental vinosity expressed as a haunting umami below the range of things we typically go looking for: what varietality, what minerality, what structure, all that stuff. This wine, even in the clamorous ’23 vintage, won’t let you do that. It brings you not just flavors but capital-F Flavor, a definite flavor, not remotely anodyne, and you’re aware it’s telling you something about a place, a culture, a history, all expressed as a tender benevolence. It’s like a consommé that was started in the late 1800s, to which a little is added each year to refresh it – a solera of the Wachau, one could say.
You could isolate some of its elements if you wanted; I’d stop at legume-y and herbal and subtly walnut-y but you could dig for specifics like a detectorist looking for coins under the soil. I happen to enjoy steeping myself in the wine’s poignant atmospheres, but no one has to love wine the same way I do.
I’ll say this – don’t serve it colder than 50º and don’t serve it if there’s a lot of noise and clamor. It isn’t a party-wine, it’s a curl up with a good book wine.
2022 Grüner Veltliner Ried Süssenberg
It has “Wachau DAC” but no indication it’s a Smaragd, which by ripeness it could be. The site is on the Mautern side of the Danube. Katherina wants to do a lot more single-vineyard bottlings. If I tasted it at the winery I didn’t make note of it.
It’s a mouth-filling spice pack of GV, tasting more of loess than of urgestein, and quite a chunky juicy critter for this winery. There’s also the tiniest peep of TCA in the tertiary finish though not in the sniff or the first palate impression. Is it really there, I wonder? It doesn’t obtrude on the resinous wildness, and the wine’s so extroverted it takes me aback a little – it’s the flavor of Nikolaihof in a full-throated bellow, which is rare for them.
I do think there’s a stealth cork, and can only ponder how the wine would be from a pristine bottle.
Tasted again two days later, any hint of cork had vanished. But a question had formed.
I’m someone who likes seeing the most specific identification of a wine’s vineyard origin, and so I support Nikolaihof’s new idea in principle. What remains to be seen – and will take a few years until it can be seen – is whether there’s a particular “Süssenberg-ness” we can actually taste. I hope that there is, but it’s too soon to say. Still, it’s a gesture in the right direction.
2019 Grüner Veltliner Smaragd Ried Im Weingebirge
I’m remembering Rodolphe Peters telling me he disliked “the saffron aroma” in his Champagnes, finding them a sign of botrytis (which he sought to avoid). I’m smelling it here, but I don’t mind it. 2019 was a year when many GVs smelled like Viognier….
There was controversy around the table when I visited. I liked the wine and said so, but another taster (whose acuity of judgment I admire) preferred a Riesling from the same vintage, finding this one coarse and oxidized. I’m sure you’ve had moments where you can completely understand why your neighbor dislikes a wine, and yet you do like it. That’s me here. Yes, one could use a dialectical counterpoint to the rather heavy ripeness here, yet one could also enjoy the chestnutty mandarin and acacia richness, and not fuss too much at the wine’s dearth of finesse.
Nor do I find “flaws” other than a certain robust assertion. I continue to like the wine! When I tasted it again I still liked it. And when I drank a glass with dinner I liked it even more. Ah, my peasant’s taste….
2013 Grüner Veltliner Federspiel Aus Den Gärten ++
Sporting a sticker saying “Late Bottled” and a note on the back label that bottling was in April 2024 – so presumably ten years in cask. You may have inferred this is the “kind” of wine I dote upon – but not automatically.
Other than the refined nuttiness of long cask aging, there’s a high note of wild fennel flowers (I remember when Daniel Patterson of the restaurant Coi used to gather these from highway median strips. I do miss Coi, and wonder how/what Daniel’s doing these days….)
Evanescence and ethereality can be expected here, but what most surprised me is the sheer length in such a “light” wine. Of course ’13 was a fine vintage (arguably a great one), but this wine – and wines like it – do a magic trick where they show profundity so delicately you wonder if it’s really there. Oh it is. It’s like the Ode To Joy played in a little music box, tinkling away while the tiny ballerina twirls and curtsies.
I’ve been reading the poems of Li-Young Lee lately, and while I can’t claim any scholarship on the particular diction of “Asian Poets” I can say this poet has such a repose of description you wonder if he wrote in some meditative trance. When I read them out loud I feel my voice soften and slow down. It’s a little like the effect of old Chenin, the view-from-the-sky feeling; you look out over the vastness and read the story in, because you can’t see faces or hear voices. You see a woman bring a bucket of water into her house from a well and it feels like it tells you everything.
I wonder, what does it tell you? Maybe you preserve some inchoate vision of medieval rural life – you read something, or saw it in a movie – or maybe it’s telling you there are hidden countries inside you, waiting for a wine to pick the lock so you can enter them.
2012 Grüner Veltliner Steinterassen +
Bottled in May 2023 after a decade in cask. 12.5% alc.
This is more definitely of-the-earth than the ’13, which had more shimmer and peal. It’s in hale shape, in its tobacco-y way; a generous mature wine in the middle of its life and hardly antique in the least. On the heels of the saintly ’13 this one’s more professorial.
It is entirely satisfying wine of a kind you barely ever get offered; usually you have to age them yourself and hope for the best. Here you can see what a decently ripe GV tastes like with ten years in the barrel, and in this case there’s none of the aldehydic or oxidative notes that had started to creep in to these aged wines from here. (The “natty” notes….)
This wine is pristine albeit firmly in its second stage, a determined creature with things it needs to do and no time for dreaming.
Also, it is wonderful. Almost muscular. It has strength and lets you see how that is different from “intensity.” It is resolute. It says what it means. It tastes glorious and gratifying and has enough qui to handle your gathering of “wine folks.”
THE RIESLING SERIES
2023 Riesling Federspiel Aus Den Gärten
This smells lovely.
Apart from the usual finishing asperity of the vintage, this is a classic gentle and atmospheric Nikolaihof wine. It’s refined, precise, and delicate and its richness of mid-palate extends into a surprisingly concentrated finish.
This is quite at odds with my impression at the winery, when I felt the wine was borderline incorrect. This bottle, for whatever reason, is fine, and whatever issues I have with it here and now are just the usual wine-taster nit-picks.
2021 Riesling Ried Grillenparz
A Kremstal site, near the Steiner Hund. It’s another in their new concept of more single-vineyard bottlings.
More resinously herbal than mineral, it has the edginess of ’21 (in a good way), leading into a curiously quiet mid-palate before roaring ahead with mints and white pepper on the finish. There follows an uprush of saltiness – which does harken to elements of the Steiner Hund – but it remains a wine of fascinating surfaces rather than swollen depths. Please note, if I’d meant to say “superficial” I would have. The wine is structured to emphasize the outer layers (both at beginning and end) but it is too interesting to be glossed over.
I wonder if it will continue in subsequent vintages. I also wonder about the age of the vines. Regardless, it’s a feint in a new direction for this estate with all its aura of permanence, though on the basis of this one wine, it has yet to justify its status as a site-wine worth highlighting.
2016 Riesling Federspiel +++
It also has the “late-bottled” sticker; in June 2022 this time.
For me this is the ideal melding of a vintage with a cellar, and the results are seriously beautiful.
I adore 2016, as you may know, and all of its sprightly green snap is here, as if the mirabelles are dancing on the trees before we go out to pick them. When we add the allusive cellar notes, the evocative poignance that causes us to feel without any discernible cause, we obtain, in fact, a miracle.
Surpassingly delicate and lapidary, it soughs and pearls its way into the ghost country ruled by the regal tandem of Chenin and Nebbiolo, those wines that can deliver a world you won’t find on the almanacs and globes.
One problem with writing about wine for so long is I’ve pretty much used up all my best images and stuff. I’d call this wine a “psalm” or a “prayer” but I know I’ve said those things before. The idea of mercy arrives and wants to be mulled over. I mean, the King commutes the sentence because he can; it’s an artifact of his power. But the child who forgives his parents, the lover who forgives the beloved, the sibling who forgives the older one who was mean when they were kids, those impulses arise from a place of heart that realizes that all of us are torn, and we can choose to live in a nexus of grievance or else in a country of forbearance.
And yes, wine can deliver us here. If we insist that it can’t, what else in our lives are we wasting?
2016 Riesling “Klause” +
I loved this at the winery, but this bottle has more oxidation than I’d like. Even with that, it shows the wit and angularity of ’16, and resolves into something more Sherry-like than decadent. Indeed as it sits in the glass it gets smokier and…not quite fresher but more of the mandarin peel of a Palo Cortado.
Excellent idea not to pass categorical judgment on this bottle in a hurry.
It freshens in the glass, as “old” wines are wont to do, yet it is a wine of patina, of weathering, and even with all the vim of ’16 it is a wine of tolerance and gentleness. It’s not a bottle I’m tempted to keep around for 4-5 days (though who knows?) but grabbing it now in its hazelnut and brown butter phase is plenty enough satisfaction for me.
2017 Riesling Steiner Hund ++
A history of extremes: the best vintages have been a pinnacle of Riesling, as great as it can be, and the “other” vintages have seemed like rather feeble Jura wines. A return to its best form would be welcomed.
This is one of the good ones.
Steiner Hund strains the imagination and vocabulary of even the best writers and tasters. (I’d love to see Tam Currin get hold of a bottle….) Last April I wrote it was like herbs that grow within the rock instead of on top or around it. So now, in my sober seventies, let me take another stab at it.
It is a concatenation of herbs, but not only herbs; also tea leaves and matja and even a little cannabis minus the skunk, and lime and yuzu; so that’s the green stuff. Then you add the grey rocky stuff, a minerality so tactile you strain it through your teeth, all of it resolving into an ancient saltiness that feels like it was unearthed someplace a thousand years deep in the crust.
It has some of the pedagogy we see in Forster Kirchenstück but here we also have the particular marrowy tenderness of this special cellar. But what we really have is an absolutely sensational finish that feels like a lesson in every-possible-flavor-white-wine-is-capable-of, lingering long enough to be not merely studied, but considered.
At any rate that’s the best I can do. The wine gives you a little shock like Szechuan pepper, so that you feel like you’re buzzing. The smell of the empty glass will keep you awake nights. If the ’16 Federspiel has you thinking “How do I even know this? It doesn’t feel like I ever learned this….” this wine will zap you into thinking “All RIGHT! I know this. But man, WTF, it could show up a little more often, ya know???”
2015 Riesling “Baumpresse” +
If you go there they will show you an astonishing 19th-century wine press – “the largest of its kind in the world” – which was a museum object until Nikki decided to see if it would still work. It does.
This wine is fun. It gave rise to one of my associative tasting notes at the winery. It is riotously sensual and wonderfully comedic (insofar as you’ll laugh with amazed delight) and what it does best is to showcase a slew of fruits and flowers in a tight binding of structure – ’15 had acidity! – in an extroverted personality that doesn’t wear out its welcome.
The half dozen fruits you’ll find are probably different from the half dozen I found, but we will agree on the sheer energy, the get-your-ass-up-and-dance-ness of this spazzed out creature. In a way it’s the antidote to the pensive nature of the ’16 Federspiel and the profound nature of the Steiner Hund. Yet it’s much more than shallow amusement. There is meaning here.
2019 Riesling Ried Vom Stein Smaragd +
While opinions diverged on the 2019 GV (noted above), we were unanimous about this, enthusiastically so. Herbs and mandarins and peaches abound in a wine that displays all the virtues of this clement vintage – “sweet” fruit allied to structure in a form that’s generous but not overripe.
While some vintages of this wine have teetered into aldehydic funk in the last decade, this one is replete with tropical fruit, and it has to be the chummiest Nikolaihof wine I’ve tasted in forever. Yet just when you think it merely beams at you approvingly, a second flavor arrives that’s like bee balm and verbena and it starts to be very Rieslingy and you need to amend your impressions.
It ”checks all the boxes,” you could say. It doesn’t summon the dark gods of mystery but instead it leads with wit and good humor and is as hedonic as any wine I ever tasted here. The genius is, it isn’t merely hedonic but instead has wonderful swish and style.
2008 “Vinothek” Riesling
Bottled in April 2024 after 16 years in a large cask; some vintages have been as profound as wine can get. I was curious how it would be in a “slight” vintage like ’08, and the wine sports a demure 12.5% alc.
At first it just smells old but we know that’s deceptive. As it freshens in the glass, it veers between (90%) glorious estery old Riesling and (10%) dubiously bacterial oogies. Or so one theorizes. You could also describe it as “foxy,” in the vein of the hybrids like Seyval or Vidal, especially when made by a winery in the “natural” sensibility. That said, one forgives or does not forgive the “band-aid” aroma, which isn’t blatant but is present enough.
I feel churlish drawing attention to such things because there is much to wonder over with this remarkable being, and much to recommend a larger measure of tolerance than I am showing in my “taster” persona. I will drink this wine with the absorption it deserves, and will feel little besides joy and gratitude. It has infinitely more of value to impart than a thousand “correct” wines….
I just had a thought. Nikolaihof’s wines are for people who love baseball, and who understand that what others call “slow” is exactly what we love most, the unfolding of events in Kairos-time, the “significant” moments like the catch of breath when you’re so absorbed you forget to inhale.
To append a “score,” even one as deliberately imprecise as mine, would be incoherent. Whatever arrangements of virtues and flaws this wine may have – and “may” is the key word – is simply irrelevant and unwelcome when tasting a wine that carries so much reverie. As such it slips outside the evaluative matrix and swims in its currents of ineffability and thoughtfulness.
SEKT Brut Nature, Zero Dosage ++
GV, Chardonnay and (surprise!) Zweigelt, all 2020; deg. 11/2024, with just 11.5% alc (yay!!!)
They haven’t been making Sekt very long. Time was, I’d arrive for my tasting visit and be met in the courtyard by Nikki with a bottle of Sekt, which we’d taste outside as an apero, and I would humor him. I didn’t want to spit on the ground and I also didn’t want to swallow anything on a tasting day, but his gesture was lovely.
It happened again this year and I quaked a little inside, but I was about to receive the biggest and most wonderful surprise among all the wines I tasted that week.
Because this wine is a masterpiece. And believe me, no other word will do.
It is also pure Nikolaihof. It doesn’t resemble Bründlmayer or Gobelsburg (or Madl, the other genius-of-bubble in Austria), and while a Champagne cognate is plausible, it isn’t exact. What is present is the effortless poise and seamless harmony of the best Champagnes. And apropos of “zero dosage;” first I’d expect a gram or two of RS left over from tirage such that zero dosage doesn’t mean zero residual sugar, and if I’m wrong about that, then this wine is better balanced than 90% of the ”zeroes” I’ve ever tasted in Champagne.
It has a certain sobriety; it doesn’t have the “sexy” flavors, it has a cool grey sort of dough and walnut. The larger Juhlin reveals a mineral cast, while from the smaller one it’s more herbal and more overt. In both instances the finish is lingering and harmonious, which I emphasize because it is exactly where so many “zeroes” collapse into bitterness and irritability.
It's a wine that beckons you inside, out of the bright sun and the flavors that put on a show for you. Here the air is sweet and cool and the chair is comfortable and the cat curls up on your lap, and the wine is perfect.
2019 Gewürztraminer
And now for something completely different….
Smoke smoke smoke. It is all campfire, burning leaves. I’m waiting for the lychee and the rose, but they aren’t here (yet).
My first impression is “Why do they even make this?” but then I remember their tavern/restaurant and recall dishes for which this would be perfect. There’s also the “WTF” factor where you just have to see how it turns out.
I mean, it turns out quite okay, but it’s hardly the reason we approach Nikolaihof, and I’m sure they would agree. Taste/drink it if you’re there, by all means.
What I don’t know is whether 2019 is the final vintage or if they wanted to age it – as is their wont – to see what it might show away from the usual associations. I respect its existence and would call it – sincerely – “interesting.” (The word we usually use when we don’t like a wine and are trying to be polite….)
(I wish they’d sent me their Neuburger instead. That can truly be an evocative and lovely wine.)
2023 (Gelber) Muskateller Aus Den Gärten
The main label omits “Gelber” but I think it’s important.
When they started making Muscat I found it to taste like other peoples’ Muscats but (either) strained through oyster shells (or) entailing a blend with a bit of GV Hefeabzug. Given that there isn’t really much to “say” about Muscat – except to slobber over it, if you’re me – it suffices to observe the variations.
So. In this case there’s almost no elderflower and instead a strong gesture of nettle, mizuna and basil. It also puts the cat in Muscat. It’s pungent and overt by their standards; it’s actually kind of loud. I love Muscat but a little of this would go a long way.
It also shows a profile of 2023 that continually frets me. With few exceptions (and there are always exceptions) this is a vulgar sort of vintage, over assertive with not enough to say – you could call it opinionated – and inherently coarse, such that the exceptions are improbable and valuable. Some of them were made here, among the GVs and Rieslings. So let’s retire now, agreeing that it doesn’t seem to have been a “good” year for Muscat at Nikolaihof.
2021 (Gelber) Muskateller Aus Den Gärten
This was the current vintage when I was there five months ago. Perhaps the ’23 is next up?
This has a classic screwcap funk – an odd thing to say about a Nikolaihof wine. When it fades it reveals a more refined yet still assertive edition of these wines. But I like this one.
It’s still in the cats-and-basil family of Muscat but the texture is infinitely more polished and the finish spreads out into a big garden of herbs. I don’t taste (and miss) the mineral touch of other years, but with just 11.5% alc it may have been plucked too early for that to develop.
It’s a satisfying enough drink in its sharp and radishy way. You can almost infer a wintergreen note on the tertiary finish. Still, it’s time for another classic vintage of this wine.