Weingut Prieler: Bergenland
2021
Prielers are having their “moment” right now, a phenomenon that tends to occur about fifteen years after I start talking about something or someone, not because I have a privileged view through the periscope but because things that take place in umlaut-bearing locales get less attention, not to mention all the attention being squandered on sweaty-bog-shrimp wines.
Pinot Blanc led me here. It’s among the world’s most interesting, and singularly delicious. When I first arrived, the reds were more “international” in style, and the signature Blaufränkisch could often feel broody and gravelly. The great wines – and there were a few, more than sporadic and less than “frequently” – were seriously fabulous, but they didn’t constitute a baseline.
Two things happened to make it change. One was, the estate obtained land in a second Grand Cru, and now there was a certain weight behind the lineup that attracted more attention.
The other thing was the echo of a heartening trend I’ve been seeing as generations shift. Let’s leave aside the feints toward the “natural wine” idiom, and focus on the good news. And that news is, many of the new generation vintners are more focused on their own terroirs, in what makes them distinctive, free now from any need to prove themselves by making plausible wines in international dialects. Georg Prieler, for example, is doing away with a barrique-made Chardonnay in favor of a delicately woodsy Pinot Blanc. He seems to be focused on texture, articulation, and polish in his “important” reds. He himself is also an appealing guy, funny and also thoughtful, decidedly serious and as unpretentious as a person can be. It feels good to praise the wines, because everything that surrounds them is appealing.
FIRST, MY FAVORITE ROSE:
2020 Rosé “vom Stein”
Vom Stein is a brand-name and not an indication of site. But this remarkable wine is nearly entirely Blaufränkisch (with all the acidity and angularity that implies) along with a smidge of Merlot to give the guy some belly. Curiously the Merlot also dominates the tertiary finish, but that doesn’t obtrude on the wine’s essentially “wild” profile. This is deliberate; Georg wants it that way. It’s a rosé with attitude, and if you came in search of big fruit you’re gonna have to reckon with a shitbucket of pepper and herbs and arugula and cilantro.
The ’20 is a little more tame than the bigger vintages have been, a little cooler and more aloof yet basically in-character if less intense. But it’s not because of the vintage, and it ran contrary to Georg’s desire that his Rosé should be serious and ageworthy (we joked about a “library release” of 10-year-old Rosé, and wondered whether that actually was a joke….), but his customers start demanding the Rosé around the time they get rid of their Christmas trees, and we all want happy customers.
But do us and yourselves a favor – keep a few bottles around for a while, and wee how intricate and vinous a Rosé can be.
RED WINES:
2018 St. Laurent
Grown on slate and limestone and vinified in Austrian wood, Prieler’s SL is one of those man-wresting-with-nature dramatizations. If you don’t know, the variety is a prima-donna in the vineyard and it makes no economic sense for anyone who grows it, which in turn means that a vintner is chasing a kind of Ideal, and the risk of falling short is ever-present. But when it succeeds, it is miraculous.
This one’s broad-shouldered and burly as these wines go. It shows clean in the Jancis glass and Brett-y in the Spiegelau “red,” which is the opposite of anything I might have expected. On first glance – and knowing the first glance may be deceiving – I like this less than other vintages. It shows an adamant charred note that seems to exaggerate a facet of SL that normally gives it contour, but here it is largely bitter. Possibly it is underripe – 12.5 alc is on the meager side. I wonder if it will seem less cantankerous in a day or two.
On DAY TWO the aromas are certainly sweeter, with no more than a thin shroud of brett, within bounds for the variety. The palate continues to be…let’s call it “rugged,” which sounds less pejorative than “rustic.”
BLAUFRANKISCH is a truly heartening story. Georg has taken what was always excellent and made the wines even more glossy and supple. Not that they’re “soft” because Blaufränkisch can never be soft unless its nature is played false, but he’s altered the canopy work in the vineyards so as to create a more seamless balance of fruit and tannin. He told me this is far more significant than any changes he may have made in the cellar. BF doesn’t really need tannin as such, because its acidity gives structure, and you’ll have some measure of tannin no matter what. He also suggested that the vineyards change each year post-organic conversion, and bio-dynamics also confer a sort of sheen of contentment to a wine. I’m willing to believe that, if for no other reason than I cannot otherwise account for how moving the wines were.
You know what I mean, even if I’m not saying it very well. We all drink lots of “good wine” and even a few great wines from time to time. But how often do we drink a wine that is redolent of a bedrock contentment that everything is healthy and flourishing and each thing is in its proper place – at home, and grounded.
2018 Blaufränkisch Leithaberg + (but ++ from the Jancis!)
The whole story is told in my catalogue(s) but to sum it up, “Leithaberg” refers to the southwestern slopes of a range of hills between Vienna and the Neusiedlersee. Soils run to mica-schist and limestone and the micro-climate is breezy, warm and dry. Some years back, a group of growers chose the name “Leithaberg” under which to offer wines (red and white) with no discernible wood flavor but with all the minerality the sites could bestow. The goal was a kind of articulation of terroir in a medium-weight form.
It was good, it worked, the wines were often fascinating.
So what went wrong? The name “Leithaberg” was chosen for the whole regional “DAC,” so now when you see it on the label it is less particularly meaningful, though many growers make the wine they made before, only under a less significant name.
Prieler sometimes sees the wine as the little brother of his Grand Crus, and in vintages when he feels the Grand Crus aren’t grand enough, the fruit goes into this wine, which therefore is at its best in lighter vintages, paradoxically. If you think of Ott’s Der Ott or Diel’s Eierfels (or, for that matter, Carraudes de Lafite) you get the picture.
Ok, say you were making a case for Blaufränkisch, to someone(s) who needed to be convinced. You stay away from the very top wines on purpose, because you want to show what the variety can consistently achieve in good hands. You choose, precisely, a wine like this, and you could easily choose this very wine – because OMG, this smells beautiful. No one could lift his to his nose and dispute the importance of this variety! It would be perverse and sullen. A wine like this smells better than many other wines I also like: Cabernet, Tannat, (old-world) Malbec (Cahors, etc), and if you think of the lovelinesses of Sicilian reds, of Greek Reds, you cannot reasonably dispute this variety stands on the summit of that mountain range.
In the Jancis it is both a rapture of prettiness and a studiously etched pattern of flavors. It’s more hedonic in the MacNeil. The wine has soft dusty tannin that’s more an organizing principle than a blatant bit of “structure” – BF has more than enough structure of its own. If Jancis’ glass doesn’t convince you that red wines can show the most fervid minerality, then you, sir, are nothing but a stubborn poltroon. This lovely wine is like a philosophy professor with a disarmingly sweet smile.
A weensy bit more subdued a day later, which isn’t shocking for such a concentrated young red. I continue to find the wine embodies sophistication in every sense that isn’t snooty or arch.
Concentration with transparency isn’t often accomplished; yet another reason not only to enjoy but also to cherish this singular and lovely wine.
2017 Blaufränkisch Ried Marienthal ++
This great Grand Cru has inspired one of the most intriguing things I’ve ever read on a grower’s (often fluff-y) websites. Georg writes: “Warm Pannonian air masses that encourage vine growth meet cool soils that slow growth. This tension creates wines that are also marked with a particular antagonism. Immense power is buffered by vibrant acidity, abundant tannin, a delineated texture and an intense play of fruit.”
I love that word antagonism. Some wines are great by dint of their seamless harmonies. We adore them. But some wines are great because of a basic tension offering an improbable reconciliation. This may be one such. The site is built on limestone with overlays of sand. Compared with its sibling Grand Cru Goldberg, this one is more St Emilion and that one’s more Pomerol. Marienthal is more lavish and untamed, and this ’17 is dynamically typical. It calls to (my) mind a “molecular” chef who’s somehow contrived a gelée of voatsiperifery (a wild pepper grown in Madagascar), because the texture is rich and bloody yet the flavor is wildly charged with an almost savage complexity.
It’s more approachable the next day, though it’s so lavish that it wasn’t forbidding even out of the freshly opened bottle. Of the two Crus, this is the easier to grok; it knows the moves a great wine’s supposed to have. Goldberg is more inscrutable in its youth, though possibly more profound in its maturity.
Clichés always at the ready, I have to note “needs time” “needs air” and all that old jazz. But face it, we’re all drinking all kinds of wines stupid-young, we’re used to it, this won’t shock us, but if we’re ready to believe that Austrian reds can do more than merely flirt with greatness, all ya gotta do is sniff ‘n slurp.
2017 Blaufränkisch Ried Goldberg ++(+)
Stands with Austria’s very greatest reds, and stands with the world’s great reds, and this one buckled my knees as I first sniffed it – and I was sitting down!
It enters the palate so firm as to be opaque, but that only lasts a second. The tertiary flavors lunge in and build their city of iron and peppers. A stingingly minty carapace protects a sweetly tender core, but you may have to take my word for it.
Valerie Kathawala, co-editor of the indispensible new magazine TRINK, was taken aback when I disputed that Pinot Noir was, as is sometimes said, the “red Riesling.” If there is such a thing, it is Blaufränkisch, and if there is a red-wine cognate to the great Cru Forster Pechstein then maybe it is this.
I’ll report back when the wine has had a few days open, and when I’ve tasted it warmer (it’s currently at 61 degrees), because Goldberg, for all its profundity, is the introvert of the tandem with Marienthal.
THE NEXT DAY I poured it and let it sit in the glass(es) for a half hour. Seriously, this wine is world-class profound. It’s so articulate it doesn’t need the Jancis glass’s customary explication. It’s an itchy beast of terroir, some giddy shriek of schist colliding with black pepper, and the finish is like bathing in a quarry of black dust.
WHITE WINES:
2020 Gemischter Satz “Kalkterassen” glug-glug-glug and +
A cuvée from fossil-bearing limestone, consisting of Grüner Veltliner, Sauvignon Blanc, Gelber Muskateller and Welschriesling, or in other words, spicy, frisky and aromatically expressive varieties.
For me this is simple; it’s a picnic among the herbs. It’s a ludicrously fecund spring day and you set your grub in the tall grasses and you’re thinking “This could get all buggy and itchy” but in thirty seconds you’re under some spell, not even really yourself any more; you sit there awash in the superbly horny smells of nature getting it on, and your very skin starts smelling like the thousand herbs around you, and maybe you think “This poor wine’s gonna get obliterated by all this nature,” but you take the first sip and the membrane between “wine” and “nature” dissolves and everything’s kicking and screaming and needing to breed, and the next thing you know you’re cursing yourself that you didn’t bring another bottle.
It comes from a “really super vineyard we bought in 2019, on a plateau that’s extreme limestone,” he says. It’s largely Pinot Blanc, which is a secret weapon to be used if the bloc-harvested wine ends up imbalanced. “If the Grüner is ripe, there’s a risk the Sauvignon Blanc gets overripe, and the Gelber Muskateller is a pain in the ass in any case, so if you pick them together you could end up with something that might be helped by a few liters of the more creamy Pinot Blanc.”
Trying fruitlessly to be “objective,” I have NEVER tasted a Gemischter Satz in the same universe as this one. It’s the crazy-pretty embodiment of whatever force it is that causes the bulb to make a plant that pushes out of the ground. There’s an old blues song whose chorus is “Since I met you baby, I’m happy as a man can be.” Damn straight.
2019 Chardonnay Sinner
What used to be a “Ried” (site) name is evidently verboten in the brave-new-world of “DAC” so Sinner is now a trademark, for the unoaked long-lees-contact Chardonnay the family has made for many years. Far from feeble, it sports 13.5% alc and is determined to show another option for this most ubiquitous (and mundane) of grape varieties. The site is fossil-bearing limestone and mica-schist, and the wine resembles a Chablis grown away from Kimmeridge, the same northern twang but without the specific terroir marker.
The wine is stony, a little saline, a bit of a closed fist, and while “nondescript” would be a pitiless word to throw at it, I don’t know how I’d complete the sentence “You need this wine because…_______” Could this land be put to more interesting use? Or am I being uncharitable? The wine improved on the second day, and it’s a pleasant drink, but I think the salient question isn’t whether the wine is good. It’s good, it’s always been good. But is it the best use of both the land and of Georg’s talents? You could make either case, and if it’s a big seller for the domain then that settles it.
2019 Pinot Blanc Ried Seeberg
This is the wine that drew me to Prieler many years ago. I had never seen this variety show itself in such a sun-warmed manner, as if certain blossoms would only release their fragrance when they’d sat in the sun for hours on end.
Think that was stupid? Here’s something really stupid. Imagine a fricassee of shrimp with crumbled corn chips on top, baked in the oven just long enough to cook the shrimp. Ha, or not! It just grabbed me. OK, back to sanity; from the Jancis glass this becomes a significant creature, showing its signature conversation between (what I’m calling) its “warm-petal” element (think oleander, flowering meadow, even orange blossom) and that immensely savory-sweet flavor of tender local bay-scallops, delivered in a deliberate soliloquy of (both) logic and melody.
As a body, its movements are supple and fluid. Its warm/cool tandem is suggested, not asserted. I can promise you it ages into even more savory complexity for up to twenty years, at which point it’s like a sweet-corn bisque with pumpkin and bacon. This is a fine, elegant vintage of a modestly heroic wine.
2018 Pinot Blanc Ried Haidsatz
His best cuvée of PB, old vines, a little oak. There used to be a rather blatantly barrique-y Chardonnnay that was discontinued, and this wine seems to be taking its place in a subtler form. I’ve had a lot of 2014 Chassagne 1er Crus – I bought the vintage for its reputation and the commune for its affordability – and this wine would sit neatly and inconspicuously among them. Oak, when it’s intelligently applied, can seem to glide into the body of the wine, carried on a stream of lees that blends ineluctably, instead of tasting like it was plastered on. It’s hard to bring off outside of Burgundy and it’s by no means guaranteed in Burgundy any more. But when oaky wine works, this is how it works – or so I argue.
Sometimes I roast a chicken on a bed of Israeli cous-cous, and sometimes I soak some dried chanterelles and use the liquid to cook the couscous in the oven with the bird on top. If I used a few threads of saffron, or used a salt mixture I make from saffron powder and sea salt, and got the couscous nice and yellow and umami-sweet, it will totally rock the chicken, and this wine will totally rock the plate. And putting myself into the mind of the vintner, I have to applaud how deftly Georg managed to impart elegance and seamlessness to this wine, which belongs to a genre where such things are….exceptional.
2025
RED WINES:
2021 St. Laurent +
This is the current vintage, and perhaps because of its extra aging (27 months in large casks) it arrives with none of the reductions to which the variety is prone. In fact it shows as much aromatic charm as the grape can show, and it begs to be sipped.
The palate shows the warmth of the region with the coolness of the vintage. Tannin is dispersed and “dusty” and fruit is subsumed into an enticing leathery umami. The finish is long and peppery. It grows on limestone and mica-schist and is beautifully salty and generous with all of 12.5% alc. Georg considers it an homage to the variety and has long sought to adapt to its caprices and moods.
It seems incidental – it is incidental for an elite champion of Blaufränkisch – yet it’s a grail-quest to bend this variety to some sort of decent comportment. In effect the wine is “perfect” as it is balanced and wholesome and entirely good. It doesn’t stand with the great St Laurents of Austria, but many of those have issues of their own (brett and reductions, more or less fleeting) and I admire a wine that grasps what it reaches for, and if you know St-L (and love it as I do) you can be glad of a wine as thoroughly good as this.
Physiologically “sweet,” highly salty and smoky, it shows the typical roundness of the Pinot type with an influx of the rugged Southern Rhône vernacular. Generous, expressive, textbook St-L.
I tasted it a second time four days later, and it had blossomed aromatically into an intensely appealing wine with as much clarity as the variety can show. A “cool” pouring temp seems ideal for it – I pulled it from my (now) 51º cellar and placed it in a 65º kitchen for 75 minutes, and while I apologize for the geeky detail, it did the wine proud. Now I’m craving moussaka….
2020 Blaufränkisch OGGAU “Johanneshöhe” +
Grown on fossil-bearing limestone, the site is unclassified and is thus offered as a registered trademark for a village-wine according to, you know, the nerds who decide these things. It’s the entry level BF. The estate has moved into the ’21 vintage for at-the-door buying.
It shows the basis, the floor for Blaufränkisch, and accordingly it also shows how superb the variety is, when even the least ambitious wine is this good.
It has the rich gamey aroma of Australian lamb; herbs and pepper are subtly present, but this isn’t an “examination of BF,” as much as it’s a wine between untroubled drinking and “so fascinating you can’t look away from it.” It’s an utter riotfrom the Jancis glass, so excellent you start asking “Is there a mistake? This can’t be the cheap one….”
I’m a geek for black peppercorns, as you may know. I never got the bougie salt thing, but peppers are an amazing world. The top Blaufränkisch tend toward the intensely ferrous nature of Sarawak pepper, whereas this one strides along a balance beam between the eucalyptus Madagascar and the floral Tasmanian. (I’m telling you man, pepper is a world.) Meanwhile, the deliciousness and animation this little guy delivers is well ahead of its modest cost.
This is another bottle I left for four days, mostly because I wanted to drink the “better” BFs with grub, to see if they were really that good. Now the wine reeks of violets and blackberry jelly….which leads me into a digression.
We talk about BF in terms of pepper and minerality and garrigue and mint and iron and acidity, but in many wines there’s a floweriness that’s sometimes covert and sometimes explicit. And I’m theorizing that it is exactly that floweriness that develops into the curious resemblance to Pinot Noir we sometimes see in mature Blaufränkisch. It calls to mind the exquisite 2021 Pinot Noirs from Ziereisen, and this could be placed among those wines – perhaps next to the Talrain – without standing out as “other.”
2021 Blaufränkisch Ried Pratschweingarten +
(It’s Leithaberg DAC, and the actual site-name is “Pratsche”, on limestone and mica-schist)
It’s the mid-level wines to lead into the Grand Crus, and in many vintages it contains fruit from the Crus. This ’21 has over 6 g.l acidity, likely the highest of any of the world’s serious reds.
The aroma is simply classic BF and the palate is so good you’d be forgiven for assuming it was one of the Crus. The wine is markedly and admirably pure; Georg says “Nothing happens in the cellar that wouldn’t have happened 70 years ago,” and it allows us to see the basic excellence of the variety when it hasn’t been pimped with this or that.
It's elegant, almost creamy from the Riedel Chianti Classico (tailored exactly to a wine such as this) and has more cut and explicit peppercorn and iron from the Jancis. Nuance or texture – up to you. I’d pour into both glasses even drinking for fun, as the distinction is almost as fascinating as the wine, nor do I want to sacrifice the hedonic joy of the Riedel. The Jancis enunciates the wine better but it also stretches its contours and makes it feel slimmer.
What a superb variety this is! I’ve had it at mealtime twice now, and this is the second “tasting,” and now the wine’s become nice and bloody. (Some might think “brett” but I doubt it, as it’s specific to the Riedel glass.)
2021 Ried Marienthal ++
(I assume the variety appears on a back label along with the DAC verbiage. “Oggau am Neusiedler See” is the commune of origin and this is on the main label. We also have a diam cork now. Alas we also have a STUPID HEAVY BOTTLE, so vexing from a certified-organic estate)
I’m less familiar with this Cru, and have always found it more umami-driven than the more up-front clarities of Goldberg. Marienthal needs to be coaxed out of its primordially obscure shell – but when it emerges….
Still, ’21 is nothing if not explicit, and the palate entry here is ridiculous, combining a sort of glace de viande of concentrated terroir with a forthright gesture of pepper and berries. It’s bloody, Wagyu in a glass, and I’m not sure how a wine manages so much density without being opaque. Still, it’s the more enveloping of the two Crus, and the finish is so dense it’s as though some ultimate concentrate of the wine is being injected through a syringe.
Again, to create such a wine carrying the acidity it does, and offering every clear parameter of greatness while frustrating the taster who needs to string together adjectives….such a thing defies credulity. If you need nuances in stark relief the Jancis will help, excitingly, but I like the murmurs and inferences of the Riedel. It’s like the virtues ascribed to music on vinyl, the warm analog power.
As it develops it takes on elements of porcini, dark chocolate, and Burgundy truffle, and seems to sough into a gentler texture. It also bears mentioning that such a wine could barely have been made fifteen years ago in Austria; oak is so seamlessly assimilated here, and tannin is so well managed, that elemental flavors blaze forth in all their innate specificity. Such a wine warrants every bit of “international attention” without glomming on to the ”international style.” I want to weep for joy.
2021 Ried Goldberg +++
(The same things apply here as for the Marienthal. The commune is Schützen am Gebirge now.)
An icon of Blaufränkisch, since Georg’s father started making it (I think) in the 70s, and whose wines are aging magnificently in many cases. The terroir is variously described as “slate” or mica-schist, but in either case it is singular in Burgenland and actually seems to join hands across the distance separating this Cru from those of Uwe Schiefer (in Südburgenland).
Goldberg is the Forster Kirchenstück of Blaufrankisch. It is utter terroir, abstracted from fruits or berries but serving up a lavish smorgasbord of mints, resinous herbs and peppercorns in a juiciness so overwhelming you’ll infer a sweetness which of course isn’t there. Goldberg is also less voluminous than Marienthal; it’s every bit as convincing but here you don’t feel that it seeks to convince, but merely to be its wild and serene self.
I’ve been tasting wine for 45 years, and I still can’t fathom how a wine can be so giving without actually asserting at all. This much I do know; when you feel the breath of divinity in a wine, that effortless beatific glow, that’s the most accurate predictor of greatness. (Another clue is when every freaking cell in your body screams when you try to spit the wine.)
Lately there have been photos of the night sky as seen from the surface of Mars, where there is no atmosphere to cloud the view, and it comes to mind as I consider the curiously loving clarity with which each molecule of flavor can be seen in this wine. I hope you are lucky enough to land a bottle of this, because you will wonder not only at its beauty but also at its evanescence and its precise spiciness and its font of kindness. You may thrill and exult over the Marienthal, but you will meditate and dream over the Goldberg.
Over the days the bones of the wine emerge, in contrast to the Marienthal, which grew more smooth. Behind the primary fruit of the Goldberg – discreet in any case – lies an iron spine of minerality and an acid-driven rigidity that stretches from Alpha to Omega across the palate and allows you to take time considering each thing this wine has to reveal. We receive a stern and loving blessing.
WHITE WINES AND PINK WINES:
2023 Gemischter Satz “Kalkterassen”
“Limestone Terraces” are the origin for this field-blend of Gelber Muskateller, Pinot Blanc, Grüner Veltliner, Sauvignon Blanc and Welschriesling. Muscat dominates the fragrance, which I don’t mind at all.
With 13% alc it isn’t quite a glugger yet it’s so entirely yummy what else do you do with it? Once again there’s a physiological “sweetness” expressing as an umami-driven surmise of actual sweetness – which it does not have, but the impression may be bound into the intensely grapey and floral aromas.
It sings its lusty little heart out from the Jancis. Joyful, life-affirming, wonderful wine! And even a “scale” as deliberately vague as mine isn’t equal to what this wine is. I can’t “give” it a plus but I also can’t possibly recommend it more highly, and while it’s too ripe to glug heedlessly, I think I’d take my chances.
It took me a few days to “taste” it again – I couldn’t keep my hands off it, plus my wife was crazy about it – and honestly, how do you know when to taste it? Ostensibly it’s the little wine to precede the earnest whites, but it’s so absurdly engaging it wreaks havoc on whatever you taste after. Plus it’s reassuring, in light of (too) much of the natty community, that you can have glou-glou without the doo-doo.
2023 Chardonnay Schützen
The vineyard “Sinner” is now a registered trademark. It consists of fossil-bearing limestone and slate, and the wine is made entirely in steel.
As such it is elemental once again, showing the is-ness of Chardonay without the usual flourishes. At 13.5% alc it feels a little top-heavy, though the flavors are attractive. There’s a certain minerality, a sweet straw flavor inherent to ripe Chardonnay un-fucked with, and really, plenty to appreciate and no fault to be found.
(Sound of shoe dropping….) It’s just that often with Chardonnay I can respect the achievement of a wine without being in a hurry to drink it. I acknowledge its salty mineral grip, and the wine has my unqualified respect. But….it’s Chardonnay. There’s really only a few places where we need Chardonnay planted, and we know what they are. Otherwise, and regardless of the many very good wines it might make, it simply isn’t needed. This is apart from its salability, of course, and growers make wine that people want to buy, and so, okay, Chardonnay. I must be a real fuss-pot, because this wine is appealing in many ways, but I’d bet this land is capable of better things.
I liked it more to sip than to “taste.” That happens, and it’s not insignificant. I like the apple butter finish. I like the wine if it comes to that. No one would taste it and think “This wine shouldn’t exist,” but I wonder whether the entire genre should exist, the heedless sprawl of a grape that only makes outstanding wine in a few privileged places. But enough of my curmudgeon-y ways. If you must have Chardonnay at all costs, you can do much, much worse than this entirely pleasing wine.
2023 Pinot Blanc Schützen, Ried Seeberg
A little skin contact for this “basic” steel-and-lees Pinot Blanc. It was the wine that brought me to Prieler many years ago, when I drank it in a nearby restaurant, found it arrestingly original and compelling, and had to ask “Where’s this grower located?” only to learn he was a few steps away. (Literally; he was at a neighboring table!)
I think it’s more interesting than the Chardonnay though many tasters might feel otherwise. The skin contact encourages many inviting elements we sometimes also see in ripe GV – the oleander and flowering-field and mimosa – but it also delivers a coarseness of texture I’m less persuaded by. It’s a group of fascinating elements that have yet to congrue, as is explicit from the Jancis glass. I mean, flavors are all well and good, but they need to add up to flavor, and here they’re still in strife. Still, this isn’t the first time I’ve felt that ’23 doesn’t “play well with others.” I recognize all the signature elements that make this wine so significant but they feel like puzzle-pieces strewn about the floor.
Sometimes wines like this can knit together over the days, and I’ll taste it again a couple days from now and again after that.
SECOND “TASTE” after sipping a couple times while supper cooked, the aromas have knitted and the wine is far more inviting now. It’s still rather pitilessly expressive from the Jancis, but whatever its actual “issues” (as contrasted to those I imagine) it’s a more interesting wine than its brother Chardonnay. There remains a certain strife between wine-and-vintage, and I hate the “needs time” trope, but I do think this wine will reconcile its factions in a couple years.
Knowing its pattern over decades of vintages is both an advantage and a drawback. I have in mind a paradigm of Prieler Pinot Blanc Seeberg, and I contrast each new iteration to that model, which means I taste inferences of all the vintages I’ve known. That gives me a contextual template, which is good, but it also precludes tasting the wine qua wine, which is less good. But – I am confident in my forecast that 1-2 years patience will reward us.
2022 Pinot Blanc Alte Reben
(Leithaberg DAC)
Here’s the start of Pinot Blanc with attitude. Sixteen months on the fine lees show as an aroma both toasty, angular and subtly creamy.
Structurally the wine enters with some density of texture, fleshes out in the mid-palate, and finishes as though it’s stretched out to a point of surprising astringency – as is the case with some ‘22s.
I know wines like this. Tasters encounter them all the time. So much to like – in this case the toasted semolina, the implied florals, the classic varietal shellfish flavors, the white-corn polenta – and then we wonder at the abrupt sharpness at the end. This micro-focus is what they pay us (or lately do not pay us) for, and we agree, taster and reader, that this is a truthful description of the wine, at least filtered through one person’s palate. That none of this pertains to how the wine might be used is a thing we elide over.
So let me say it again. If you’re drinking this wine you’ll like it, as I myself do, but if you’re “examining” it you may (or may not) be annoyed by the finishing briskness. That said, it’s nice and salty also, as it makes its way out.
It’s been a useful food-wine, as we’ve had a plenitude of chanterelles lately and the wine likes them, especially when I sprinkle my home-made saffron salt over them while they cook. Sure, the toastiness of the wine is a little emphatic, and sure, the tertiary finish dissolves into a buttery sort of grit, but we tasters do not actually need to fixate on such things. I mean, here I sit with my Let the record show….While in my actual, you know, life, I’m happy to have a glass with my chanterelles.
2022 Ried Haidsatz
(Again, and kind of absurdly, we’re supposed to “know” that this is Pinot Blanc, though I suppose it appears on the back label, together with the DAC rigamarole….) (It is, for the record, Pinot Blanc.)
Grown on limestone over a schisty base, the wine smells like gangbusters. We’re in a place that speaks the language of white Burgundy now, yet here we have a chomp of mineral, more acidity, and a different kind of saltiness. It has plenty of personality, assertively so, but attains a kind of serenity at the finish, where there’s just a sideways flick of phenolic action.
If I say “toasted oats and cranberries” I can only insist the association was valid at the time. (!) No one will quarrel with “saltiness.” There’s also a gras that is less buttery than it is duck-fatty.
An ambitious Pinot Blanc, very good if not the best vintage I’ve tasted, but these efforts are well worth making.
Yet for all its power and authority, the wine is oddly perishable, showing oxidation over a small number of days. This is acceptable in light of its basic shellfish-stock nature, yet more exposure of terroir would be welcome.
2022 Ried Steinweingarten +
(Allow me to fuss – yes, again, I know. STUPID HEAVY BOTTLE. It’s Pinot Blanc. It’s from Schützen am Gebirge. As long as I live I will never understand why it was assumed we consumers would just *understand* that a site-name alone would suggest a grape variety, in a very recent labeling-system without hundreds of years backing it up. I sympathize with every grower who has to be buffeted by all these metaphysics and must alter the label accordingly, often at the cost of clarity.)
A recent acquisition for Prielers, a limestone site that gets morning sun only, a boon in a warm climate zone. And this wine attains the qualities the others strove for. If the previous PBs seemed to have Côte d’Or whites as their north stars, this one looks to Chablis.
It’s sophisticated in its depths, this beauty. It’s not ostentatious and it doesn’t lead with seductive flavors. It shows a really perfect poise of minerality, depth and grip; its wood is convincingly absorbed into its overall vinosity; it’s fantastically salty, and its eagerness of expression can be indulged in view of its many valid gifts.
It's like a 1er Cru Chablis that’s not especially “Kimmeridge-y” and each time I taste (or sip) it I like it more.
2023 Rosé “vom Stein” +
100% Blaufränkisch, from a single site on cretaceous limestone. It’s always been a wine with attitude – “I like it a little wild,” Georg has said – and I love its character and its lack of overt seductiveness. It’s like a Rosé that’s a Mensa member; plenty good-looking but preternaturally smart. It's also absurdly lovely from the Jancis glass. Indeed this is among the more (relatively) mainstream vintages, and nothing the matter with that.
It’s one of those wines I have praised for so many years I risk repeating myself. So as briefly as I can; it’s an articulate and interesting wine that happens to be pink, but the explicitly intricate flavors along with the little hint of snark makes this a wine that spills over the banks of its genre.
2026
2024 Chardonnay Schützen “Sinner”
Grown on fossil-bearing limestone with slate, “Sinner” is now a registered trademark, a clever way of finessing the identity of what used to be the name of a site, appearing on the label.
As before, this is a stainless steel wine with long lees contact, for creaminess without wood. The 24 vintage does not usually lead with creaminess, but the wine smells enticing.
My essential view of Chardonnay from umlaut-bearing locales is that the burden of proof is on them for why they should exist – leaving aside the fact that people want to buy them. This is a lovely wine that will give pleasure to its customers, and perhaps it is unreasonable of me to insist it must add something unique to the world-o-Chard.
Georg Prieler doesn’t make any ordinary wines, and he has realized his aim for this one – a dialogue of stone, hay, and a sort of ghee or brown butter from the lees. The wine is successful albeit it has to contend with the aggression the ’24 vintage can show. Nor does it present the usual length of finish that mitigates the pointedness of this fascinating year. It’s pithy and stony from the Jancis glass.
But pithy and stony are much of a muchness in 2024. The result is a kinda clunky wine, but you know? Forget my curmudgeon ranting, and know that this wine is already sold out ex-cellar. Shows what I know….
I sipped it before dinner and am tasting it again, wondering if I have been too stern. I switched out one of the glasses And am liking it much more. Time (48 hours) may also have been kind to it. (Or to me….) It’s still pretty stringent from the Jancis, but I’m tempted to assume that’s always the “truthful” glass, yet sometimes it isn’t.
2023 Ried HAIDSATZ
You have to turn the bottle around to see that it is Pinot Blanc. The STUPID HEAVY BOTTLE at that. (“SHB” from here on.) This is especially lamentable from a certified organic estate. I hold Georg in great esteem and I’m fond of him personally, so it pains me to kvetch about this. But kvetch I must, and I won’t cease until this scourge is eradicated, once and for all.
The soil combines limestone and slate, and the wine is made either in “large cask” or in 500-liter cask, depending on which website text you believe. Wary as I am of oaky wines, this one surmounted my wariness and I humbly surrendered to it when I tasted it at the estate last year.
It has only gotten better since then. It’s one of those wines that’s half way to food, such that we don’t really talk in terms of “vinosity” but instead in terms of a nearly tangible solidity, like a custard that’s just starting to set. It’s also a rare wine where oak is a discreet consort instead of Uncle Blabby who won’t let anyone else get a word in edgewise.
The finish, too, is semi-solid and remarkably savory. The wine is salty and grainy and really doesn’t address the grape variety directly, if at all. It shows oleander and vetiver, but so do many Grüner Veltliners. Then again, Prieler’s Pinot Blancs have always been varietally atypical, to which Georg might respond Maybe, but they’re typical white wines of the region, and I’d have to agree. In fact I see this wine as the more successful in the genre the Chardonnay often occupies, and if you seek a wine of that “type” this is the superior choice.
Could it have used more fruit? Yes, but only at the expense of its singular character. Give me a slice of pike-perch in the paprika sauce typical of the region and all will be well with the world.
2023 Pinot Blanc LEITHABERG Alte Reben
Taster’s note: if you’re curious, auto-correct changes Alte Reben to “late Reuben.”
I tasted out of (price) sequence, but it made sense. Old vines (mostly 60, and a few over 90) in mica-schist and limestone, from the Seeberg site. Made (after stainless steel fermentation) 2/3 in 500-liter cask and 1/3 in clay amphora. The wine is beautiful.
It presents an articulate dialogue among varietality, toastiness, exotics, masa harina (taco shells), and a fine salty savory finish. With less “impact” than the Haidsatz, it has more animation and originality. With air it introduces a basmati note reminding me of tapioca pearls.
An entirely satisfying and successful Pinot Blanc, reminding me that it was these wines that compelled me to the estate. The reds came later.
2023 Ried STEINWEINGARTEN +
Again you must turn the SHB around to identify the variety – Pinot Blanc in this case.
Fermented in cask and aged in both cask and amphora, this remarkable vineyard is giving Georg his finest white wine since the family obtained it in 2019. It does so again now, but sniffing it on the heels of the Haidsatz it registers less smiling and clement. More assertive, demanding, opinionated one could say. It has opinions with which I happen to agree….one could also say.
It is, I suppose, “Burgundian” in its outlines – leesy, stony, salty, maybe a little too expressively woody. Maybe, but not on the palate, at which moment the wine overcomes any doubt and simply blasts you with a dream of licking sea-salt off a limestone rock with the scent of basmati rice in the background.
It is complete and fulfilled. Common to all such wines it is seamlessly balanced, as if it juggled its flavors so deftly you can’t see the juggler’s hands. There’s a kind of virtuosity behind such poise.
Back to “Burgundian.” It’s less luscious and creamy than most white Burgundy, except perhaps for the recently purist vein fashionable among some Meursault growers, but this wine stakes a deeper claim to (a little pompously) existential validity than (for example) the Chard. Markedly “grown up” for a wine of its nature, it could become a lodestar for Burgenland whites outside of the Muscat-Sauvignon types.
2024 Rosé vom Stein +
As always 100% Blaufränkisch. The 2025 is already sold out at the winery, by the way. But the good news is, this is a rosé that can age, does age, gets (even) better with age, and if there is a more interesting pink wine than this, I hope you will send me a bunch of it.
It is the opposite of “pretty” or “enticing” or “ingratiating” or “seductive.” (I once wrote that it was only a picnic wine if you were going on a picnic with Noam Chomsky, but Mr Epstein’s put the kabosh on that feeble little witticism. Maybe substitute Ian McGilchrist for Chomsky. This is a right-brain wine to the max.)
I don’t remember a better vintage than this. It gives more than anyone could envision, let alone ask for. Some will liken it to the wildness of Provençale rosé, but the crucial difference here is the magnificent Blaufränkisch acidity. It gives buoyancy and twirl to the complexity of berry and mineral and tomato leaf and Sencha and summer savory.
And with all this be-bop, the wine is addictively drinkable, not least for its savory and deliberate finish. All you can say is a hearty WTF.
2022 Blaufränkisch OGGAU (Johanneshöhe) +
Officially a “village” wine with the erstwhile site name changed to a registered trademark, which I think is admirably clever. In fact it hails from nine separate parcels.
And so we enter a world I love. I think Blaufränkisch is a noble grape that belongs at or near the status of the world’s great grapes. The fact it is controversial strengthens my case. There’s no controversary around the status of Prieler as among its very best producers. Here’s the first of four – the entry-level wine. As it were….
I’ve written that you don’t need great Riesling to know that Riesling is great. The same holds true for Blaufränkisch; the “ordinary” wine from a top producer establishes the variety’s “status” as well as the grand wines that lie ahead.
This wine is suave and chocolatey, with cocoa-powder tannin. It naps the palate with a brush of flavor, some of which is the typical range of varietal signatures and some of which is a superb umami leading into a beautifully suggestive finish of smoke and tallow and morels and resinous herbs.
A tactful, stylish wine, both gentle and precise, with an agreeable note of oxidation (but not decadence), suggesting there’s no better time than the present to drink this loveable creature.
And yet, and yet….with three days open (and not much left in the bottle) the wine has obtained the improbable floral aromas of a maturing BF in transit toward Pinot Noir elements. I only report this, I can’t explain it, or, candidly, fathom it. There’s also an attachment to the faux-oxidized thing I noted right away, and which has increased, which isn’t shocking. Yet again there’s a surprise; the wine is firmer and less evolved from the Jancis glass, whose wider bowl would seem to hasten secondary flavors.
Maybe the innate angularity of BF reveals all sorts of embedded enigmas. Another thing to love about it.
2022 Blaufränkisch LEITHABERG Ried Pratschweingarten ++
Stainless steel fermented from whole clusters and then aged in both large casks and hogsheads for 28 months.
The aromatic reticence barely prepares you for the mass of sweet fruit that coats the palate. Tasting from the Jancis glass reminds me that the lady herself wrote to me last week, agreeing that wines in the “middle” of the range are often her favorites. It’s hard to know how one could reasonably demand more from a wine than this wine gives, though I know what lies ahead and how great they will be.
I love greatness and am by no means a contrarian who insists that these mid-range wines are in some sense “equal” to the Grand Ones. But – in order to properly love and revere and respect that which is great, two things must take place. One, a stage has to be set for such wines, and part of doing so is to leave some white space around them, and two, that drinking too many great wines risks becoming jaded by them. It’s best if we walk toward them, paying a decent respect to everything we encounter along the way.
I could actually stop here and be entirely satisfied. In all the years I have loved wine I have encountered equivalencies of pleasure, whereby it becomes absurd to try to measure them against some absolute (and arbitrary) framework. This is not great (or “great”) wine but it gives as much pleasure as an excellent wine can give. It is in its way a quintessence of Blaufränkisch, even without the effects of the Grand Crus, because it presents everything we can love about this grape without the affects of profundity – even when those affects are justified.
Does it show a precise lusciousness or a luscious precision? Who knows? What it does show, I am very sure, is the joy of considering such a question while sipping something so hedonistic yet so articulate.
It firms up over the days, and as much as I like the “next-gen” flavors I like even more the sumptuous coating of fruit from the freshly opened bottle. Or do I? The refined articulation of flavors from the Jancis is really captivating. Hmmm….the wine-lama here can’t seem to make up his tiny mind.
2023 Ried MARIENTHAL ++
Again one turns the bottle over – the SHB bottle, alas – to spot the grape variety.
These are the Grand Crus – this one on fossil-bearing limestone. It’s the chocolatey one, a kind of syrup of Blaufränkisch. But embedded in its creamy mouthfeel are all the wild elements of this magnificent grape; the black pepper, the black berries, the dark plums, the snap of mustard greens (mizuna) and the tingle of resinous herbs, all of it napped in the sweetest goo you ever tasted.
As intricate as it is, and as complex as it will be in fifteen years (or more), it’s a comprehensible wine. It’s fluent in the lingo of Great Red Wine. It isn’t “foreign;” you’ll get it. One marker of its elite stature is not only the length of the finish but also its amazing density. It feels almost molten. It is the opposite of exacting; it is spellbinding.
I usually find BF the perfect partner for lamb, but this wine would also cuddle up to beef, or to the more earthy Australian lamb which can taste as though it’s part-way to beef. There’s also a root-deep flavor I’ve seen in young Barbaresco, though this has a more civilized (13.5%) alcohol.
Of all the wines this was the most stable and least changeable. It started out great and kept being great with no detours or feints or wry asides or whispered confidences.
Easy great. In contrast to what awaits….
2022 Ried GOLDBERG +++
Same issues, variety hidden from the main label, bottle – excuse me, the SHB – weighs too much.
I don’t think it will be much longer before this wine is generally regarded as one of the world’s greatest reds. It grows on mica-schist and clay-retaining loam, it is a terroir-lover’s dream, and I some years it has an evanescent melting quality you cannot fathom in a wine so singular and lucid and coherent.
This ’22 is more overt than its ethereal predecessor (that ’21 tasted as though no mortal being could have made it). It is also more feral and wild – some of which is due to a fleeting but discernible brett. The palate leads with a savagery of stone, which I adore. Even more iron than stone – look, you really have to get to know Sarawak peppercorns because this is them in liquid form.
2021 was a sighing sort of year for Goldberg, and 22 is a yammering extrovert which is tangibly and definitely great. There was a ghostly fleeting melody in the ’21 and a fanfare in this ’22. There’s also more earthbound material to push through to reach the shrine to terroir that lies in the nucleus here.
But today, on first pour, straight from the bottle and no decanting, there’s a slow-motion unfurling, an almost visible parting of the stones to reveal a mysterious and bottomless sweetness all the more exquisite by being spoken out loud. This is a play in three acts, and I’m only a few minutes into act-1.
Many years ago a NY Times writer did a piece on (the Mexican food) mole, in which, when tasting a supernal example, described the feeling of being “invaded by silence.” It described, perfectly, a sensation I knew but was never able to describe. Now, any time I’m engaged with a work of art, whether a film or a piece of music or writing or even a good TV show, there’s a moment when it claims me and the world falls away. It is rare, this moment, as it has to be. Too many things lay a bogus claim to it, and then I get angry. Some things have elements of profundity but are too noisy to deliver the “silence” I find so moving.
That is the crux of difference between the 2021 and this ’22. They are equal in quality by any sensible measure. I consider them so, at least. But this wine is (maybe) too resplendent to carry that ethereal fragility that seems to focus the soul. It is thrilling and stirring, but the poem is written in capital letters. It is ecstatic rather than interior.
It will be a sensationally beautiful wine in time. It already is, but time will develop the tertiary sweetness that will turn the clamorous toward the sublime. The ’21 has a pale light – maybe why it touches me so – but it could be perishable, whereas the sheer energy of this ’22 is something to behold.
Picking through the aspects of greatness in Blaufränkisch Goldberg is a fine way to spend an afternoon. A fine way to spend a life, in fact.