2012 Gruner Veltliner Achleiten Smaragd

Rudi Pichler’s 2012 Gruner Veltliner Achleiten leads with a fascinatingly enticing nose suggesting caraway-laced rye bread; bittersweet floral perfume; and saline, alkaline ocean breeze, adumbrating the combination of seedy, roasted grain savor, inner-mouth perfume and mouthwatering minerality that follows on a glossy and expansive palate. Ore-like, nobly fungal, woody, and toasted nut low-tones all add to the striking and complex personality of this metaphorically dark beauty that finishes with sappy, satiny, salt-tinged, mouthwateringly umami-rich persistence. Plan to follow it through at least 2022. Rudi Pichler – whose approach and evolution as a winemaker I have attempted to chart in some detail in past reports – took advantage of 2012s excellent autumn conditions to harvest over an extended period with dates diverging widely according to the parcel in question. “What we particularly did in 2012,” he relates, “is to put almost none of the fruit through the crusher but instead to tread all of it by foot. It was some sort of intuition on my part. We had high ripeness but not the usual degree of lignification of the stems.” To give you an idea of the robustness of skins and their ratio to juice, Pichler laughingly relates the following story. “I had a young American woman in the crew and she said she just had to say she had done this. So she jumped into a bin ... and bounced right back out! Clearly, 48 kilos (105 pounds) were too little. I’m 75 kilos and it was difficult for me. My colleague Robert weighs 90 and that functioned perfectly. Somebody else insisted on treading barefoot because that’s how they do it in Burgundy. But in Burgundy they don’t harvest in November. It was two degrees (37 F.) down in there, and this individual lasted all of two minutes.” Given the relative austerity and frequent bitterness of the resultant wines, Pichler was certainly wise to treat his crop’s phenolic material with caution, though perhaps he exercised a bit too little. In typical fashion for this address, the wines are analytically (and adamantly) dry, which naturally also plays a role in their austerity. Importer: Winebow, Montvale, NJ; tel. (201) 445-0620