Grapes: 100% Grüner Veltliner

This Austrian Grüner Veltliner has very little to do with what you might think of as Grüner Veltliner. The wine has spent nine years underground, in a century-old 2,400L barrel, in a cold cellar in Austria, not terribly far from the Czech border.

The near decade in barrel has transformed this wine into something else, something more. Grüner Veltliner, often bulky or unwieldy, has, here, become elegant, perhaps not lean but lithe, glossy and airy, nearly levitating and alive. This is Grüner at its most perfumed, sweet apples and pears, nearly caramelized while also mineral – there is that woolly sweetness that shows in Chenin Blancs with some age.

Even a decade already behind it, there is an obvious freshness that drives through this bottle. This is another cask of the wine we brought in years ago — and this tasting note is still 100% correct, though it has found even more harmony and freshness with time in bottle.

There is just no way to reproduce the effects of such extended barrel aging. And there are few precedents for this kind of wine, for this extended an elevage. The only one that comes to mind immediately, are the revered and mystical “Vinothek” bottlings of Nikolaihof – wines that, we might add, command prices of $150-$200+ a bottle.