(Manfred Klimek / WELT am SONNTAG)
I am Austrian. I am Viennese. And I am the only Viennese and Austrian who cannot ski. And never wanted to learn. In the eternal dispute between mountains and sea, I am a man of the sea. That is why I am rarely in the Alps. This time, after years, I was back on the peaks and among the rock massifs – to drink wine. In the second part of the Alpine Wine series, we briefly return to where we ended in the last column: the new wine bar at Hotel Sandhof, a place that can only make wine enthusiasts happy. Clemens Riedl, founder of the wine-trading company Trinkreif (specialising in mature wines), is partly responsible for the list here and has a few tips on which wines between 50 and 250 euros he would drink here.
We begin with a red wine from Rosi and Hannes Schuster from Rust in Burgenland, vintage 2024 (€52.00 in the bar), a notably succulent cuvée of Blaufränkisch, St. Laurent and Zweigelt. Plenty of cherry, a little cassis and quite a lot of exotic herbs. Fragrant, elegant and wonderfully medium-bodied. The second wine is already a more sought-after white wine, the Chablis AC 2022 (€75.00) from Laurent Tribut. Clemens Riedl says: “Laurent Tribut is one of the quieter but very reliable names in Chablis.” True. Reliable here, too, is that classic Chablis style which was lost for decades because of absurd mass production.
Also striking on the list is the very reasonably priced Trebbiano Abruzzo from Amarotti (€68.00) – but I was craving an old white wine. And Riedl has a 1997 Riesling Kellerberg Smaragd from the Wachau winery Knoll on the list (€150.00), which urgently needed to be opened. My relationship with the 1997 Smaragd wines from the Wachau, especially those from excellent wineries, has always been ambivalent. The reason: in their youth, these wines were simply undrinkable: too much botrytis, a noble rot which is primarily responsible for the harvest material of most sweet wines, had made these wines virtually inaccessible for almost 15 years – too fat, too high in alcohol, too monosyllabic in their expression on the nose and palate. Even then, the famous Wachau winemaker Franz Xaver Pichler had word sent to us critics, and to me, that we were all idiots who did not understand how great these wines would be with age. And he was right.
We close the final round in Lech with an outstanding white Bordeaux, the Smith-Haut-Lafie blanc 2017 (€250.00), a cuvée of Sauvignon, Semillion and Pinot Gris. Riedl believes that in the cuvée, the Semilion and Pinot Gris varieties in particular give this wine important distance from the dominance of Sauvignon. And he is right.
In a restaurant in the mountains, I discovered a winery in the mountains that I would not have had on my list: the Garlider winery of the Kerschbaumer family in Feldthurns near Bolzano. Christian Kerschbaumer junior has converted the only 4-hectare winery to organic production and primarily makes a few of the Germans’ favourite varieties in a very distinctive style: cool, elegant, with immense varietal typicity, yet never seeking the applause of the cheap seats. The 2023 Müller-Thurgau (€14.60), otherwise a wine that is always too floral for me, loses a good deal of its often overpowering flavour here and shines with an elegance that disciplines the fruit and brings the mineral salts to the fore. Then there is Garlider’s very own interpretation of Sylvaner (2023 vintage, €16.90) in the glass: Nashi pear, cool green apple, little stone fruit, more quince and also a hint of raspberry. The 2023 Grüner Veltliner (€18.50) leaves the first impression in the glass not to the peppery spiciness, but to the Burgundian power of the variety: an astonishingly weighty wine for a simple Veltliner. There are also “Hautnah” versions of Sylvaner and Veltliner, that is, reserve wines which should first spend a few years in the cellar.
I had actually intended to introduce a young German winemaker on the eastern edge of the Alps, also in the Alpine area near the Geschriebenstein mountain. But I will write about him in a separate column about this very, very distinctive region.