(Manfred Klimek / WELT am SONNTAG)
I am Austrian. I am a Viennese. And I am the only Viennese and Austrian who cannot ski. Nor have I ever wanted to learn. In the age-old debate between mountains and the sea, I’m a man of the sea. That’s why I’m rarely in the Alps. This time, after years, I found myself back on the hilltops and amongst the rocky massifs – to drink wine. In the second part of the ‘Wine in the Alps’ series, we return briefly to where we left off in the last column: the new wine bar at the Hotel Sandhof, a place that can only delight wine enthusiasts. Clemens Riedl, founder of the wine merchant Trinkreif (specialising in matured wines), is partly responsible for the wine list here and has a few tips on which wines, priced between 50 and 250 euros, he would choose to drink here.
We’ll start with a red wine from Rosi and Hannes Schuster in Rust, Burgenland, vintage 2024 (€52.00 at the bar), a remarkably smooth cuvée of Blaufränkisch, St. Laurent and Zweigelt. Plenty of cherry, a hint of cassis and quite a few exotic herbs. Fragrant, elegant and wonderfully medium-bodied. The second wine is a sought-after white: 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.” That’s true. What’s also reliable here is that classic Chablis style, which had been lost for decades due to absurd mass production.
Also striking on the wine list is the very reasonably priced Trebbiano Abruzzo from Amarotti (€68.00) – but I was craving an older white wine. And Riedl has a 1997 Riesling Kellerberg Smaragd from the Knoll winery in the Wachau on the wine list (€150.00), which was in desperate need of a bottle opening. My relationship with the 1997 Smaragd wines from the Wachau, particularly those from outstanding estates, has always been ambivalent. The reason: in their youth, these wines were simply undrinkable: too much botrytis – a noble rot primarily responsible for the harvest of most sweet wines – had rendered these wines virtually inaccessible for almost 15 years – too heavy, too high in alcohol, too one-dimensional on the nose and palate. Even back then, the famous Wachau winemaker Franz Xaver Pichler had it conveyed to us critics – and to me personally – that we were all fools who failed to grasp just how great these wines would become with age. And he was right.
We round off our final session in Lech with an outstanding white Bordeaux, the Smith-Haut-Lafie blanc 2017 (€250.00), a cuvée of Sauvignon, Sémillon and Pinot Gris. Riedl believes that, within this cuvée, the Sémillon and Pinot Gris varieties in particular provide a significant counterbalance to the dominance of the Sauvignon. And he’s right.
In a restaurant in the mountains, I discovered a winery that I wouldn’t otherwise have included on my list: the Garlider winery, run by the Kerschbaumer family in Feldthurns near Bolzano. Christian Kerschbaumer Jr. has converted the vineyard – which covers just 4 hectares – to organic farming and mainly produces a few of the Germans’ favourite varieties with a style all of its own: cool, elegant, with immense varietal character, yet never seeking the applause of the cheap seats. The 2023 Müller-Thurgau (€14.60), a wine that I usually find far too floral, loses much of its often overpowering flavour here and shines with an elegance that reins in the fruit and brings the mineral salts to the fore. Then there is Garlider’s very own interpretation of Silvaner (2023 vintage, €16.90) in the glass: Nashi pear, crisp green apple, a hint of stone fruit, more quince and even a touch of raspberry. The 2023 Grüner Veltliner (€18.50) does not let the peppery, spicy notes make the first impression in the glass, but rather the Burgundian power of the variety: for a simple Veltliner, it is a surprisingly substantial wine. There are also ‘Hautnah’ versions of the Sylvaner and Veltliner – in other words, reserve wines – but these need to be left in the cellar for a few years first.
I had actually intended to introduce a young German winemaker on the eastern edge of the Alps, who also works in the alpine region near the Geschriebenstein mountain. But I’ll write about him in a separate column dedicated to this very, very distinctive region.