Turn Up the Heat! 2017 Danube Whites Are Exciting Despite Some Overblown Gruner Veltliners
There’s a lot of talk about the effect of global warming on wine, but seldom have we encountered such a dramatic example as the 2017 vintage in the regions along the Austrian Danube. Even an untrained taster should have no difficulty spotting the difference between the same dry white gruner veltliner from the cool 2016 vintage and the much warmer 2017 vintage. The 2016 wines almost always taste much more acidic and less alcoholic than the 2017s, and in many cases, the difference between the two vintages is stark.
I use gruner veltliner as an example not only because it is the signature grape of Austria, but also because it was particularly affected by the unusually hot and dry summer of 2017. Alcohol levels surged due to the high ripeness of the grapes, high-end bottlings often reaching 14% alcohol and occasionally 15%. Taste these rich, opulent wines, and you could wonder how these regions are still regarded as cool climate!
We enjoyed the view from Rudi Pichler’s tasting room in Wosendorf, Wachau. The JamesSuckling.com team spent two weeks tasting the latest releases from Austria.
The most successful expressions this year of the variety include the graceful and subtle Bernhard Ott Grüner Veltliner Wagram Rosenberg EL 2017 from the Wagram, rated 97 points, and the 2017 Nigl Grüner Veltliner Kremstal Pellingen EL Privat 2017 from the Kremstal, rated 96 points. It’s wines such as these that have enough freshness to carry the extravagance of the vintage, while many others taste rather overripe and heavy, with some being seriously overblown. Stick to the wines we have rated highly, and you will get a crisp and aromatic gruner veltliner that’s food friendly — just what drove a global revival of interest in Austrian dry whites not too long ago.
What makes the impact of climate change on wine production in the Danube so dramatic is the fact that 2015 and 2018 were similarly warm vintages to 2017. That means three of the last five vintages there were unusually warm! We suggest that the frequency of overripeness issues raises fundamental questions about the future of gruner veltliner in these regions, which account for more than half of the world’s acreage of this grape.
The question is whether changes in cultivation methods can adequately compensate for the warming of the growing season, or if certain hillside sites with southerly exposures are slowly becoming too warm for gruner veltliner. Regardless, this development looks certain to give new impulse to the plantings of other grape varieties, most notably riesling. Plantings of this grape in Austria have almost doubled since 1990, reaching 2,015 hectares in 2015. Meanwhile, the area planted with gruner veltliner fell significantly to 14,376 hectares during the same period as the Austrian wine industry shifted its goal from quantity to quality.
Our tastings of more than 500 of the 2017 wines from the Danube regions revealed a striking contrast between the way gruner veltliner and riesling performed. The 2017 dry riesling wines from the Danube taste ripe but not overripe unlike many of the gruner veltliners. While generous, they offer the crisp and lively taste profile we expect from them. The words “mineral” and “minerality” appear far more frequently in our tasting notes for the 2017 rieslings than for the gruner veltliners. Indeed, 2017 is a great vintage for Austrian dry riesling!
These riesling grapes in Langenlois, Kamptal, from a vineyard belonging to the Hiedler winery, were photographed on September 6, 2018. The last two vintages, 2018 and 2017, are the earliest on record in Austria.
Conversations with a string of leading growers revealed there was a good reason for the huge difference between the two grapes. “Normally, riesling has one gram per liter more acidity than gruner veltliner,” explains Emmerich Knoll Sr. of the Emmerich Knoll winery. “That means if riesling is picked with around seven grams per liter acidity, then gruner veltliner will have about six grams of acidity. However, in 2017, the difference in acidity between them was double the norm. We were very surprised by how fresh the 2017 rieslings tasted after the hot and dry summer.”
This not only applied to the dry ones, which make up the great majority of Austria’s wine production for this grape variety, but also to the rare sweet wines. Emmerich Knoll’s luscious yet dazzling vibrant and seamless Riesling Wachau Loibner Beerenauslese 2017 was one of two wines rated 100 points. This is not quite as surprising as it might look at first glance. Already back in 1983, Emmerich Knoll produced a string of excellent dessert wines. The other 100-point rating was for the astonishingly concentrated, yet perfectly balanced dry F.X. Pichler Riesling Wachau Unendlich Smaragd 2017 (“endless riesling”).
The explanation for the contrast between these two grapes this year, from which most of the wines in this report are made, seems to be the way it cooled off dramatically after heavy rain during the night of August 15-16 in 2017. The complete final maturation phase for the late-ripening riesling grape occurred entirely under those cool conditions. Conversely, by this point the development of the earlier-ripening gruner veltliner grapes was already well advanced and their acidity content had already dropped a long way.
Learning from these experiences is a matter of urgency for wine producers along the Danube and its tributaries, because 2018 is turning out to be at least as extreme a vintage as 2017 was. On September 5, Hannes Hirsch of the Hirsch winery in the Kamptal was upbeat in his explaination of the situation: “We’ve already been picking gruner veltliner for five days, and I’m so glad we started at the end of August. The juice tasted great and we’ll pick the rest of the gruner veltliner as fast as possible, then move straight on to riesling.”
Or, as Alwin Jurtschitsch of the Jurtschitsch winery in the same region put it, “We have to forget our tradition of harvesting in November!” The 2017 wines from these two producers were models of balance and freshness. They prove that it can be made to work. — Stuart Pigott, Contributing Editor