2013: A Great Vintage for Austrian Riesling and Grüner Veltliner

Despite a growing season marked by a dry summer that was statistically among the five hottest of the last century, Austria’s 2013 Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners display exceptionally bright acidity, clear flavor definition and uncanny complexity. To understand how this result was possible in a hot year requires going all the way back to December of 2012, when a cold, long winter was ushered in, something that nearly always pays dividends by ensuring deep, restful vine dormancy and killing off spores and larvae of eventual vineyard pests. There was also, for a change, more than ample snowfall to guarantee a high water table heading into spring.

The 2013 Growing Season

Early April retained a chill and May remained cool, with regular rainfall further building up ground reserves. The vines blossomed nearly a month later than they had in 2012, and under exceptional circumstances. Flooding along the Danube—ultimately nearly as high and destructive as that of 2002—made international headlines, after having arrived with surprisingly little advance notice. The same could be said of a sudden heat wave that engulfed all of Lower Austria’s growing regions in mid-June, resulting in an especially poor set of Grüner Veltliner (and accompanied in parts of the Kamptal by damaging hail). Riesling came away with a desirable and far less extreme degree of millerandage, setting the stage for loose clusters and tiny berries.

Hot, dry conditions gripped most of eastern Austria through August. But in the second week of September, by which time discussion of early picking was on growers’ lips, rain and cool weather returned, delaying the harvest for most growers until the normal window of October and early November while preserving acidity and promoting aromatics. Grapes in rude good health at summer’s end, especially where more water-retentive soils or irrigation had staved off drought stress, only reluctantly gave whatever fungal spores were out there much chance to spread, since heat had probably killed off most of them; and the extended rain was accompanied by temperatures that were mostly inhospitably cool for botrytis.  

F. X. Pichler harvesting his Klostersatz Grüner Veltliner

The 2013 Harvest