Austria’s 2015 Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners: Ripe and Ready

BY DAVID SCHILDKNECHT | FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Two thousand-fifteen, a stress-free vintage for growers, overflows with generous, lovely wines that belie mid-summer drought and record-setting heat.

A Bit of Perspective

The 2014 and 2015 growing seasons in Lower Austria’s Riesling and Grüner Veltliner growing sectors offer an irresistible opportunity to hold forth on the subject of vintage assessments. In 2014, Nature threw the book at growers, meteorologically speaking: ripeness was challenged by inopportune chill and record-setting rains that led to the agonizingly frustrating, labor-intensive harvest of a crop too small for its sale to even cover their costs. No wonder growers were still grimacing months later when asked to relate their experiences, by which time the popular press, and even too many of those who are professionally tasked with assessing new wines, had already pronounced the vintage a disaster. In 2015, on the other hand, everything fell into place. Following ample winter and spring precipitation, predominantly warm, dry weather promoted early sugar accumulation in an abundant crop that could be harvested largely at leisure. Small wonder, then, that growers could scarcely wipe the smiles from their faces and the press corps crowed about a Great Vintage.  

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, nothing has yet been said about how the wines actually taste! This summer, Ilse Maier of the Geyerhof told me something I’d never heard from a grower but that couldn’t have been better-timed: “I keep a poker face and never volunteer my impressions of a vintage until the journalist or customer has first tasted the young wines. He or she probably has enough preconceptions already. I’m not about to add to them; and if they need to be corrected, I can only hope that the wines will accomplish this.”

I commenced my summer foray into Austria by visiting Hannes Hirsch, who turns out to have rendered some of the most exciting wines of 2015. At his invitation—not that I wouldn’t have asked—he opened full sets of 2013s and 2014s alongside. “If you had told me even a few months ago that any 2014 could have held its own in this company,” Hirsch exclaimed, “I’d have said ‘no way’!” Yet there they were: bright and shiny, rivetingly complex, although, to be sure, in an entirely different key from the 2015s and 2013s. I had to remind Hirsch that this outstanding performance by 2014 had in fact been my own prediction.

So before we both embark on my detailed survey of vintage 2015, dear reader, permit me to make two recommendations up-front. If I had to deprive myself of one vintage among these three, 2015 would be my pick. It is an excellent vintage with an abundance of lovely, lush, ripely fruity wines, many of which are far from lacking in animation and complexity, and a few of which are sensational. But 2015 doesn’t rival the consistent excitement of 2013. Meanwhile, unloved as it was in Austria thanks to horror-mongering early press, 2014 is that rare vintage from which, despite low yields, many of the most successful growers—not to mention many merchants—had wine left unsold more than a year after the harvest. So it’s not too late for those who have yet to discover the unique virtues of the best 2014 Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners from Lower Austria. What’s more, most of the hundred or so that I retasted this past summer and early autumn proved even more exciting than when tasted a year earlier.

Stein vineyards; from left to right, the Steiner Hund, Grillenparz and Goldberg, and in the distant right the vineyards of Braunsdorf, all coming in for renewed recognition thanks to new talents emerging in the Krems area.

A “Perfect” Growing Season and Its Wines