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Herbert Zillinger

Young Herbert and Carmen Zillinger organically farm loess and sand sites just west of the March River, which forms Austria’s border with Slovakia. Their spacious, modern Ebenthal facility doubles as a hotel. Beyond the fancy packaging and colorful names of their wines lies an experimental spirit coupled with serious attention to viticultural detail. Typically for the Weinviertel, more than half of their acreage is devoted to Grüner Veltliner and that percentage is on the rise. But a lot of care and creativity clearly goes into their bottlings from other grape varieties. Herbert Zillinger aims to achieve ripe flavors and palpable density while harvesting at modest levels of potential alcohol. Must oxidation is routine, fermentation spontaneous, and lees contact maximized as much as spring and late summer release dates permit. To a significant extent, the wines are bottled with low levels of sulfur and without either fining or filtration, in which case analytical dryness and completed malolactic transformation are presupposed. Herbert Zillinger explains that he used large casks a bit more extensively for vintage 2014 due to its high acidity, and also because low total volume left him with cask capacity to spare. In a riper, broader, lower-acid vintage, he will tend to favor higher percentages of stainless steel in the belief that this will firm up the wines. Apropos of high-acid 2014, Zillinger opines that “like 2010, it is one of the most difficult but ultimately loveliest vintages of the ten we've thus far experienced.” On my first visit here in June 2015, the site-specific 2014s had not yet been bottled and the Zillingers preferred to defer showing them. Unfortunately, I did not have a chance to catch up on those during my brief September stay in Austria, but you may be sure that I’ll ask to taste them when I revisit to report on vintage 2015.

The Zillingers divide their offerings into several categories, some of whose names are the most prominent inscriptions (other than a huge “Z”) on a given label, and which I have incorporated into my descriptions below as if they were nicknames. Vineyard names are the most prominent inscriptions on their site-specific bottlings, but I have followed the usual convention of mentioning the relevant grape variety first. While a couple of Zillinger Zweigelt bottlings I tasted were hampered by raspy tannins and brett, there is a delightful, bone-dry but low-alcohol sparkling wine called Indiskret Rosé from a parcel of the same grape variety grown expressly for that purpose. I have not published a more detailed note on this bubbly due to lack of vintage dating or lot identification to distinguish one bottling from another of a wine that Zillingers are transitioning from red fruit-domination to more interesting if less ripe flavors of citrus fruit, celery and radish.

From Austria 2014: A Catastrophe? Not Qualitatively! (Feb 2016) by David Schildknecht

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2014 Welschriesling Neuland

Color: White

2014 Welschriesling Neuland

2014 Grüner Veltliner Neuland

2014 Grüner Veltliner Horizont

2013 Grüner Veltliner Vogelsang

2013 Grüner Veltliner Weintalried

2013 Grüner Veltliner Radikal

2010 Grüner Veltliner Radikal

2014 Chardonnay Horizont

2014 Sauvignon Blanc Vogelsang

2013 Traminer Profound

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