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Weingut Prager

“We had a terrible situation, so I had to make sacrifices,” says Toni Bodenstein of 2014. He elected to harvest all of his Steinriegl Riesling as Federspiel and incorporate into that bottling what little fruit could be salvaged from the Hollerin (whose esca-ravaged vines will be replaced in 2016). There was also a minuscule quantity of Riesling Kaiserberg as Federspiel, but I couldn’t locate a bottle even at the estate. Any Grüner Veltliner from sites other than Achleiten ended up in this year’s Federspiel Hinter der Burg. “If we were going to have a harvest at all, then at least we were going to make sure the grapes achieved physiological ripeness and the malic acid had time to dissipate, which was only possible at an enormous cost in yield. And if you were really rigorously selective in what you harvested,” Bodenstein continues, “then you could allow your fruit 10 or 15 hours of skin contact to ameliorate the high acidity. What’s more, I let the wines sit on their fine lees right up until just a few days before bottling, which we accomplished on a single day in early May—that’s how little wine there was in total. In a vintage where Smaragd approaches 14% alcohol, you couldn’t permit such long lees contact because you’d have way too much breadth and heaviness.” Bodenstein also places importance on the unprecedentedly high levels of dry extract (in the mid-to-upper 30s promil) that help knit together his young 2014s, further buffer their acids, and, he believes, might well contribute to a stability and longevity in bottle that few growers or other observers of the vintage are currently anticipating. “Leave the bottles open for a few days,” he challenges, “and you’ll find that these wines are anything but oxidation-prone.” Finished alcohol levels are around one percent lower in most cases than in a typical Prager collection of the past two decades but, as Bodenstein observes, “they’re very much like what we were used to in the early 1990s.”

In an exciting development, Bodenstein has taken over 30 acres of Grüner Veltliner in Zwerithaler that were originally planted by Stift Melk in 1907-14, the first vines in the region to have been grafted onto American rootstock in the wake of phylloxera. The tiny green-golden berries hanging there in September 2015 looked more like Riesling, and are likely, as have the vines that inform Bodenstein’s Achleiten Stockkultur, to offer genetic as well as organoleptic revelations.

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

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2014 Grüner Veltliner Federspiel Hinter der Burg

Release Price: $38

Color: White

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