2013 Grüner Veltliner Spiegel

For the first time in many years, I visited this fairly well-known address last June to taste through a substantial array of wines, sourced from 30 hectares of their own vines plus contract fruit, and widely available in the U.S. Red wines—in which Bauer and his father (their family’s third- and fourth-generation vintners) have a keen interest—extend to such exotics for the Wagram as Blaufränkisch and Syrah, though I found most of the offerings I sampled candied and caramelized in fruit character, bitterly extracted, oxidatively stressed and awkwardly woody. The ostensible top-end Bauer whites are typically not bottled until August or September, and in several such instances I tasted the 2013s but not the 2014s. These Bauers (there are numerous wine-growing families of that name in the area) are among the few Austrian growers to have installed huge, high nets to protect their crop from hail, so they will enjoy a fairly normal 2015 vintage while many of their neighbors will have next to nothing to harvest, and then only from second growth. Of course, such nets influence the immediate microclimate, but Bauer insists that the drawback of moisture retention is only significant in rainy years like 2014, since the Wagram characteristically experiences some of the lowest precipitation in Austria.