2016 Grüner Veltliner Rosenberg

“2016 was a very challenging vintage,” reports Bernhard Ott, who expressed a strong conviction that even just a few years ago neither his biodynamic regimen nor his technical cellar capacity had reached the level where he could have made such a success of a growing season like this. (Bear in mind that Ott shocked most knowledgeable observers when he elected not to bottle even a single site-specific wine from vintage 2014.) Picking began already in mid-September and was completed on October 26. “I believe we harvested the single vineyard wines on the 11th and 15th-17th of October,” reports Ott, “in other words: not all that late.” (Spoiler alert: I tasted 2018 Spiegel with just one gram of residual sugar remaining on September 11, 2018. Yes, you read that correctly. One cask of 2018 Spiegel was racked into tank on September 10, 2018! But I digress ;- ) The vintage 2016 fruit was given 4-24 hours of skin contact including stems, and with additional presses now in operation, it doesn’t matter if the numerous lots that have accumulated from a day’s picking need to be processed all at once. “My 2016s are more accessible younger than those of some other recent vintages but,” Ott predicts, “are going to be much longer-lived, especially given their low alcohol” – none reached 13% – “which I really like.”

Ironically, during my September, 2017 trip, I went immediately from tasting the two latest inspiring skin-fermented “Irden” Roter Veltliner of Toni Söllner to hearing his neighbor Ott relate – to my extreme disappointment – that he would likely discontinue skin-fermentation of Grüner Veltliner in buried Qvevre. “I wasn’t convinced that half a year on the skins was ideal for the fruit from 2016,” Ott averred. “And in general I’ve been very hesitant in communicating [about the Qvevre project] because we had a real problem with getting put into the ‘natural wine’ pigeonhole [in diese ‘Natural’ Eck gestellt zu werden] which was depriving our single-vineyard wines of attention. So I probably won’t export the 2015 Qvevre. I’m keeping communication about it to an absolute minimum and it will probably be sold only directly, to people who can understand it in context or can communicate that context to their customers.” Rest assured, dear readers, for my part I do not intend to give up without continued agitation for this wine’s return! (Meantime, you can read my note on the 2015 Qvevre below. For a great deal of detail concerning this estate, its vineyards, practices and recent history, readers are invited to consult the introductions to my reports focused on its 2013s and 2015s.)