2015 Riesling Smaragd Kellerberg

A clear indication of how effective the Domäne Wachau’s recent viticultural regimen has been is that even Grüner Veltliner Federspiel from top sites did not need to be harvested in 2015 until early October, albeit then in considerable haste. With picking for Smaragd having been delayed until the last third of that month, explained cellarmaster Heinz Frischengruber, it became necessary to cull a certain accumulation of botrytis. His crew manifestly mastered that task. The best wines of this impressive collection share delightful freshness, energy and clarity, traits not to be taken for granted in 2015, and this is no doubt in part due to the same restraint in de-leafing, hedging and crop-thinning as well as the retention of ground-cooling cover crops that helped stave off prematurely high must weights. Possibly, too, a wine cooperative, drawing as it does on many small growers even within any given site, gained from lot diversity and blending options in a year when ripeness tended toward extreme homogeneity. The difference in finished alcohol between Federspiel and Smaragd bottlings is unusually narrow here this year, with nearly all of the wines falling between 12.25 and 13.5 percent. But those Federspiel bottlings I tasted (and that was most of them) displayed the levity appropriate to that category. Especially in this vintage, then, the Domäne Wachau offers oenophiles a rare and delightfully delicious (not to mention unusually affordable) opportunity to compare the characteristics conveyed by some of the Wachau’s finest sites without having to do so at Smaragd level. “Now that our improvements in the vineyards are having their effect,” noted Frischengruber, “more sites than ever are meriting single-vineyard bottlings.” He thinks Riesling was advantaged in 2015 by its superior ability to withstand drought and heat – though my own impressions of his collection are ambiguous in that respect – and he emphasizes that the water available for irrigation was at best barely sufficient this year to alleviate outright midsummer shutdown. Delayed bottling continues to be a trend at this address, so most of the single-site Smaragde were still in tank or cask when I last tasted them in June, and weren’t due for bottling until August or September 2016. (For details concerning this cooperative’s vineyards, practices and recent history, readers are invited to consult the extended introduction to my report on its 2013s.)