2014 Riesling Smaragd Hochrain

Franz Hirtzberger Junior and the family team fielded a nearly complete range of bottlings from 2014 (albeit sans Neuburger, which was a complete loss), but he hastens to note that this is deceptive, seeing as the total volume of Smaragd is a mere 20% of what has become the estate norm over the past two decades! “Believe me,” notes the younger Hirtzberger, echoing the comments of many other growers, “during the harvest it wasn’t clear that we were going to be able to achieve anything remotely like the quality with which we ended up, let alone in the Smaragd category. The raw materials we harvested didn’t look like any pictures you would see in a textbook on cellar technique.” The bulk of harvest did not take place until late October and November, the Hirtzbergers finding themselves in the nowadays rare predicament of liking the flavors that had developed before then, but hoping that through dehydration and benign botrytis influence the must weights would climb higher. In the end, selectivity had to be so extreme that a typical harvest rate of two or three hundred kilos an hour slowed to fewer than a dozen. According to Hirtzberger Junior, Grüner Veltliner was no less demanding of selectivity than Riesling, and in fact I was amazed to find the former overshadowed in this collection by each of the estate’s other cépages. On account of botrytis, what little Smaragd got vinified involved shorter skin contact than was employed on the other Hirtzberger 2014s, even including their Steinfeder. Lesser lots of Riesling were subjected to calcium carbonate deacidification as must.