2015 Riesling Steinhaus

The Steiningers, with their many grape varieties and special focus on sparkling wines, began picking in mid-September 2015. But serious harvest of Grüner Veltliner and Riesling didn’t commence until the beginning of October. “Ordinarily we pick into mid-November,” related Eva Steininger, “but this year we were finished at the beginning of that month.” Across the board, an approach was adopted that has otherwise only occasionally been employed chez Steininger, namely to arrest the primary fermentation on their Sekt base wines so that the secondary fermentation could rely largely on residual sugar rather than dosage, thus keeping finished alcohol close to the estate norm. There is a certain irony here, in that Karl Steininger was the Kamptal’s sparkling wine pioneer as well as a prime mover behind the recently established legal hierarchy of Austrian sparkling wine that includes a “Grosse Reserve” category designed to showcase individual villages or vineyards, yet his typically 13-13.5 percent alcohol sparklers come in for criticism from some of his Sekt-bottling neighbors as “too heavy for the genre.” But as Karl Steininger emphasized, “we elected to go our own way with Sekt,” and I don’t anticipate the resultant style changing significantly. As it happens, finished alcohol levels in the non-sparkling Steininger 2015s are lower than in several recent vintages, and while the wines are slightly less focused and animated than their 2014 and 2013 counterparts, they are luscious, enveloping and ripely flavored almost to the point of luxuriance. High hopes that 2014 would prove especially amenable to champagnization were slightly dampened by my early tastings of recently disgorged Steininger Sekt. A Grüner Veltliner that I tasted in June 2016 was disappointingly simple and vegetal, while the corresponding sparkling Riesling was downright grassy. (For details concerning this estate’s vineyards, practices and recent history, readers are invited to consult the extended introduction to my reports on its 2013s and 2014s.)