This tasting will be a lot of fun—potentially eye-opening—and full of new and interesting reds and whites, but first:
"A wine geek moment"
Current issue of the Wine Spectator…
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Top Wine – "Highly Recommended" – Spectator Selections:
Prager Riesling Smaragd Trocken Wachau Achleiten 2008 – 97 points
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(That's the name of a wine?…We promise, come to this event and we'll make instant sense of that label for you. The 2008 has not arrived in the U.S., but we'll be pouring the 2007.)
Flip over a couple of pages to the Austrian wine reviews:
12 Austrian Gruner Veltliners at 90+ points (Top 5 wines from Prager and Rudi Pichler)
17 Austrian Rieslings at 90+ points (led by 11 wines from the same Prager and Rudi Pichler)
If this was equally highly rated California "cult" Chardonnay or "vintage of the decade" White Burgundy, there'd be fist fists in the street over six packs. But we're talking riesling and gruner veltliner from Austria. (What? From where?). Hip sommeliers in New York caught the Gruner Veltliner bug a couple years ago, but leave it to the Brits to have figured it out first. They've been skiing in Austria all along, and a bunch of Masters of Wine have conducted multiple blind tastings in the UK (still only a couple hundred of those MW's in the world—most of them British—including Jancis Robinson, one of the world's most renowned wine writers who organized one of these tastings) where the results looked something like this:
Austria – top 4 slots (of 35 wines) and 7 of the top 10
California Cult Chards (Kistler single vineyard, Kongsgaard, etc) – 2 of the top 10 slots
Grand Cru and Premier Cru White Burgundy (Le Montrachet, Leflaive, etc) – highest slot #18
Hey, take a shot (and no need to study for 10 years to pass all those MW tests). We're going to put up a top Gruner Veltliner against an esteemed California Chard and a Puligny-Montrachet—in brown bags—and let you decide for yourself. No matter what the results, some great wines to try!
(Oh, yes, we'll also have that Prager Riesling along for the ride—just not in a brown bag. Also a selection from the aforementioned Rudi Pichler, and some "everyday" Austrian whites and reds that pair with everything.)
