WINE : Magical Wines From a Forgotten Valley

“This is my best wine of the ’92 vintage, and it’s called M, which stands for Monumental,” Austrian vintner Franz Xavier Pichler told me. There was no doubt about the man’s earnestness.

“I wanted to erect a monument to the Riesling grape,” continued Pichler, a winemaker from Loiben, in the Wachau, one of the Danube regions of Austria.

This sort of talk could have been the ultimate in winemaker arrogance, but what he poured in my glass exploded with the flavors of peaches, passion fruit and minerals; it was indeed one of the best dry white wines I had ever tasted. It combined the bouquet and elegance of the great German Rieslings with the power and weight of the finest examples from Alsace. It was a wine as unique as a great Montrachet.

Until a very few years ago, nobody outside the German-speaking world was aware of the extraordinary dry Rieslings produced in the Wachau. This idyllic 23-mile stretch of the Danube Valley between the towns of Krems and Melk, where the river flows between steep forested and vine-clothed hillsides, is one of the most beautiful winegrowing regions in the world. Each year it is visited by thousands of tourists from around the globe. In spite of this, most visitors to Austria come back with a stronger impression of the country’s great coffeehouse culture than of its wines.

One reason for the world’s ignorance of the region is a wine scandal that scared off importers and journalists 11 years ago.

When diethylene glycol, a harmless but illegal additive, was found in a small number of Austrian wines in 1985, exports of Austrian wines collapsed and several of the large companies involved went bust. So Austrian consumers turned to the small family-run estates and thereby encouraged a new generation of winemakers.

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Wine importers and journalists weren’t around to see the resulting changes in the Wachau. During the last decade, the Austrian wine industry has turned upside-down, and some extremely talented winemakers have become media personalities in their own country. Although their wines are limited in quantity, almost all of them are represented in the U.S. market.

It is the landscape that both makes these wines unique and limits their production. The combination of stony soils and the special climate of the Danube Valley enables the Riesling grape to reach very high levels of ripeness without losing acidity. The ripeness translates into richness, which the acidity balances perfectly, making for dry wines that remain delicate despite an alcohol level of 13% or more.

German dry Rieslings rarely achieve as much body as the Wachau Rieslings do, while Alsatian Rieslings with as much alcohol seldom taste as elegant. As for Californian Rieslings, few of them are vinified bone-dry, and those that are generally lack freshness and subtlety.

The distance from Krems and Spitz, where most of the vines are concentrated, is a bit less than 10 miles. There are virtually no vines on the right (north-facing) bank of the Danube because it gets too little sun. Instead there are orchards.

The best vineyards of the Wachau are planted on narrow terraces that tower over the Danube. There is no way of expanding the meager 3,578-acre vineyard area of the valley.

Fortunately, Riesling also grows in the neighboring Kremstal and Kamptal regions, parts of which enjoy similar conditions to the Wachau. For example, young Martin Nigl of Senftenberg in the Kremstal makes archetypal Austrian Rieslings, intense yet dry and sleek, from the Mochacker and Kremsleiten vineyards, proving that wines comparable to the best in the Wachau are possible outside its borders.

Great wines like Nigl’s do not make themselves, though, and the international recognition they are beginning to gain is the result of the hard work and dedication of the leading vintners. Pichler--called simply F.X. by his countrymen--personifies these qualities. He is legendary for his obsession with wine quality--and for not suffering fools gladly.

During the harvest he is a bear, happy only when he is able to outdo all his previous achievements. His new tasting room, with its inlaid Italian marble floor, is ideally suited to impressing wealthy Viennese. If Pichler doesn’t like the look of a potential customer, however, he suddenly becomes ausverkauft (sold out), and the customer goes home empty-handed. His Rieslings from the Kellerberg and Steinertal vineyards are worth any amount of trouble to obtain; they are so tremendously concentrated they taste not like wine but like an essence of wine.

Pichler’s close neighbor, Emmerich Knoll of Loiben, could not be more different, nor could his wines. Often mistaken as shy and reserved, Knoll is a deep thinker with as profound an understanding of human nature as of the growth of vines and the development of grapes. Like their maker, his wines need time to be appreciated fully.

No wines could better demonstrate what wine critics mean when they use the word “complex” than Knoll’s Rieslings. As they age, they develop ever more facets of fruit, floral and spice character. They are also extremely long-lived; the 1977 and 1979 vintages still taste vigorous, with many years of life ahead of them.

Knoll describes Toni Bodenstein, winemaker at the Franz Prager estate, as “living one-third in the past, one-third in the present and one-third in the future.” The ex-army officer is a wine visionary and passionate amateur historian. Bodenstein is completing work on a book about the history of the Wachau in the scant spare time that wine and three extremely active children leave him. His dry Rieslings are packed with peachy fruit and have a crystalline clarity, at once immediately appealing and sophisticated.

Bodenstein’s revolutionary work lies in the dessert wine field, the main theme of fine German winemaking but hitherto almost completely ignored by Wachau vintners. In 1993, he harvested the region’s first Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese, or TBA. Trockenbeerenauslese is the highest legal designation for Austrian and German dessert wines made from grapes affected by Botrytis cinerea, the fungus known as the “noble rot.”

The ecstatic reception of this luscious wine in the Austrian press led many of Bodenstein’s colleagues to follow his example. Now small quantities of dessert wines have been added to the Wachau’s traditional range of dry wines.

The leading vintner of Spitz, the farthest point upstream that quality wines can be made, is Franz Hirtzberger. He is president of the region’s winegrowers’ association, the Vinea Wachau, a job that makes full use of both his boyish enthusiasm and his gift for diplomacy.

A decade ago the Vinea Wachau introduced its own classification of the region’s dry wines to safeguard their identity. The lightest, with no more than 10.7% alcohol, is called Steinfeder, after a feather-like grass that grows in the vineyards. Medium-bodied wines with between 10.7% and 12% alcohol are called Federspiel, a term that comes from falconry.

But it is the Smaragd wines, with more than 12% alcohol, that are most sought after. This name (“emerald”) comes from the emerald-green lizards that sun themselves on the dry stone walls of the terraced vineyards. Chaptalization (the practice of adding sugar to the fermenting wine to increase its alcoholic content) is strictly forbidden.

Hirtzberger’s Riesling Smaragds from the Singerriedel vineyard of Spitz are some of the most difficult Wachau wines to obtain. Like Pichler’s Kellerberg and M, they are the object of a cult in Austria. Extremely late harvesting, in early to mid-November, gives them a lavish aroma and flavor of exotic fruits interwoven with floral and spice notes. Despite an alcohol content of 13% to 14%, they are perfectly proportioned and extremely refined. The law of supply and demand dictates a $50 price tag for this wine in the U.S.--if you can find it.

Willi Brundlmayer of Langenlois in the Kamptal region is in the lucky position of having more wine to sell than most of Austria’s top Riesling producers. At once dynamic and gentle, Brundlmayer has built a winery that looks as if it has been beamed down from California.

Here he makes everything from one of Austria’s few serious Pinot Noirs to barrel-fermented Chardonnay and excellent Champagne-method sparkling wine. His best wines are the Alte Rebe (“old vines”) bottlings of Riesling from the great Heiligenstein vineyard, which marry power with great elegance. French dry white wines of comparable quality cost several times the $27 these wines retail for in the U.S.

The Wachau’s excellent co-operative winery, the Freie Weingartner, or free vintners of the Wachau, has still more modest prices. Its winemaker, 27-year-old Fritz Miesbauer, has just been declared winemaker of the year by the Swedish magazine Gourmet. (Previous winners include Angelo Gaja of Barbaresco in Italy, Miguel Torres of Penedes, Spain, and Andre Lurton of Pessac-Leognan, France.) With 1,500 acres of vineyards to work, Miesbauer is able to produce good quantities of classic Wachau wines. They offer the possibility that soon the region’s wines will be widely available in the U.S., conclusively ending the Wachau’s long isolation.

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SOURCES

Wines from the Wachau in Austria aren’t widely available in Southern California yet. What follows are a few local sources, including restaurants, that have caught on to the Wachau wave a bit sooner than retail outlets.

All prices are per prices.

Retail Shops

* Wine House, 2311 Cotner Ave., Los Angeles; (310) 479-3731.

‘93 Brundlmayer Gruner Veltliner “Ried Lamm,” $17.99.

‘93 Brundlmayer Riesling “Zohinger Heiligenstein,” $19.99.

‘93 Hirtzberger Gruner Veltliner Federspiel “Rotes Tor,” $17.99.

‘93 Hirtzberger Gruner Veltliner Smaragd “Honivogel,” $32.99.

Pichler, Knoll and Heidi Schrock wines should be available at the store soon.

* Schlossadler International Wines, 12842 Valley View, No. 106, Garden Grove; (800) 371-9463.

‘93 Freie Weingartner Gruner Veltliner “Ried Vorderseider” $12.45. (Sold only by case)

Restaurants

* Campanile, 624 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles; (213) 938-1447.

‘93 Brundlmayer Riesling Kabinett “Klassifizierte Lage,” $24.

‘93 Knoll Gruner Veltliner Smaragd “Ried Loibenberg,” $42.

‘94 Nigl Gruner Veltliner “Kremser Freiheit,” $24.

‘92 Nigl Riesling-Privat “Senftenberger Ried Hochacker,” $42.

‘93 Pichler Gruner Veltliner Smaragd “Kellerberg,” $40.

‘91 Prager Riesling Smaragd “Ried Steinriegl,” $38.

‘93 Salomon Riesling Kabinett “Steiner Hund,” $25.

* Spago, 1114 Horn Ave., West Hollywood; (310) 652-4025.

‘93 Hirtzberger Gruner Veltliner “Spitzer,” $58.

‘93 Pichler Gruner Veltliner “Loibner Berg,” $30.

‘93 Prager Riesling Federspiel “Ried Steinriegl,” $42.

‘93 Prager Riesling Smaragd “Ried Steinriegl,” $56.