Light, with spring in its step
SPRING is not simply an in-the-air phenomenon, nor is it limited to the meadow or the flower patch -- it happens on the plate as well. As the first vegetables find their way to market -- favas, peas and their pale, graceful tendrils, pungent green garlic, artichoke and asparagus -- the mealtime flavors turn brisk, immediate and alive.
Austrian white wines perfectly capture this vernal moment, none better than Gruner Veltliner. Few wines in the world seem as vivid or as unique as Gruner, and few pair better with the flavors on an April menu. “When it comes to spring vegetables,” says Brian Kalliel, wine director at Melisse in Santa Monica, “Gruner owns the menu.”
“They rise to the occasion with the season,” says Jonathan Waters, who directs the wine program at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. “They’re such pure, beautiful wines.”
Gruner used to be kind of a sommelier’s secret weapon: an exotic, food-friendly, relatively unknown grape variety from an under-explored country that wine people could really geek out on. But gone are the days when sommeliers were the only ones in the know about Gruner.
“People ask for them,” says Benny Bohm, wine director at Ammo in Los Angeles and an Austrian who grew up with Gruner in Vienna. “It’s part of the wine movement now. When people want to go off the beaten track, they drink Gruner.”
Now more importers are bringing more Gruners into the country than ever before, and they’ve become a regular fixture on wine lists and on retail shelves.
Gruner Veltliner is nearly always dry; if a wine possesses any residual sugar, it is more than compensated for in its tone and structure.
In terms of aromas and flavors, young Gruner is frequently stubbornly unusual. Terry Theise, an importer based in Silver Spring, Md., suggests that its aroma is roughly a cross between Viognier and Sauvignon Blanc, an aromatic image that might be useful if it weren’t so peculiar. Aromatic descriptors such as green bean, lentil, scallion, cucumber, arugula and chervil are not unheard of; many people detect a jittery bite of white pepper. I get all that, but for me, Gruner is like smelling a shot of freshly pressed wheat grass. It may not be an exact match, but that immediacy, that pungent, bright-spring chlorophyll smackdown of green, gets at Gruner’s elusive bouquet.
The flavors are no less easy to pin down. Peach, mango, melon, lemon and other citrus all turn up in tasting notes, but fruit is not its lead card. “At the heart of it,” explains Waters, “Gruner has a savory nature. It has fruit, but it’s not really a sweet core.”
Kalliel agrees. “It hints at fruit, but it’s really just insinuating,” he says. “With most wines, what you taste is the fruit, or sweetness. With Gruner, the edge is what you’re tasting; that’s what you focus on.”
Wide-ranging tastes
LIKE Chardonnay, another fairly neutral grape, Gruner has a truly wide range of expression. Unlike Chardonnay, there’s a vivid through-line in nearly every Gruner, one of structure, acidity and minerality. “That minerality is so pervasive and so important with food,” says Ammo’s Bohm. “You can taste the wet stones and the white pepper in the wine; it’s almost like an effervescence, without the bubbles.”
Gruner and Austria are practically synonymous. The variety constitutes more than a third of the country’s total wine output, and for good reason. It seems ideally suited to Austria’s continental, partly Alpine climate, with its harsh winters and fairly hot summers. Gruner is winter-hardy, but it is notoriously late-ripening, which has (until quite recently) made it unsuitable in Germany, to the north. (Austria’s vineyards hover around the 47th parallel, almost due east of Burgundy.)
Gruner Veltliner is grown all over Austria, but the regions best-known for quality, Wachau, Kremstal, Kamptal and Langenlois, are clustered in foothills north of Linz, though lesser regions, like the Weinviertel and Burgenland, still produce some fine, simple wines. Because most of the country rests on the remnants of the geological tumult that produced the Alps, its soils are a muddle, but deposits of schist, slate, mica and loess are found on the better sites, as well as eroded granitic base rock. That mineral soup and the region’s warm days and cool nights combine for whites with a prominent mineral spine.
Chefs, like sommeliers, adore the wine because nearly every Gruner, from the humblest table wine to the loftiest vineyard selection, possesses a luminous purity that shines with food.
This wasn’t always so. When, in his teens, Wolfgang Puck left Austria to hone his cooking skills in France, he didn’t believe his homeland was capable of producing great wine. (That early stint, in Burgundy, may have reinforced this impression.) While he was establishing himself abroad, the wine industry in Austria did what it could to uphold his initial opinion, with high yields (leading to wines with less concentration), a focus on cheap bulk production and a general lack of inspiration.
Then on a visit home in the early ‘90s -- there were no Austrian wines in any of his restaurant wine lists at the time -- Puck drove through the Wachau, one of the country’s premier wine regions, and visited the home of winemaker F.X. Pichler. “He brought out five wines,” says Puck, “without telling me what they were or who they were from, and I tasted them. When he told me they were all Gruner Veltliners from the Wachau, I said, ‘You must be joking. These cannot be Austrian wines.’ I could not believe how beautiful they were.”
Indeed, Austria’s wine industry had been transformed -- partly by decree and partly by near-disaster. In the mid-’80s, a scandal erupted in the Austrian wine market when unscrupulous merchants added diethylene glycol, a chemical additive that was said to contribute body and the perception of sweetness, to a small but highly publicized portion of Austrian wine. Exports plummeted and the industry nearly collapsed.
In response to the crisis, laws were passed that have made Austrian winemaking standards some of the most stringent in the world. Today, Austria’s winemaking and grape-growing practices are known for pristine, artisanal and natural methods; the country has some of the highest percentages of organic and biodynamic producers in the world. The whites in particular are vivid, almost electric in their vibrancy. Along with Austrian Riesling and Weissburgunder, Gruner is a standard-bearer for this extraordinary clarity of expression.
Austrian labels aren’t nearly as bewildering as those in Germany, but they can still be somewhat difficult to interpret. For dry wines, there are three national classifications: Tafelwein (or table wine), Landwein (land wine or wine of the country) and Qualitatswein, which indicates a higher standard of quality than the other two and must show a region. (A fourth, Pradikatswein, refers to wines with a higher sugar content and, usually, some residual sugar.)
The lesser wines are typically mixed with seltzer and ice to make spritze, consumed on summer afternoons in street-side Vienna cafes.
In the U.S., it is rare to see anything less than a Qualitatswein on a wine store shelf. Many wine shops carry an inexpensive Gruner Qualitatswein for about $10 for a liter bottle, often finished with a bottle cap like the tasty Gruner from Weingut H.u.M Hofer. Liter bottles from Loimer, Berger and der Pollerhof are good alternates.
The Wachau region has three supplemental classifications that refer to the must-weight or level of sugar in the unfermented grapes. A Steinfeder (named for a local species of grass) tends to be light, fresh and very low in alcohol. A Federspiel (referring to falconry) is more medium-bodied in intensity. Smaragd-level wines (“smaragd” is the German word for emerald, and refers to a local sun-loving green lizard) are made from grapes harvested at peak ripeness and are the most highly concentrated and full-bodied.
Though Smaragd wines from Wachau represent a pinnacle of expression, sommeliers sometimes prefer a bit more agility. “The Smaragd wines are impressive, but they can be quite big,” Chez Panisse’s Waters says. “I think our spring menu requires a lighter wine to keep from overwhelming the food.”
For pairing with your spring menus, I’d recommend the middle ground: Federspiel and wines like it (remember that you’ll only see the word on wines from the Wachau). Gruners at this level are usually quite affordable -- between $15 and $20 retail, $25 to $40 on restaurant lists -- so I’d encourage you to experiment.
Try them with your most minimal meals: mizuna and chicory greens with avocado, simply prepared spears of asparagus, fresh pasta with peas. They pair well with light white fish, and more full-bodied versions would easily hold up to grilled pork.
If the flavors of these dishes seem exceptionally broad, it’s because Gruner can seem to intersect with food at different points, now bringing out the sweetness of the peas, now mollifying with the pungent edge of asparagus, now punctuating the peppery finish of the arugula salad.
So take Gruner Veltliner wherever the flavors of spring lead you.