WTN: 1998 Nigl Senftenberger Piri "Privat" Grüner Veltliner, Kremstal, Osterreich
My students and I talked about older Grüner Veltliner when I poured some 2002 and 2003 bottles from Austria's Kremstal and Kamptal regions, the result of a close-out sale at K & L Wines. I have always assumed that GrüVe, as the in-crowd calls it, does not age well, but the reader for my class includes articles from David Schildknecht and Terry Theise wherein they assert the opposite: "If it's under ten years old, it's young," says Terry. The "old" wines I poured two weeks ago had trace elements of the characteristics I associate with aged whites: a certain mellowness; more complex, hard-to-define aromas; a cohesive quality.
But our in-house storage rack is not ideal—nor even all that good—and I worried that the 1998 Grüner Veltliner I pulled from the curved slots would be far along the road to sherryville. As I extracted the dark green bottle, I muttered to myself that I should have moved it long ago to our cellar. The bottle is from Martin Nigl, one of the best producers in the Kremstal if not all of Austria, and its grapes were grown in the Senftenberger Piri vineyard, a terraced bank of urgestein, the local name for a number of primary soil types such as granite and basalt. The bottle deserves better than the temperature fluctuations in our closet.
So you can imagine my sigh of relief as I sniffed the sunshine-yellow wine and found, not excessive oxidation, but a fascinating blend of funky earth, spice, nuttiness, and that rain-washed-mineral character often described as petrol. Flowers, spices, and minerality flavor the wine and its long finish. This wine convinced me that a good GrüVe can sit in a cellar for a long time, though I still wouldn't recommend a setup like ours, where the rack backs onto a wall whose other side sports a radiator. I can only imagine the complex flavors this wine would develop in a decades-long rest under its cocoon of searing acidity. I enjoyed the wine with takeout Vietnamese food from a nearby favorite.
An amusing side note: When I googled this wine, I found myself.
- Terry Theise In The New York Times
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