Austrian wines… Phew! One thing is sure and that is that the pork in cream sauce-noshers like them as heroically proportioned as their lunch servings. Certainly with whites, delicate, subtle grape varieties like Riesling are all too often tied up in piano wire until they obey orders and get up to unfortunate levels of ripeness and therefore final alcohol content. When you serve all too many Austrian wines you feel like you are issuing your compatriots with fearsome battle implements, hewn by deep-dwelling dwarves in order that you all may engage in furious mano e mano combat with your livers.
Then there are the good ones – light elegant beauties that you want to quaff all day in summer. Except you cannot because the Austrians need something to keep them cool whilst working at the weapon forges during the summer and drink them all themselves. Rarely does one escape to charm where all before have bludgeoned. However, The Editor and I are having a deliciously enjoyable Pinot Noir from Austria which was not the alternate fuel for a secret, rocket-propelled weapon of fiendish devilry. Let’s get started!
Pinot Noir Alte Haide 2010, Weingut Schloss Gobelsburg
Yummy, Pinot Noir! And Pinot Noir that’s not been farted around with in way that makes it a crap soulless wine for the utterly dreary international middle class who seem to think that all red wine should be purple in hue, painful in booze content and piss-boring to anyone but that miasma of ill-educated, crass, sartorially-challenged understrappers. The BASTARDS. No, this has pure Pinot fruit that is lithe with bright vigour.
There is sweetness to the fruit on the nose, but it doesn’t come from excessive alcohol. It’s the pure ripe joy of the perfectly-ripe fruit I’m smelling here and ROAR!!!! I love it!! Well-tended grapes, picked at a sensible potential alcohol and vinified in a clean, pragmatic, uncomplicated manner. Yeah, that’s what I like my drinking Pinot Noir to smell like!
The palate has great acidity to match the abundant, juicy fruit and that makes it a lively little number to drink. Indeed, it has much the same acid/ripe fruit balance that the 2010 Burgundies show. This is a good thing!
There has been no excess of new oak used, in fact I cannot detect any at all. This delivers a distinctly sprightly mouthful of fulsome fruit flesh and those totally winsome flavours persist for a long time. A surprisingly long time, to be honest, considering that it’s more dashed delicious than dealing detailed dimensionality.
When you can do totally tasty with such effortless ease, you can decide you’ve done your duty diligently. I’m having a hoot drinking this. Even The Editor has agreed that, despite me opening an Austrian wine, the strap can stay on its hook and if it remains there after our final container is consumed we will all be happy! Hooray!
This wine came from Clark Foyster Wines.
It’s good to see that Austrian reds are finally getting the attention they deserve!
Oh they are definitely ‘in’ at the moment, Roberta. I hate most of them that a lot of the aesthetically challenged rave about. But this one was excellent.
Brilliant photo. x
Richard looks most fearsome armed with a jero of Chablis, doesn’t he Susan?
Fearsome indeed! That clenched jaw!