Aggressive Austrian

I had a wonderful friend from Austria when I was at Oxford, Gernot; it’s a shame we lost contact when he moved back to Austria. Getting to the point, he was crazy about Austrian Smaragd wines. The serious wine crew drank them at his house quite regularly.

Smaragd is a wine ripeness category, akin to the German ones used on QmP wines, except it is used for dry wines. The category allows for rather high potential alcohol levels. Frequently we drank Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners from the Wachau that were 14.5%!

I do not think Riesling should be made with 14.5% alcohol, so there were times when he opened something with great enthusiasm that made me apprehensive about having to experience another aggressive Austrian.

It was not just the alcohol that made me worrying about doing battle with an Austrian. They usually had frightening levels of acidity too. My stomach would wince with some of them.

The Austrians also have a bit of a thing about dry extract in a wine. Consequently, Austrians often give their whites more skin contact than in, say, Alsace (that produces France’s most stylistically-adjacent wines to Austrian Rieslings and Grüners). The wines are not anywhere near approaching the foulness of orange wines, but they often had pronounced astringency.

However, doing battle with one of the top Austrians was often an awful lot of fun. These power-crazed Austrians were often serious art. They were one of my earlier encounters with the idea that really fine wine should have a terror-balance.

What I mean by this is whilst the wines were perfectly balanced, they expressed that harmony in a way that was extreme, and a little domineering. Such were their extremist character, one almost felt a little scared of them. Yet they were in perfect harmony, with great integration of characteristics and so on, thus they had the terror balance of distinctly fine wines. Not easy, but so rewarding to drink.

The best Austrian’s that Gernot opened, the likes of Knoll and F. X. Pichler, were not bedecked with pretty glisks of charm, they were fulgurating, coruscating entities of brilliance. They shouted about their quality, but quality they were.

So, when I saw that Lay and Wheeler had an offer for newly released Wachau wines from a string of famous names, I was so intrigued my debit card noticeably increased in temperature. When I saw that they had an array of Prager wines, the card detonated and left money as fall out landing on the L&W’s orders’ desk.

Prager was Gernot’s favourite producer and back in the mid-1990s and the wines had left a lasting impression on me. As I had not drank one in nigh on thirty years, I decided to get some. Last night The Editor and I popped a Riesling Smaragd Ried Klaus 2022 – the wine at the top of Prager’s memorable array of quality dry wines.

Beware, crazy Austrian approaching!

Riesling Smaragd Ried Klaus 2022, Prager

Due to the astringency I knew this wine would have, I took it out of the fridge half an hour before we drank it (fine whites should never be served at fridge temperature, otherwise you will not taste them) and double decanted it back into its bottle. I had a little taste whilst I was doing this.

What?!? This does not smell like Austrian wine at all! There is no white pepper or massive booze burn (in all honesty, I was too afraid to consciously clock the booze quotient, only 13% – delightful!). Instead it has the lime-y, citric freshness and purity of a Mosel Riesling!

This smells quite lovely. Yes, it does have higher alcohol (like a Saar Grosses Gewächs) but the nose is yet light and refined – delicious.

Quick taste: Bof! That is wine already! However, it clearly needs the oxygen dissolved in solution to work for half an hour. More then.

Then: It still has a pretty and lime-y nose, but has developed hints of mint and coriander. There is a huge depth of vineyard character on display here, the excitement just keeps on flowing. Perfectly judged alcohol level.

What restraint, balance and harmony show on this winsome wine. To sniff it is to love it.

Wow! I mean: WOW! What an entry onto your palate! It slashes across your senses with a wild, fresh, supremely energetic level of acidity that would undoubtedly be agony if you had cavities, but otherwise it is extremely captivating. Just with this crazy character alone, consider me smitten.

Swirl it around your palate some more and the plunging depth of fruit, more plunging than the preferred necklines of my ex-girlfriend Alison ‘Big Tits’ G., whisks you into another world of total delight. It has lime, lemon, orange zest and a lot of mint and coriander. There is just the merest hint of the white pepper one normally associates with Austrian wines. But crivvens, that fruit is just stunningly endowed and even more attractive than Alison G. was 30 years ago!

After the energetic acidity and heroic fruit are registered some the trademark Austrian astringency. As I said, this is nothing like the evil filth orange wines I believe nutcases buy. Instead, it adds to the sense of power and dimension of the palate. It works very well as a foil for the fruit and acidity.

That is not to say this wine is a neat little package of charm. Instead, it’s trip as you slurp it around your palate is a supersonic V2 screaming to detonate in your mouth, up your nose and sending irresistible shockwaves of delight right to your pleasure centres. What a stunner! What a wine!!

I am moved and delighted by this wine. I do not know if Prager has the same winemaker as thirty years ago, but this is better than I recall Prager wines being. It is knockout stuff. You can drink it now for sensory overload, but I would suggest it might be at its best in 5-15 years. It certainly has what it needs, where it needs it, to live a long, majorly pleasure-delivering life.

Get onto your browser and buy! Buy!! BUY!!! From Lay and Wheeler.