Trip to Austria - Part 1.1 - Wachau
Nicolas Mestre and I had a successful, 10-day tasting trip to Austria in early March. Many thanks to Monica Caha for her help organizing the trip and introductions to many of her winemakers. We started off in the Wachau after a drive in from Munich and lunch stopover in Salzburg. Even before noon we had made it into our first wineshop in Salzburg and were interrogating the owner about good wines. We ended up tasting a number of wines with him, plus some herbal liquors harvested in the Alps and probably made in somebody’s bathtub.
We arrived into the Wachau at sundown and found the right Donabaum (all european wine towns worth their weight have several estates with the same family name, I think we came across a town with 32). As we arrived, there were several gentlemen from a wineshop in Linz tasting, we joined them for a few of the last pours but knew our full tasting would be in the morning. Anyway, too late to taste at this point, we got settled into our rooms at the small inn that is part of the Johann Donabaum estate and then headed off to Krems for dinner.
The first place was closed for a private party, which was fortuitous because Johann’s second choice turned out to be excellent. In a brightly lit, modernly furnished, slightly subterranean space off a small square, Zum Elefant turned out to be a great place to drink a selection of Johann’s wines with food, good food. This having been four months ago, I can’t recall the exact menu, but I know I started out with an octopus carpaccio and I know we finished on Johann’s super special gruner veltliner. He produced something like 500 bottles (magnums actually, only bottled in magnums) of a super rich, oak free, dryish gruner veltliner with laser cut aluminum labels. 2006 vintage allowed him the hang time to get the superb fruit ripeness to make this style and thankfully he knows how special that is and that new oak would be the best way to ruin it. This was not a high acid, crisp GV, but it was a completely unique style and totally well executed.
After dinner we headed to a Relais & Chateau restaurant and wineshop (both now closed) with a bar upstairs and dance club in the basement. Avoiding the russian mafia look-a-like (or maybe just russian mafia) gentleman at the dance club entrance, we settled into a seat at the long bar, complete with an equally long lineup of schnapps from one end to the other. We did a little schnapps tasting and then at some point ordered a 1996 Knoll BA. The sommelier disappeared for a long while and returned with a bottle of the 1995 and news that the 1996 was sold out. Left out of this news however was the 40 euro price difference between the 1996 and 1995, so we enjoyed the 500 ml of precise opulence completely oblivious of the $160 surprise-in-waiting.
