How green was my Gruner Veltliner

While the white wines of Alsace, for all their elegance. continue to wobble on the edge of popularity, just as they seem always to have done, Austrian Gruner Veltliner is going from strength to strength.  Though there are similarities between them,  it seems plain to me that the banks of the Danube are proving increasingly  successful - more so perhaps than those of the Rhine - in enabling wine producers to strike a balance between the greenish sweetness and dryness that rewards the palate. The result may be less mellow than we would expect of an Alsace wine, but it can be, in the words of the English wine authority Hugh Johnson, “really snappy” - which is not a description you would often use of something from Alsace.

Perhaps it’s the flintiness of the polished Austrian wine at its best which makes the difference, and which makes it so good to drink. It’s not what you might associate with the rough young wines quaffed in the open air at the local  inns in what is now the Viennese suburb (in Beethoven’s time the village) of Grinzing, celebrated  in old Viennese songs by that gemutlich baritone Erich Kunz, where you eat  chicken on the spit or wiener schnitzel  beneath the trees. That was something - perhaps still is - often quite raw in taste, not that it seemed to matter,  since you tended to ignore the rawness for the sake of of the spirit of romance created by where you were drinking it. With a good modern Gruner Veltliner, however, you get a quality wine without losing  the romanticism.

Yet in Britain our supermarkets are still holding back a little on the appeal of these bottles. Though it’s possible to find at least one type of Gruner Veltliner on their shelves, it’s harder to find two. But the small Waitrose stable of these wines has now grown to three -  two of them established (and, priced at more than £10,  not inexpensive) examples of the breed, plus what is presumably intended to be an enticing new cheaper model at £7.99.

The trouble with this bargain, however, is that, despite its sophistication, it does taste undeniably edgier. So my recommendation, for the moment,  is that if you want to try Gruner Veltliner, it’s worth spending  a little more on one of the pricier bottles, with their finely-chiselled minerality, or else wait for Waitrose to bring them briefly down in price, as they sometimes do.

16 July 2014