This week's wine: Gruner Veltliner

With Swiss wines, to which I am very partial, becoming harder and harder to find in Scotland, I am turning more and more often to their Austrian equivalent, Gruner Veltliner, which is  somewhat easier. But good ones are growing conspicuously more expensive.  Waitrose, my usual source of supply, is charging £10 or more for the top of its range - steer clear of its inferior £7 version -  and I am becoming resigned to the fact that anything up to double that is becoming the norm for something better.

My latest purchase has been from Naked Wines of Norfolk - a supplier whose list is increasingly worth a look and whose Rotes Haus Gruner Veltliner is a model of its kind with a touch of lime behind its very slight petillance. True,  at £12.40 to customers and £16 full price, it is even dearer than Waitrose’s, but it is a delicious drink, as full of flavour as a fine Alsace, and infinitely quaffable as an aperitif or with veal or chicken,  which is probably what the Viennese like to drink it with. I am impressed.

Although my own Viennese days are probably over, I love the place for more than its music and still recall my first trip to Grinzing, on the outskirts of town, for a sampling of the new wine - not always with the best Viennese food, just as the wine itself was  not usually very special. But it was always rich in atmosphere,  evoking memories for me of Erich Kunz’s sentimental old Viennnese songs. which I collected in my boyhood on ten-inch Columbia shellac discs.

That is what I continue to associate with the best Gruner Veltliner and what I now  possess, not quite so satisfyingly,  on CD, to match my wine palate to something appropriate. The first time I saw Kunz was long ago as Don Alfonso in Cosi fan tutte at the Edinburgh  Festival. The last time was in The Bartered Bride at the Vienna Opera. Happy days. Let’s open another bottle.
14 November 2014