What have the Austrians ever done to us?

Author:  Heather D

Well, OK, if you're being picky, there were on the "other side" in the last two world wars, but, leaving those worldwide conflagrations aside for a moment to concentrate on wine....just what do we have against Austrian wines?

The thorny old issue of anti-freeze never takes long to rear its ugly head when I introduce an Austrian wine to a tasting.  Yes, it did happen.  Yes, it was downright dangerous.  Yes, it was a long time ago.  Now, can we move on?

The next problem that stops us from buying Austrian wines is that they don't have a clear identity of their own.  For most wine drinkers tend to lump them together, mentally at least, with German wines.  Anyone in the wine trade is happy to bang on at length about how undervalued sweet German Rieslings are, with their light alcohol, delicious floral-fruity characters and their ability to age.  Most UK wine drinkers, however, pay no attention and carry on drinking fruity, off-dry New World wines instead.  Being associated with a country which is commercial poison in this country is never going to work in Austria's favour.

I also think we have a problem putting Austrian wine in its context, with food.   Compare it with Italy, for example.  It's easy to imagine a simple, juicy red Italian wine going with your pizza or plate of pasta - we've all eaten it at Pizza Express often enough.  There isn't a chain of Austrian restaurants (Dumpling Express?  Schnitzels R Us?) pairing the country's food with its wines.  Culturally, Austria is an unknown quantity for us, other than oompah bands, Lederhosen and yodelling.

The mountain that Austrian wines have to climb is a steep one, but they do have some delicious wines to help them in their cause.  Here are some of the highlights of yesterday's annual Wines of Austria tasting in London.

Polz "Therese" Sauvignon Blanc 2008 - £15.75 from www.ultimatewines.co.uk

No oak , so the grapes themselves are responsible for all the deeply mineral flavours found here, allied to a lively herbal and lightly floral nose.

Domaene Wachau Riesling Smaragd Singerriedel 2007 -  distributed by Alliance Wine and seemingly hard to find, but www.waitrosewine.com list other wines from this estate

"Smaragd", meaning emerald green, denotes a higher level of ripeness than the lighter category of "Federspiel"  (meaning falcon or bird of prey).  The Smaragd in question refers not to the gem, but to an emerald green lizard found in the area - it's amazing what you can learn at these events.  To the wine:  this single vineyard riesling has great purity of aromas and flavours and is beginning to flesh out with time in bottle.  Like most Austrian whites it is dry, with a lovely long, juicy finish.  

Machherndl Gruener Veltliner Smaragd 2008 Kollmitz - £12.50  from www.greatwesternwine.co.uk

Gruener Veltliner is Austria's unique grape variety and is beginning to become better known.  We're drinking more white than red wine nowadays in the UK, so maybe Gruener could do for Austria what Malbec has done for Argentina?  This wine has lovely ripeness, but remains dry, with a twist of grapefruit zest, even a hint of the bitter pith on the finish.

Feiler-Artinger Blaufraenkisch 2007 Umriss - £15.75 from www.slurp.co.uk

It might come as a surprise to find that Austria makes rather a lot of red wine.  While you won't find much syrah or cabernet (yet...) they have a trio of varieties which suit their climate:  Zwigelt, St Laurent and Blaufraenkisch.  Never blockbuster wines, there are nevertheless some serious examples, such as this, which has spent 13 months in (mostly old, large) oak barrels.  It combines black-fruited fleshiness with enough structure to give an elegant mouthful.

And I haven't even mentioned any of the delicious sweet wines yet!  That will have to be a whole new post methinks.

Learning to love Muscadet

Fashion is a fickle thing. Pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc are currently the UK drinker's white wines of choice. Sancerre and Pouilly Fumé have spawned a thousand sauvignon blancs from New Zealand to Chile, via South Africa and Eastern Europe. And Italy's GDP figures would surely be severely dented if we stopped glugging their crisp, vaguely fruity pinot grigios at every available opportunity.

But here's a question: when was the last time you drank a Muscadet?

Muscadet used to be oh so chic, but now the only time you're likely to drink it is at an eighties themed evening, when it might be served alongside a prawn cocktail, before the beef stroganoff and the black forest gateau.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about Muscadet – indeed the crisp, fresh, lightly fruity flavours are not a million miles away in style from pinot grigio. It's simply that wine fashion has moved on and poor old Muscadet is one of its victims.

Generally we think of Muscadet as being one of those wines that you should treat as DYA (drink youngest available) and not keep for a minute longer than necessary. And in general, this holds true for the Muscadets we see on the supermarket shelves at around the £5 mark.

Pierre and Marie at Domaine Luneau-Papin, however, take pride in making Muscadet that ages amazingly well. I tasted a vertical of their L d'Or Muscadets from 2008 back to 1989. As we got to the 2003, I wrote: “Now this is getting interesting”. All vintages of the wine had plenty of life in them and retained a characteristic freshness, with increasing complexity and depth of flavour as we went back in time to the earlier vintages. 

UK importer Les Caves de Pyrène has L d'Or 1999 for £13.59. Buy a bottle, serve it blind to some friends and marvel at the rich, yet dry, flavours that unfold. But not with a prawn cocktail please.

Wine of the week

Fitou l'Exception 2006, Cave de Mont Tauch - £10.00 (or buy 2 for £9.99 each) at Majestic

There was a time when Fitou was all the rage - around the mid-nineties I think. Much of it was supermarket own-label stuff and its popularity then probably had something to do with the disappearance of a previous source of bargain reds, namely Bulgaria. We always need a suppy of decent, cheapish red wine - and for a few years, Fitou was it. French, but mercifully easy to pronounce, rustically easy to enjoy - that'll do nicely.

After its brief day in the sun, however, Fitou faded from view as we transferred our affections (what fickle serial monogamists we are) to the "sunshine in a glass" provided by New World wines. Fitou has not stopped being produced, of course, and the Mont Tauch co-operative has been quietly toiling away over the years, turning out vast amounts of wine from a mind-boggling 1950 hectares of vineyard owned by 250 different growers.

Not all of it is worth seeking out, by any means, but I was quite taken with this one, made from grapes grown in the best vineyard sites. It's a blend of carignan and grenache with a little syrah. Carignan is an often-despised variety, accused of adding nothing but colour, alcohol and rusticity - but older vines give an inky, spicy character too. This is not all about the black, spicy fruit - it has plenty of that savoury, herbal aroma of southern French garrigue, which seems unique to wines from Languedoc and Roussillon. Great for a dark, late Autumn evening and some suitably hearty food - wild boar sausages would be just about perfect.

Wine of the week

Loacker Atagis Gewurztraminer 2008, Alto Adige - £16.95 (2006 vintage) from www.greatwesternwine.co.uk

Alto Adige is a bit of a conundrum; technically part of Italy, but essentially German-speaking; a disconcerting mix of Tyrolean alpine scenery, dotted with palms and fig trees; an area where Muller Thurgau is taken seriously as a grape variety, instead of being derided. It's hard to know what to make of it.

The varieties grown in this region are, as you might expect, not typically Italian: alongside Pinot Grigio sit Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Blanc, Riesling and Gewurztraminer. Reds are traditionally made from the local varieties Schiava and Lagrein, though some Pinot Noir is making its mark.

Rainer Loacker's wines, however, are a soothing balm to confused minds. He was the first grower in this region to become organic and biodynamic, using only homeopathic remedies to treat his vines since 1979.

Gewurztraminer, though usually made as a dry wine here, can become rather fat and flabby in Alto Adige's hot summers. This version though, has great precision and freshness which reins in the variety's broad lychee and rose petal fruit. Alto Adige will never be a low-cost production area and Loacker never a maker of cheap wines - but there's a uniqueness here which is worth paying for.

By the way, just in case you were wondering - yes, they are part of the same family who own Loacker Wafers, beloved of UK coffee shops.

What's it all about, Amarone?

Thank goodness for the onset of cold, dark evenings. At last we can get stuck into winter warmer red wines – and they don’t come in more comforting winter weight than Amarone della Valpolicella.

Valpolicella we all know, right? Light-bodied, soft and juicy wines that you might glug down with a bowl of pasta or a pizza. But Amarone? What’s that about?

The difference between Amarone and straight Valpolicella is all down to grape drying – a process that the winemakers in this part of the Veneto in north eastern Italy have known about and practised since at least the time of the Romans. In simple terms, winemakers pick their best grapes slightly earlier than the main harvest and then air dry them on racks for around three months before crushing and fermenting to make wine.

The grape varieties themselves can sound like a mouthful – including Corvina, Rondinella and Molinara. An old wine teacher of mine suggested Cinderella and the two ugly sisters as a way of remembering the names – it's worked for me!

During the drying process the grapes will, of course, lose moisture – weighing around half what they did originally by the time comes to crush and ferment. With less water in the grapes, they are proportionally higher in sugar, which will be converted to alcohol during fermentation.

Amarone, then, is a high alcohol wine - legally the minimum level is 14%, but can exceed 16%. But some other things happen to the grapes during the drying process as well, which create massive concentration of aromas and flavours, as well as a great ability to age and to develop layers of complexity. With alcohol at these levels, this is not a “session wine”; it’s what the Italians call a “vino da meditazione”, a meditation wine to sip on its own.

These are wines that might start out smelling and tasting of sour cherries, dark chocolate and tobacco leaf, but develop in the glass, changing each time you take a sip, evolving and tempting you back again and again. As you might expect, these wines take to ageing like ducks to water and continue to grow in fascination and enjoyability over many years.

Not cheap to produce: that extra picking separate from the main harvest; the drying process itself; grapes that can be lost to rot and can't be used to make wine; the fact that dried grapes will naturally make less wine than freshly-picked grapes – they all mean that Amarone cannot be made as cheaply as normal wine.

But prices paid for grapes destined for Amarone have been dropping, while the amount of Amarone made has been steadily rising, leading to concerns that corners are being cut and quality levels are perhaps not always what they should be. A group of leading Amarone producers, the self-styled Amarone Families, is seeking to address these issues, imposing stricter quality measures in an effort to maintain the reputation – and high price – of Amarone della Valpolicella.

Last week they came to London to showcase their wines, focussing on the outstanding 2000 vintage. It's a mark of the wines' ageworthiness that many of these wines were still youthful and barely into their stride, even after nine years.

Amarone is not a cheap wine habit to take up, with prices starting at £20, but if you fancy an exploration of the style, there is no better place to head than The Vineyard in Dorking (http://www.wineunlimited.co.uk). John is an Amarone fanatic and stocks around twenty different ones at any one time, whereas most merchants will have one or two.

Amarone on the High Street
Amarone “Le Vigne” Ca' del Pipa 2004 - £25 at Majestic (Fine Wine section)
Dense, dark and truffley – great for game.

Amarone Classico Brigaldara 2006 - £34.99, £27.99 as part of a mixed case at Oddbins
One of the Amarone Families group, Brigaldara make wines in a modern style, ie using new French oak in addition to older, larger oak casks. Polished and powerful.

Amarone Allegrini 2004 - £45.95 from Imbibros near Godalming (http://www.imbibros.co.uk), £50 from Waitrose
One of the foremost modernists of the Amarone Families, Allegrini make wonderfully expressive wines – at a price.

Grapes are not the only fruit

It's wine, but not as we know it. The British Isles have a long tradition of making wines – just not the kind that is made from grapes. We probably all have memories of a relative who made dandelion or elderberry wine, which bubbled away in demi-johns in the airing cupboard, making intriguing noises and smells but not, alas, anything remotely drinkable when the moment came to try it.

Lurgashall Winery, in an intensely rural setting between Haslemere, Midhurst and Petworth, specializes in making wines and liqueurs from an array of fruits and vegetables, as well as mead from honey. They are trying to change our view of what are called country wines (to distinguish them from normal wines made from grapes). They are proud to point out that they use only fresh fruits and vegetables in their wines, with no artificial essences or ingredients – not all country wines are made in the same way it seems.

Mead is surely the most ancient alcoholic drink in the country, requiring only water and honey as ingredients. Our ancient forebears would have relied on the wild yeasts which surround us in the air; the winemaker at Lurgashall uses cultivated yeast, in order to be sure of a consistent finished product.

Lurgashall's owner is the slightly eccentric US-born Jerry Schooler, self-styled “lord of Lurgashall”. A background in industrial engineering is not perhaps the natural qualification for taking on a wine and mead business in the UK – but it must undoubtedly have come in handy when Jerry needed more buildings for the winery. Instead of building from scratch, Jerry found a Medieval barn in Billingshurst, which he then had dismantled, moved to Lurgashall and rebuilt on-site.

Eccentricity appart, Lurgashall will be celebrating its 25^th birthday next year, so Jerry must be doing something right.

As well as selling from the winery shop, Lurgashall make wines for a huge number of heritage institutions, from the National Trust to Chatsworth and Balmoral. The US is also an export market, along with Canada, Japan and Scandinavia. Americans, it seems, can't get enough of their Tower of London Mead.

What of the wines themselves? Grapes are, of course, fruits. There is no reason why, say, a blackberry should not make a palatable wine, as it has the same basic ingredients of sweet pulp with fruit acid and skins containing tannins. But silver birch sap? And rose petals?

I will not be abandoning my passion for more “normal” wines, in order to take up these charming oddities, but I have to say they do have a certain appeal. The Gooseberry Wine is reminiscent of sauvignon blanc, but why not just have a sauvignon blanc? It's not as if there is a shortage of the stuff. However, the more esoteric flavours give more interest, as long as you discard any notions of wines to go with food – other than the gooseberry, all the wines are essentially off-dry to really very sweet. These are wines to be drunk on their own, or even mixed with fizzy water or sparkling wine.

Their red Elderberry Wine and rosé Plum Wine I found most closely resembled grape wines, because they are relatively dry and have flavours and aromas that you could also find in mainstream wines.

For sheer weirdness I was drawn to the Silver Birch Wine – made from the sap of their own birch trees. It's nothing like a normal wine, but has an intriguing “woodiness” which I find hard to describe, but appealing nevertheless.

The frankly bonkers Rose Petal wine is a beautifully delicate pale pink to look at and smells and tastes of, well, rose petals. A little bit like drinking perfume, I wouldn't recommend it on its own, but with sparkling wine (not a posh one, please!) or in a gin and tonic? Mmmmm.

Of the meads, I favoured the Dry Mead and the Reserve Mead, which has had some barrel ageing to provide more depth of flavour. Mead is, by its nature, very sweet, so this is to be treated like a liqueur or a dessert wine, even the “dry” version.

The liqueurs are where the fruits themselves really get to sing. The Raspberry Liqueur is so full of fruit flavours it's practically like drinking alcoholic raspberry jam. For a real taste of tradition their Sloe Liqueur (they aren't allowed to call it Sloe Gin) has great depth of sour cherry sloe flavour with a cleansing kick of bitterness at the end – I found this the most grown-up of the liqueurs and one I would be happy to drink by the fire in the months to come.

Country wines are not about to knock regular wines off their pedestal, but they are fun – and we all need some of that.

Lurgashall Winery, near Petworth, www.lurgashall.co.uk

Country wines are all £7.50 for a 50cl bottle, the meads range from £7.50 to £9.45 for the Reserve Mead. Liqueurs cost from £9.95 to £11.45 for a 37.5cl bottle.

Wine of the week

Trenel Fleurie 2007, Beaujolais, France - £9.95 at The Wine Society

Beaujolais suffers an image problem, but this wine shows what proper Beaujolais can and should be. No confected, bubblegummy flavours here. This is pretty grown-up stuff with delicious, slightly musky, deeply fruity flavours, with a whisper of tannin and a touch of savouriness. Just the thing for this week, when you could have it lightly chilled while the sun shines, or have it at room temperature in the evening. Great for charcuterie, or a good old banger.