Coffee beans and sweet cherries: the wines of spitzerberg | thearticle

The Austrians were in London recently — before the lockdown — holding their annual tasting at the Science Museum. I started researching my first book on Austrian wine in 1991. The people I

talk to now are often the grandchildren of the men and women I encountered then. And I have seen plenty of changes. Indeed, the process has been vaguely Hegelian: we began with a thesis,

there was an antithesis and now a sort of synthesis has occurred. At first everybody loved new oak barrels or _barriques_. Now most people hate them — but they will use second-hand casks, or

amphorae; certain grape varieties were considered noble — particularly Cabernet and Chardonnay. Now they are considered vulgar. Slick marketing men muscled in, followed by the

techno-wizards who made soulless wines; then an effort was made to put the soul back again with a concentration on _terroir_, organic and biodynamic wines: the grape had to speak for itself.

Next up were ‘natural’ and ‘orange’ wines. These days, growers are cultivating small faults as a means of injecting character.   Gernot Heinrich from Gols is a case in point. He looked

painfully young when I first met him, but he was already making great wine. He is now going down the natural wine road and rejecting the use of sulphur and filtration where possible. His

wines are labelled ‘Naked’. He told me his father no longer understood them and bought his supplies elsewhere. Others, like the Blaufränkisch pioneer Ernst Triebaumer have clung to their old

style. His son showed me a series of wines that hardly detracted from those I knew 30 years before. They are still lovely. There has never been a reason to change.  She won’t thank me for

saying so, but another person I have known for nearly 30 years is Dorli Muhr. In those dim and distant times, she worked for Austria’s wine marketing organisation. In 1996, Dorli bought her

first bit of land on the Spitzerberg near Hainburg in the far east of Austria, where the Danube’s alluvial plain is spotted with striking sandy limestone rocks. Her acquisition was in the

Roterd vineyard which is still one of her best. Like Josef Haydn, Dorli hails from nearby Rohrau and when she married Dorli’s grandfather, her grandmother brought with her a small vineyard

on the Spitzerberg as a dowry. In 2002 Dorli went into business with her then husband, the dynamic Portuguese winemaker Dirk van der Niepoort. Although the Spitzerberg had possessed a

reputation second to none, it had been such a long time since any half-way decent wine had been made there they had to start again from scratch. It wasn’t easy to acquire land. Most was in

the hands of ancient villagers who tended their vines to get away from their wives. Dorli put up an advertisement in the doctors’ surgery and with time they were able to put together a

parcel of some 12 hectares (30 acres) that they either owned or rented. The grape variety that suited the porous soils best was Blaufränkisch. Dorli has retained an experimental plantation

of Syrah and grubbed up most of the others planted at the time.  Dorli presented a dozen of her wines at her importer’s offices in St James’s the day after the Science Museum tasting. She

explained why her Spitzerberg vineyard had such potential. It is a steep, 300 metre-high south-facing hill that lies between the Danube and Lake Neusiedl; between the beginning of the

Carpathians and the Leithaberg that is the harbinger of the Alps. Hot winds from the Hungarian Puszta come whistling through, making the land hot, dry and little susceptible to rot.  Her top

wine is ‘Spitzerberg’, although this could change with time. The fruit is picked in three vineyards: Spitzer, Pannhölzer and Roterd. The oldest on show was the 2012, which was possibly my

favourite with its aromas of coffee beans and sweet cherries. The 2013 seemed a mite less complex and is drinking best of all now. Dorli has an affection for the 2014, which was a terrible

year as I remember only too well, with rain falling in buckets during a cold harvest. But still, this is as clean as a whistle and full of sap and power.  The next year was the polar

opposite: there was a heat wave, and a danger that the wines might taste hot and jammy. There is no sign of that, but the wine is notably richer. Also from 2015 was ‘Liebkind’ — the ‘Love

Child’ from Ried Kobeln, made from vines planted in marl in 2008. The berries grow to the size of red currants and just 800 bottles are produced from one hectare. It has a nice plum-skin

tang to it and is attractively wiry.  In 2016 the weather was bad again and the wine had a difficult birth. The result is a triumph for all that, but there is a pepperiness about it that

betrays the fact the grapes were not as ripe as they had been say, the year before.  In 2017 there were big changes. Dorli became sole owner of the vineyard as Dirk decided to concentrate on

the wines and port he makes with such aplomb back in Portugal. It was a hot dry year. We tasted four wines: Samt und Seide (Velvet & Silk), Ried Roterd and the top-flight Spitzerberg. A

lovely morello cherry character dominated in Samt und Seide and the Roterd. The Syrah ‘Sydhang’ has a strikingly deep colour and had an aroma of sweet black fruits. The Spitzerberg was far

more closed than the others but is showing quite clearly that it will be one of the best vintages to date.  The wines are all the better for the fact that they are not ‘techno’. Dorli says

she does not even possess a refractometer any more, a device used to measure sugar in the grape and thereby potential alcohol. Picking is determined by taste. The grape is allowed to speak

for itself.  Dorli’s wines are available from Justerini & Brooks.