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| Früg Grüner Veltliner Burgenland Straka “Stratos Mash” Burgenland Krutzler “Mash-Up” Burgenland 2024 Umathum Traminer Burgenland Moric Blaufränkisch Burgenland 2023 |
| When I first began studying Austrian wine, twenty-five years ago, the received wisdom treated Burgenland like the New Jersey of Austria, or maybe Staten Island. A region located due south of the capital, Vienna, Burgenland was considered a source of familiar, “useful” wines, sometimes foursquare, other times, gaudy, oaky, overripe replicants of international wine styles, but never a source of mind-expanding or serious wines, nothing to worry your pretty little head over—indeed, you’d be forgiven for laughing. It turns out that the received wisdom regarding Burgenland is dead wrong. Today, the Burgenland wine scene is alive and exciting, and indeed, most of the Austrian wines we stock originate from this once-deprecated region. Tonight, we’re pouring five storied wines from Austria, and more specifically, from Burgenland. Some of the wines we’re pouring are new vintages of old friends; others are wines that are new to the shop. But why Burgenland?
Before WWI, Burgenland was part of the Hungarian side of the Habsburg Empire, a place where German, Slavic, and Hungarian cultures coexisted. To my mind, it’s the heterogeneity of that hybrid cultural context that made the place difficult to pin down, so the easiest route was to deride it. The mind-bending stuff could only originate from the easier to comprehend, northern part of the country, where steep hills of morainic soils produced the sort of wines that you needed to pay attention to, whereas in the south, well, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, that of which we cannot speak must be left unsaid. Burgenland is a place where international varieties were widely planted in the 1980s, but it’s also the homeland for blaufränkisch, a traditional red variety of the region widely planted in central and eastern Europe, which truly came into its own, in part due to the hard work of one of the Burgenland growers we’re featuring tonight, Roland Velich. It’s a place where, perhaps because the strictures of normie culture up north were looser, growers feel free to experiment a bit: one of the wines we’re tasting is a co-fermentation of red and white grapes from a brilliant savant who is not yet even twenty five years old; another is a shorter-macerated orange wine made mostly from a grape confusingly named welschriesling (zero genetic connection to riesling) a useful, productive grape that, like Burgenland, no one took seriously, but in Thomas Straka’s hands, you’re forced to reconsider. It’s a place where you might find varietally bottled, bone-dry, mineral, yet delicately aromatic traminer, such as the Umathum we’re pouring tonight, the same grape that’s cultivated in the Jura in the east of France, where it’s called “savagnin.” And to be sure, it’s a place where grüner veltliner is also cultivated, as it has been for centuries, perhaps not as a source for wine to age for many years, but lovely for near-term guzzling, such as what we’re pouring tonight. |