Terry Theise tastes his way through a line-up of current vintages from Austrian “god of flavor” Walter Glatzer.
No one drinks wine any more. Fewer and fewer people drink alcohol of any kind, thanks to a WHO report that will be contradicted in five years by another WHO report. But we here are interested in wine.
Let’s leave aside the question of wine’s status as an “alcoholic beverage.” And then let’s admit that wine is singularly unattractive to anyone but we who’ve been bitten by the bug. Let’s further admit that wine is unattractive because we who are nuts about it are also unattractive. Not all of us, but too many of us. And while we’re prostrating ourselves, we have to stare unblinkingly at the stark reality that too many “high-scoring” wines are not self-evidently enticing except to people who’ve drunk a highly specialized kool-aid.
What we have squandered for years now is any sensual connection with deliciousness. We don’t talk about it or write about it or use it as a parameter in our “scoring systems” and yet we wonder why new wine lovers aren’t swarming into the fold. It’s as though deliciousness is banished into a punishing corner wearing a dunce-cap that says “tasting good is for idiots and the maladjusted.”
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In a better world than ours, we’d have at the very least a parallel scoring system that accounts for simple sensual delight. Something like “STG” (shit-tastes-good!) or even a three-pointer—delicious, fucking delicious, and seriously fucking delicious. I wince to see (or even to imagine) some earnest wine geek trying fruitlessly to impress upon some hapless neophyte the virtues of the typical “high-scoring” wine by adducing each and every recondite element of the pitiful beverage while the neophyte casts about desperately for the exit.
Contrast that with a glass of wine that, as soon as it’s sipped, engenders an immediate and spontaneous yelp of joy. “Jesus, what the hell is this, and can I have more?”
Lest you suppose that such a quality must be reduced to a rudimentary level of simplicity that insults even an average intelligence, you are mistaken. And you are missing one of the signal delights of the wine world, the graceful combination of delicious flavor with layers and dimensions and all the stuff that makes wine interesting. You really don’t think such wines are the kind that would make life-long wine lovers? Really? Then my friend, you are lost.
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I always recall the power of deliciousness when I taste Walter Glatzer’s red wines. Whenever I have posted reports about these wines on my website before, they have attracted too few eyeballs, because Glatzer is considered less consequential than some of his peers. This is seriously misguided. It is so misguided that Glatzer himself started to wonder if he shouldn’t make his wines more overtly “serious” so that he wouldn’t be shoved into a ghetto of merely tasty wines. Indeed he made those efforts yet even as his wines (Blaufränkisch especially) grew more intricate and layered they remained delicious, as though it was in their DNA and couldn’t be erased.
I’ve had the wines open for two weeks now. They keep well but they do not, as rule, get better. Open them and drink them. Have a spare bottle at hand because you’ll empty the first one in half a snap. And not once, and I mean never, will you pause and think “Sure it tastes really good but it’s kinda simple …” These wines are not simple. It is we who have been stunted into thinking “If it’s fun then it can’t possibly be serious.”
And we wonder—we really wonder—that so few young people are entering our world of wine.
The white wines at Glatzer are good, sometimes very good, but his is a 70% red wine estate and it is on those that his reputation is built. To me he is a god-of-flavor, and anyone could comprehend that if we weren’t so effing busy being sophisticated “experts” and groping for things to appreciate about wines that really don’t taste very good. And we could, if we only remembered how, find our ways to wines whose flavors grin at us and still give us plenty of grist for the cerebellum.
Let’s start with the whites:
2024 Glatzer Weissburgunder (Carnuntum DAC)
The “basic” wine has tended to be snappy over the years, but both the vintage and the man have tricks up their sleeves…
The extract-dense ’24 cannot quite subsume the usual snap, at least until the (always) surprising length of finish. Even more surprising; the wine is better from the Jancis glass, which can sometimes offer a rather stark interpretation of “crisp” wines. In this instance it’s so aromatic you wonder if the last wine in the glass was Sauvignon Blanc and you failed to rinse it enough.
You get the mussel-y side of Pinot Blanc at Glatzer, with few flourishes except to make you jones for a slab of pike-perch. A tic of sourness on the sides of the palate is actually agreeable, not to mention it’ll go with your arugula side-salad. From the Jancis it expresses like the slightly burnt crust of a piece of toast.
The wine is effective. It has no wish to command attention. It has a job to do and does it impeccably and honorably. Insisting on more is greedy, and irrelevant.
2022 Glatzer Weissburgunder Göttlesbrunn
In effect the current “reserve” bottling, and a village wine in the DAC schemata.
A “Burgundian” fragrance offering age, cask, and greater fruit concentration. The question, always, with such wines is whether the oak is deft or clamorous. Here it’s on a razor’s edge, but often such wines advance their fruit with air. Let’s see.
The Jancis glass articulates more, and as it does it both pushes the non-wood flavors forward while also separating the wood and making it feel added-on afterwards. It was not, of course. It simply demonstrates the risks of wood.
That said, I don’t disavow the “corn and lime” I wrote at the estate last April, though corn in this case is more masa harina, taco shells. Though it freshens with air, it remains a mature wine and now’s the time to drink it. Nor is it surprising that air knits the elements together, so that the “wood” becomes a faint caramel flavor. The texture is like an aspic made with saffron. Or chanterelles (plentiful now) sauteed in ghee.
2024 Glatzer Grüner Veltliner (Carnuntum DAC) +
Again the “regular” wine (with all of 12% alc). I’ve always liked it and I do again now. It’s been a vintage-responsive wine, such that it over-achieves in ripe years and reverts to its norm in a year like this one.
Aromas are pure vetiver and legume. In effect it’s the variety abstracted from terroir, and it is also a primo vintage for this old standby. Somehow it’s avoided the sharp angles of many ‘24s and arrives almost juicy, full of flavor, and stupidly long. It’s like a one-class upgrade, and I’m not sure how he did it. The sheer lushness is atypical, and for all its ostensible modesty, this is a seriously good GV.
Now bear with me; I don’t know how Glatzer made such a yellow wine in such a green vintage. Because this is thoroughly the Viognier side of GV, calm and golden. I’d have sworn it was the reserve bottling, a luscious and almost sumptuous wine with no precedent I can recall from here.
2023 Glatzer Grüner Veltliner Göttlesbrunn “Dornenvogel” +
To remind you, “Dornenvogel” (thorn-bird) is the term for his top wines, a metaphor for the birds who swarm over the vineyards when the grapes are very ripe. I’m glad the authorities allowed him to keep using it.
Interesting to look at a ’23. The fragrances are suggestive, enticing, a little shy. The palate has the high-relief of the vintage, all the way to the rasp at the end. It’s a more intricate flavor—or arrangement of flavors—and it tilts toward the mineral. (It was done in stainless steel.) Indeed what it most recalls is good Aligoté, as vinified by one who respects it and wants to coax it onto the stage with the other “serious” wines.
There’s a lot of middle here, and the wine almost visibly awakens in the glass. It’s worthy of comparison to the GVs we approach more earnestly; it wouldn’t shock you to taste it in a flight of Gobelsburgs. It does have the boxwood-y mustard-green thing, the nettle and marjoram resins.
And even if it’s an artifact of the vintage, it’s still as refined a GV as Glatzer has made.
2024 Glatzer Sauvignon Blanc Niederösterreich
(Declassifed appellation as the variety is excluded from the DAC, which is sometimes prescriptive as opposed to descriptive…)
Glatzer always made at least one excellent SB each year; sometimes this one, other times the “better” one. We never knew which one I’d select. I’d have selected this one!
It’s the aromatic profile I prefer with this variety; green, herbal, verbena and Sencha and woodruff. Not much red pepper, and no vulgar vegetality.
It’s good Sauv-Bl—what can I say! This clamorously assertive variety can go wrong in so many ways, and even when it goes right—as it does here—it’s still SB. (Yes I know the nobility of SB and respect it profoundly, but there are times you just hope it doesn’t stink of broccoli water.) It’s too good to glug yet I could drink it any time all the time. And relish it because its angularity is interesting.
It’s a sort of Bib-Gourmand of the variety. I’d be glad to have it as my “house” SB.
2023 Glatzer Sauvignon Blanc “Weisser Schotter” Niederösterreich ++
This reserve wine is named for the white gravel on which it grows, and is once again declassified by you-know-what.)
Now this is a fine SB aroma. It leads to a surpassingly fine wine. Did I buy enough for my cellar?? I hope so.
It may be the best white wine Glatzer has (yet!) made. It has all the qualities of the better (best?) Loire wines—except silex—and it’s more interior, more searching than those lovely Styrians. (At least the ones I know; time to get my ass back there…) It’s seductively juicy and salty and fervidly herbal yet with notes of ginger and apricots and matja and Makrut lime (I’m not being precious; I have a source for it and have it in the pantry). Heard enough esoteric associations? How about Timut pepper? And no, I didn’t squirrel it back in my luggage after a journey to Nepal—my Whole Foods sells it.
Refined aromas of red pepper, and flavors of compound salts, and a finish of a dozen herbs, and the portrait is complete. What a beautiful wine.
2023 Glatzer Zweigelt (Carnuntum DAC) +
A perfect varietal aroma.
I adore Zweigelt when it’s like this. It can feint in a peppery direction sometimes—one of its genetic parents is Blaufrüankisch—and sometimes a grower who wants to make “important” Zweigelt will force it into earth-and-blood—and its other parent is St. Laurent. Zweigelt can be intensely blackberried also, but I love it most when it’s like this: cherries and violets. Quoting oneself is unseemly, but I can’t improve on this image; if you scape the top layer of pure fruit from Syrah, leaving the animality and smokiness behind, you have Zweigelt.
It may be the ’23 vintage and it may be Glatzer’s recent wish to make more dimensional wines, but even this sensational beauty has angles and depths. I’d like to glug it but it’s too good. From the Jancis glass it nearly shrieks with spiciness. It is ideal from my other, improbable glass, the larger of Spiegelau’s white-wine stems. That glass it too large for most white wines but it’s perfect for fruit-driven reds.
The texture has just enough cream and just enough dustiness, and the finish lingers improbably for an ostensibly “basic” wine. If it were a restaurant it would be a Bib Gourmand and you’d think “Who needs stars when you can eat this well?”
2022 Glatzer Zweigelt Rubin Carnuntum +
The term may be used by any Carnuntum growers who observes its criteria. It stands for medium bodied wines with more depth than the entry level and less power than the top. It permits oak aging but doesn’t require it. Commercially, at least in the States, it lived in a no-mans-land that suffocates so many of these in-the-middle wines. (Another reason we grope for clues for the decline in wine consumption; we’re too busy selling “categories” and “concepts” and not busy enough selling flavor and authenticity.)
Zweigelt at this level adds carob and even chocolate notes to its basic varietality. It can be truly irresistible, richer than its predecessor but not so concentrated as to preclude lusty drinking. The Jancis offers more peppery precision, and from either glass the finish is outrageously seductive. It is very rare for a wine to offer such gloss atop such structure, and this is in many ways a “perfect” wine, squaring the circle between rampant yumminess and stuff-to-think-about.
Take a bow, Walter (and Doris) Glatzer. With a wine like this you stand on a summit very few people have ever stood on, or even know the way to.
2022 Glatzer Zweigelt “Dornenvogel” Göttlesbrunn +
You could imagine young Rioja smelling this way, even the new-wave bottlings. In a certain way Zweigelt could easily be a cousin to Tempranillo or Schiava.
Technically a mere Village wine it comes in fact from the oldest vines and the ripest fruit from three sites: Hagelsberg, Eisenberg, and Stuhlwerker. It sees around 18 months in barriques, 20% of which are new.
The wine has intensity and grace. In its context it may seem rather earnestly “significant” but on the other hand, why shouldn’t it be? Over the years Glatzer has learned to tame oak flavors, which play the supporting role one wishes they always did. At first strong and sumptuous, as it visits the entire palate it grows rockier and more tangibly solid. (Emphatically so from the Jancis…)
It’s implosive rather than extravagant. It has a transparent buoyancy from the Spiegelau (whereas a Riedel Chianti Classico made it overly somber). Glatzer is solving the problem of ratcheting up the intensity while preserving the essential Zweigelt fruit. As an achievement this is more than laudable, but the wine I’d want to be infused with is the Rubin.
2022 Glatzer St Laurent (Niederösterreich) ++
The wine sees no new wood but a good sojourn in used.
More often than not, Glatzer can amaze you with this challenging variety. And again he does it in his particular way. St-L can be reductively stinky, especially when it’s made to be archly fruity, and it can also be overdone when forced into a power it cannot often support.
But this wine? This wine had me yelling the words “fucking amazing” into an empty kitchen as if anyone could hear me. It is criminally delicious! You call your attorney to make sure it isn’t illegal and then you call your priest to make sure it isn’t a sin. (It could easily be both….) For all the hassle and bother we lovers of the grape encounter just finding one we don’t have to “allow for,” Glatzer’s making it look easy-peasy. I can’t fathom how.
Other than the typical black-cherry thing, I must ask you to fantasize a blend of around 65-70% red Burgundy (Santenay or Chassagne rouge) with 15% Julienas and finally 15% of Mourvèdre. More than just a triumph over adversity, this is a stupid-delicious wine and yet with grip and articulation, precisely ripe enough, just enough vertebrae to offer “structure,” and more than enough sheer tastiness to satisfy and but the most insolent and sulky imbiber.
2022 Glatzer St Laurent Alte Reben (Niederösterreich) ++
They allowed “Alte Reben” but not the origin-vineyard Altenberg. I’m probably one of seven people in America to whom this matters, but to the other six, it’s the same wine.
An evanescent reduction blows off in seconds. Right away there’s more “minerality” (or its simulacrum) and I have to try to write in the stiff wind of a helpless thrall, because I love this wine with a heart I may have mislaid, or never knew I had.
There is more here than in the last wine, but the “more” is more interior, more unfolding, more angularity….if you play or listen to jazz they’ll tell you about “outside” notes, those not inherent in the underlying harmony but that seem to stretch it so that it’s surprising without being dissonant. So, along with the greater mid-palate density there are also all these notes—smoke(s), resin(s), rock-dust, lavender, and all this with the pliant candor of this angel’s red wines.
And all that with a balletic leaping energy that lets you sip and sip and sip again.
Want to know why wine consumption is declining? Because we don’t pay enough attention to wines like these. I promise you, if you served this to any of your pals who weren’t “into” wine, they would clamor to know “Where the hell did you get this?”
(Meanwhile you’re serving them tiring over-alcoholic over-extracted wines that got “high points” some-fucking-where, or else some sweaty bog shrimp “natural” wine stinking of low tide and broccoli farts because this is the wine “the best” people drink….)
2023 Glatzer Blaufränkisch (Carnuntum DAC) +
Glatzer’s development as a red wine maker is most dramatic with Blaufränkisch. And it is dramatic.
When I first got to know these wines, the Blaufränkisch was an innocuous wine seemingly meant for customers who found the Zweigelt “too fruity.” The change took place perhaps five years ago. It was striking, almost quizzically so. I might have said “Dude, what’s up with these?” or some such thing. Walter smiled slyly in response.
You won’t get a full-frontal Sarawak-pepper sting from these, nor will you see the minerality as starkly rendered as you might at Krutzler, Schiefer, or Prieler. Instead you get a pipe-smoke warmth astride an allusive crush of rock and a smidge of wild herbs. And you get all this here, with the “basic” level. But that’s not all you get.
You receive a lingering salty finish with a shocking suavity and juiciness. You get transparency and remarkable fullness of flavor for a medium-weight wine. You also get the perfect gesture of cask, in this case 2000-liter giants in which the wine was aged for a year.
You also receive—or I do at any rate—a level of satisfaction that cannot be surpassed. If I “scored” on a curve based on my rich delight in drinking, this would be supreme. It is a ne plus ultra of its kind, an amazing amalgam of articulation, charm and intricacy. And it comes closer to the special nature of fresh Tuscan extra-virgin olive oil than any other wine I know.
The upcoming wines will deliver such things as they do as we “ascend” to their level. They will have more power, density and profundity. I know I’ll love them, but this one? This one I adore.
2022 Glatzer Blaufränkisch Göttlesbrunn +
By now you recognize this as the village wine, the mid-range in the chain. Usually, the orphan. It’s denser, burning-leaf smokier, more licorice, more Kampot peppercorns.
More dark chocolate too, and more overall seriousness. More affect and intentionality. Yet even as it makes the statement one anticipated, it does so with grace and courtesy. It is more nocturnal but by no means broody. It’s chewy but you chew through vinosity rather than tannin.
Firmer, richer, yet not opaque, it draws closer to what one assumes a significant red wine would be. Nor am I praising it faintly; I think the wine is outstanding. And I know its ilk very well.
2020 Glatzer Blaufränkisch Ried Bärnreiser (Höflein) ++
This single site (Cru) grows on a poor soil of gravel and limestone with a loamy topsoil. It’s typical vinification would entail open-top fermentation in a 560-liter hogshead, followed by sixteen months in 500-liter casks, half of which new.
<Whew!> And it smells like a million bucks. But it doesn’t yell.
The palate splits the difference between Pomerol and robust young Rioja. It’s almost luridly seductive, at least at first, and knowing such impressions are often fleeting.
It was made for the Jancis glass, or vice-versa. Here its ripe sweetness is tempered by all manner of peppery/mineral/resin diction—and I do mean “diction,” since a wine this rich doesn’t tend to explicate itself as finely as this wine does.
I own some and will decant it when we drink it, but now it’s straight from the bottle. I’ll taste it again in 2-3 days and it will have spread its wings. (Meanwhile it sits in a cold cellar at 52º.) But even with a few minutes in the glass it starts to show the improbable flowery notes this vastly underrated grape can show, and which age into flavors curiously aligned with Pinot Noir. If the first wine was beautiful, this wine is gorgeous.
And surprising. Where the village-wine firmed up with air, this one seems to sigh itself open, growing not “soft” but pliant. One could cavil that we’ve entered the world of a certain type of European red wine at the expense of the particularity of Blaufränkisch, but if that is true—and I’m not convinced that it is—that’s an issue solved by aeration.
A second surprise is that the Riedel glass is more expressive than the Jancis, especially when sniffing them both empty.
