I know I report on Schloss Gobelsburg quite regularly. That’s because the estate is remarkably interesting and consequential, and because they are very good about sending me samples. With this collection I’m unusually timely, as the crus on the market are (still) the 2023s, and all the other wines were current when I visited them last April.
There are two more reasons for paying this degree of attention. One is, even with a winery as reliable as this one, the occasional flub sneaks through, eg, the premox issue with some of the 2015s (imponderable from a vintage with such prominent acidity), while the second issue is, I assume, temporary and vintage-dependent. Attentive readers will have guessed already I am wary of 2023. Again, they were good at the property five months ago, and they have been well-reviewed, but I’m close to feeling that a really good 2023 is a wine that defied the odds.
Should you be interested, I’m tasting over three days: first all the Grüner Veltliners, then three Rieslings and three (of the four) Sekts, and finally the four reds, the remaining Sekt, and the (two) Tradition wines. I make this explanation to bring you inside my tasting logic and also because I won’t arrange the notes this way.
Thus will the games commence!
Related
Schloss Gobelsburg Grüner Veltliners
I’m passing over the always superb Schlosskellerei bottling, because it is always superb, so much so that an AI-bot could produce a note for it: “Punches above its weight, offering amazing value, a paradigm of the virtues of the variety without intending profundity…”
2024 Grüner Veltliner Gobelsburg
The “village” wine introduces ’24, a vintage I adored consistently while in Austria. And this wine is reminding me why. In some ways it’s a baby Steinsetz, grown on old alluvial Danube gravel, and giving one of the “legume-y” types of GV.
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The Jancis glass loves it. The wine shows the innate magic of the variety in template—its particular fruit and savor, its minerality, its hale freshness, its playful intricacy even below the stratus of the “great.” Oat flour, marjoram, tarragon, saltiness, a textbook example of the basic virtues of “modern” cellar work; cleanliness, clarity, character, and respect for the drinker, who deserves to receive these things. Not to get all “get off my lawn” on you, and with full recognition of the good wines in the natty vein, but when I drink something like this I want to suggest, as gently as possible, that maybe, we are offered the worst wines for the best reasons from the natty gang, and it’s a choice we shouldn’t be asked to make. And now I shall go no more a venting….
2024 Grüner Veltliner Langenlois +
The other “village” wine, on loess this time. I wouldn’t have guessed that, as the wine has always suggested primary rock to me, mistakenly. I wrote elsewhere that the wine overcame my reluctance to offer it because it was simply too good to leave behind. How it is “doing” I do not know, free as I am from the mercantile, up here in my ivory tower.
The wine is wonderfully angular, herbal, smoky, peppery, full of nightshade and brassica and esoteric salts. It reminds me of the Schenkenbichl from Hiedler, which is all the high praise you can ask. In ’24 it has the extract-saturated mid-palate juiciness that makes the vintage so seductive.
Yet I wonder whether this might be a perishable virtue. Extract is most tactile in the first few years of a wine’s life, after which we taste the elements it has buffered, which is not inevitably good. It suggests a case for drinking such wines early, which I encourage because the pleasures they give now are actual whereas the ones they may give later are hypothetical.
The fading of the baby-fat stage also reveals a certain edginess which I like; it is more assimilated than the screeching rasp of (many) ‘23s. Leaving theory aside, this is a dangerous wine for the vendor because it is so good you wonder whether you really need to trade up to the upper layers. You do, as it happens, but a wine like this offers teasing glimpses of what those layers will give you.
2023 Grüner Veltliner Ried Steinsetz
I’m being disobedient. The grape variety is absent from the front label, by design, to draw all our attention to the cru, as in Burgundy. I wonder how many years it will take for “the consumer” to learn that Steinsetz (et.al.) indicates Grüner Veltliner just as Meursault Perrières indicates Chardonnay. My friend Michael Moosbrugger thinks in epochs, which is part of why I hold him in such high regard, yet still, I disobey.
2023 is like a great violinist who needs to restring his instrument but when he finally got to Padova (or Assissi or Brindisi or Sion or wherever) the shops were all closed and the only strings he could find were the ones they sold at the train station—which naturally they do in Europe—and so this superb instrumentalist could not attain the mellow sonorous tone he was easily capable of producing, though the notes were the proper ones and his intonation was flawless.
Thus the “music” of Steinsetz is evident here, almost convincingly so, and the sound is heard through ordinary speakers, or less than ideal acoustics. But wow, he comes close….
I mean, this is ’23, it can’t be helped, it is just this-kind-of-year, but what’s stirring here is how close this wine comes to mitigating the vintage issue with heroic creaminess and concentration, not to mention the interior length of a truly significant site. So in a sense this is a wine in segments; one justifies the stature of the Cru and the other struggles with the issues of the year.
Which segment prevails has much to do with serving temperature and oxygen, which is to say the wine kept getting better the longer it was in the glass. It was also excellent with a simple arugula salad with EVOO and a lemon vinegar. I started to feel a little churlish, like why am I being such a fussbudget?
2023 Ried Renner (Grüner Veltliner) ++
So okay, I’m sort of obeying …
Almost always the greatest of Gobelsburg’s GVs. It was very well reviewed within Austria, by the most reliable commentators. I’m seriously grateful to Michael for leaving this where it is in the pecking order (the third-highest price in the range) because it becomes a great gift to the drinker. Micheal even told an interviewer that his “American importer (which at the time was me) says this is my best value.” I did, and it is.
If there is a great 2023, it sits in my glass as I write. It is also—and I emphasize this point strongly hoping Michael will read it—the wine that most embodies his principle that site supersedes variety. In effect it is always a GV that tastes as much of Riesling, which is partly (or mostly) because the terroir—eroded primary rock from the Gaisberg with a loessy topsoil—is usually associated with Riesling.
(Consider a mix of Clos Ste-Hune and Corton-Charlemagne, if you haven’t tasted this extraordinary creature. Renner could easily be the only GV in my cellar except that I’d actually miss the more typical GV.)
This is simply superb Renner, and you will note that I do not append “for a ‘23” because this is special wine in its own context. Yes, it is pointed on the finish, but nothing more than one would expect from a high-spirited lad who’ll go on to be the new Dalai Lama.
2023 Ried Grub (Grüner Veltliner) +
If ever a vintage would be favorable to this site it would be 2023. So, is it?
I have never admired Grub. To me it is obtuse and lumpen, lacking clarity and articulation except for a certain meaty thickness, the appeal of which eludes me, especially alongside the manifestly superior Renner and the more cogently expressive Lamm.
But I liked it at the estate in April. I asked them to send it and they kindly did. I’m glad they did, because the wine is an excellent rendition of Grub and it also shows how rare such a thing is. It has a certain lift for a wine with such fleshy density. I ascribe it to the vintage. You’d drink it with the dark meat (of poultry) whereas you’d pour Renner with the white meat. I mean, Grub sort of is the dark meat, like the turkey thigh in liquid form.
But this vintage is so appealing! You have to love its savor, its porcini earthiness, like a day you walk in the woods and you just know you’ll spot them. I admit I am convinced by this fiend; it is just so savory, so perfectly salty; it’s like a virtuosic consommé, perfectly reduced, almost “sticky” in the center, ten pounds of umami in a five pound bag—a wine of profound implicit impact, undeniably delicious.
And if you taste carefully you will note the finest possible expression of cask, like a glimpse, an aside, supporting the hundred allusions of the wine and making it finer rather than more vulgar.
2023 Ried Lamm (Grüner Veltliner) +++
I’ll say this: Grub is flattering to Lamm, because while each has a similar degree of dense power, Lamm is much more articulate and distinct in its diction.
It suits 2023 and ’23 suits it. A fabulous vintage of Lamm. All the attributes of a Grand Cru. Continuing the poultry association, this is a wild Barbary duck long-slow roasted, the flesh studded with clove and served with a ginger Spätzle. Come on over; we eat that way every night….
I know what I wrote about Lamm versus Renner, but this is a time when Lamm enters the land of the mystic. How do I know? Because it slows you down, it uses its energy to address you lower down than the sensual or cerebral; it alters you for a few minutes. It’s like when the Apple tech commandeers your laptop to solve your problem. You look on and you’re not in control. It’s how I know when great wines are great; it is exactly that thing, it is never any other thing but that one, the moment you know you have been lifted and carried, and the place you have been taken to is more sublime than your little self can grasp. You think, “When I return from here I won’t be able to tell anyone how it was,” and if you ever read The Phantom Tollbooth you’ll know what I mean.
As a younger man I thought I knew what this moment asked of me. I wrote and wrote and wrote about it. I wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it didn’t matter what I wrote; it mattered that I wrote. If we are carried to a place we don’t otherwise visit, a place with every answer to the hundred questions we forgot we asked, a place of pure reality but the cost of entry is to give away our eyesight, what can we ever “say” about that place? What text, what music, do we hew into the tablets they hand us? None. Because they neglected to give us the tools.
I think you can argue that the purpose of great wine is to defeat us beautifully. That is it. Each time I try to elaborate on that idea I get pulled into absurdities, so leave it there.
I took a sip of Renner now. It is wonderful, the wit and rhetoric of it. The sheer delight, the knowing and grasping and the telling of what it is. And then I go back to Lamm and it isn’t what it is but how it is. And the greatest wonder is you can’t reduce it to practice or formula. I know Lamm! I know it from three growers in three decades of vintages, and this is one of the very few times it has melted through the membrane.
I am having a very good day. One wine says “It is exactly what you think it is and you can describe it perfectly and accurately, each fine and wonderful element,” and the other wine is “It is nothing like you think it is, or ever thought it was, and you cannot describe it though you will wrack your mind trying, unless you learn to give up and tumble down into whatever is waiting there to catch you.”
Schloss Gobelsburg sparkling wines: BUB-BUB-BUBBLES-BUBBLES (here at Gymboree)
(When my son was three he spent many days at Gymboree and came home singing “buh-buh-buhboos-buhboos, buh-buh-buhboos-buhboos, hee-da-wanna-wee!” We’d sing it with him. For years I thought those were the words.)
Among the elite producers of Sekt (along with Bründlmayer and recently also Christian Madl, who has no American importer that I know of; the one he had grew impatient with when sales didn’t soar immediately). And in this group the achievement at Gobelsburg is perhaps the most impressive. Bründlmayer had a head start, having made fine Sekt for many years, and Madl is a specialist who does almost nothing else, while Gobelsburg applied their glowing insistence on excellence and entered the stratosphere-o-fizz in a few short years.
Brut Reserve NV ++
A very fresh disgorgement (April 2025) suggests a base vintage of 2022 given their typical tirage. It’s mostly GV along with some Riesling and red wine, in this case Pinot Noir (if their website is up to date).
The wine is stylish, friendly, ripe but not spherical, rather warmly linear somehow. It’s a true assemblage where no variety dominates. It’s absolutely delicious in a way that’s analogous to Champagne but does not refer to Champagne (except as a lodestar), and while I know that every “other” sparkling wine must answer to Champagne, those I like best are those that insist, most calmly, that there’s more than one way for Sparkling wine to be classy and refined—as this one is.
With air (and as the mousse calms down) some of the vetiver aromas of GV grow more vivid. It’s completely sensational from the smaller Juhlin and hardly too shabby from the bigger one; in fact I don’t recall a better edition of this masterly creature, and I’m not sure any previous bottlings have been this good.
Blanc de Blancs Brut NV
Disgorged July ’24, from a cuvée of Chardonnay, Welschriesling, and GV; it’s a coeur-de-cuvée aged in cask for 6–12 months before a 2.5–3-year tirage. All of which would suggest 2020 as the guiding vintage, though ’19 could also be in play.
It’s naturally rather leaner than the above, and though they charge more for it I don’t find it the better wine. It is stricter and more exacting, more tartly mineral and also more woodsy. It is very good yet it feels somehow “conceived,” designed, whereas the Brut Reserve feels as though it fell from the sky exactly as we drink it.
Mind you, it’s a privilege to nitpick when everything’s so good, and while I appreciate this cost more to produce I wonder if the upcharge is justifiable. I find it interests me cerebrally; it’s pleasant to consider and contemplate (which may be why I receive it as “theoretical”) but it is far less drinky than its ostensibly lesser sibling. Dosage—which is low but not brutal—could be the issue, if there is an “issue.”
I’m damning with faint praise, which isn’t fair. The wine is excellent by any rational standard. Some tasters will prefer it to its more fetching stablemate. I find it a little knobby.
Brut Rosé NV ++
Disgorged March 2024. It has the basic flavor of the Brut Reserve, “plus.” (Plus red wine in this case, and I’m trying to find out which red wine and how much of it. In fact it is entirely from red grapes, which is really amazing.) I must say this is quite amazingly elegant and handsome, with a perfectly calibrated dosage and with lip-smacking salty length.
Hardly a fruit-bomb nor a little sprite to make you giggle, this is creamy and sophisticated, a little bacony, with a richly clinging middle that doesn’t let go. I mean, everything about this wine works; its purity and shapeliness and vinosity and seamless balance. I haven’t had a sparkling rosé in a long time I’ve liked as much as this one, and it would easily slide in to the higher echelons of Champagne if one insisted on comparing.
And it is (yet!) another example of the thousand benefits conferred by the proper dosage. Again I issue my abiding plea: forget what you think a wine “should” have and give it what it must have to taste as good as it possibly can. Your customers will thank you, and the piss-pots who are fixated on residual sugar are hapless fuckers whom we can safely IGNORE.
Vintage 2012 Extra Brut “Grosser Reserve” ++
Deg Nov. 2022, with a similar cellar regime to that of the BdB. But this of course is another thing entirely. (So much so that I grabbed one of the Riedel “Krug” glasses, which have seemed to like those papery mature wines along Krug lines, not to mention these lines.)
That it smells mature and intricate and many-faceted is hardly big news. It’s massively salty and earthy from the Riedel. It’s a profound glass of wine, to be sure, and there’s no “but” waiting in the wings. I am temporarily stymied by a wine that has mature flavors with which I am (gratefully) familiar, yet it has no other cognate I can recognize. It doesn’t act like mature Champagne. It acts like some crazy gorgeous one-off, and while it is thoroughly enveloping it is also contemplative and searching.
Conventional notes will cite nougat and brioche and mango and unconventional notes may alight on nori and matja and even shiso-leaf. It’s all there, along with myriad other nuances that may be tasted or supposed. I’m not convinced you need to know that stuff, because I myself don’t. I remain delightedly perplexed how a wine can be so familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
It is a wine you both consume and pay respects to. It warrants your full attention. If you opened it for friends, be ready for conversation to stop for a few minutes. (If it doesn’t, you might need new friends.) I myself would look for the nearest outside space where I could probe the sky for the moon, and if there wasn’t a moon I’d remonstrate with my hosts—How can you serve a wine like this when there’s no moon?!?! My friends need deep reservoirs of indulgence in order to tolerate me.
The wine is seriously beautiful and beautifully serious. It’s like that list of questions that’s supposed to make you fall in love with a stranger in 30 minutes. It cuts to the chase. A lovely, resonant experience, as these things can be. It delivers enigma and invites you to ponder numinous and mysterious things. We mustn’t squander those invitations or our souls won’t have any friends any more.
Amazing, isn’t it, that a single wine estate can give the most delightful imaginable “basic” wine and yet also deliver something like this (and like the “Tradition” series); it’s like a house where one room is full of squealing happy kids and the next room is a library where the uncle sits, deep in thought and smoking his pipe, and when some of the kids go to check on him he gathers them into his lap, and he loves their giddiness and they trust his kindness—yes, that is what it’s like, gaiety and pensiveness beneath a single roof, a little firmament of thoughtfulness and caring.
One travels, doesn’t one, at times with wines like this one.
Schloss Gobelsburg Rieslings
2023 Zöbing Riesling ++
The “village” wine is effectively young vines from grands crus, since there are no mundane Riesling sites in Zöbing. The estate is already on to the ’24, by the way.
This wine made me babble to myself in an empty kitchen (where I taste) because this is precisely the incredible fragrance of fine Austrian Riesling, which is like no other fragrance, and not only of Riesling. It’s a concatenation of primary rock aromas, gneiss, mica-schist, amphibolite among other things, and the only place I’ve ever seem come near to approximating it might be—might be—Forster Pechstein.
The wine is spicy, psychedelically limey (like a Margarita of Riesling), and if you noticed I haven’t referred to the “23 problem” it’s because there isn’t one with this wine.
Yet another example of this estate offering much more than you had reason to expect. A superbly original wine laden with character and vim.
2023 Ried Gaisberg (Riesling) ++
If you love Riesling, as I do, you will find this aroma heavenly. There is something definite yet otherworldly about it. Gaisberg is like a poignant memory of perfection that might have been a dream.
The so-called “Gföhler Gneiss” plate reaches its eastern terminus in this vineyard, where the foundational gneiss is mixed with slatey para-gneiss, mica and amphibolite. This soil drains down into the Renner, which is why those wines are so brilliant.
Do read back to see the many ways I have sought to “capture” the essence of these wines. Sometimes I tried to be definite, and other times I lost myself in the rapture. This ’23 is salty and exotic, but not tropical-exotic like its neighbor Heiligenstein, but rather a sort of extravagance of iridescence and iciness; mineral, salt, ginger, white pepper, blueberry—but enough of that! Gaisberg is like a ghost of Riesling divinity that never knew flesh, and we get to observe its spectral progress through our palates, searching for a home it has already found.
2023 Ried Heiligenstein (Riesling) ++
I am partial to Gaisberg. It aligns with a neglected aspect of my temperament. At times, foolishly, I suppose that Heiligenstein is rather “obvious” next to the iridescent overtones of its neighbor. Then a wine like this comes along and admonishes me.
I’ve said that this cru stands with the “top five” greatest Riesling sites. I grant you the whole “top five” business is a sort of clickbait that sensible people will scoff at. Therefore I will up the stakes; I seriously think a case can be made that Riesling from this land creates one of the few greatest impressions of any white wine on earth. It can easily be seen here and now, just as it’s been clear from any number of previous vintages.
I have no desire to adumbrate yet again the facets of these wines. It’s analogous to being weary of the need to write “slate, apples, and lime” for every Mosel Riesling I taste. So, in the context of the years-long experience with the vineyard, what can we say now?
It will recall you to years such as 2016 where its high notes are prominent, and the sometimes-voluptuous tropical notes are consigned to nuance. These high notes are amazing, by the way. The “low” notes aren’t very low; more along lines of pastry spices and fruits like persimmons and yuzu with just a hint of butterscotch.
As a group, this trio of Rieslings is by far the best group of wines I have tasted from 2023, and with that said, this wine is the only one that even alludes to the rasping nature of the vintage. I can’t fathom how they brought it off.
Schloss Gobelsburg red wines
These were my favorites among the reds, which have grown more ambitious over the years, aided by the warming climate. Yet in some ways I think Michael’s essence as a vintner is best exemplified by his reds. Which doesn’t mean they are his “best” wines, but rather they pull from deep in him. He has long believed that Zweigelt is the victim of a vicious circle among vintners; because it is presumed to be unremarkable it is planted in ordinary land, and because of that it usually gives unremarkable results. You can almost see the thought-bubble above his head, saying “I wonder what would happen if we pushed it.” His Zweigelt(s) are wines to take seriously while not affecting a solemnity they cannot support. These environs will always confer a certain coolness and buoyancy on even the most ambitious wines, but that’s merely another way of saying they will never lose fruit in their pursuit of significance. Nor should they. Fruit is the bellwether of the variety—and what enticing fruit it is!
2021 Zweigelt Reserve +
A true “reserve” from a single site and the estate’s oldest Zweigelt vines, aged in 600l casks from the local (Mannhartsberg) oak.
In 2021 you couldn’t avoid fruit if you tried. But in this instance, the “serious” vinification creates a Claret-like wine with cedar and graphite and gently dusty tannin. It’s a seriously elegant wine from my Riedel Chianti Classico glass, leading to a confoundingly delicious and lingering finish. A wine of poise and grace and beautiful flavors.
The Jancis glass is another matter, as I thought it would be; now it is far spicier and more peppery, alluding to Zweigelt’s Blaufränkisch progenitor, and showing an aggressively angular affect while preserving the enticement of fruit.
In effect you can select the profile you want in a dramatic example of a stem’s effect on the wine it presents. My subjective sensual preference is the murmuring sweetness shown by the Riedel, along with the hauntingly pretty finish it offers. It’s more contoured and knuckle-y from Jancis, which some will favor. I lean toward the suavity and warmth, but if I had a leg of lamb I’d be grabbing the Jancis to give the brashly spicy expression the meal requests.
2015 Zweigelt Reserve
Now we see some bottle age and the effect of a warmer vintage. We also see some if the round plumminess of Zweigelt’s other parent, St. Laurent. (We also see a little of reduction St-L is known for….)
I’ve sometimes described Zweigelt as a northern Rhône Syrah with the middle and low notes scraped away such that all that remains are the top notes of berried fruit. Here the Syrah cognate is vivid and the usual “fruit” of this variety is so deeply embedded you aren’t sure it’s there at all. This wine means business.
Mind you, it’s as much wine as I require, but others who drink more of the big-and-bold could find this excessively polite. Me, I enjoy a courteous wine, and this shows a graceful dispersal of its medium body with all the weight it requires. Its paradigm is old-school Old World Cabernet, the kind that is barely made any more.
It loves the Jancis glass, which maintains its outlines and clarifies the interior flavors the Riedel only alludes to. At least as first poured. All of these reds will relish a day or two open, and my notes are bound to reflect developments I didn’t foresee. But it’s with this wine that we see what Michael was aiming for; how far can we push the variety without shoving it into gooey overripeness and trampling its essence.
It’s fair to ask, good as this wine is, whether it loses its fingerprint and becomes “European red wine.” I think it is honorable to be “European red wine,” but perhaps its more interesting to be “fundamentally Zweigelt.” The question lingers for folks like us, but the sensible imbiber is happily satisfied with what’s in the glass while we retire into the parlor and debate the metaphysics.
In another day or two I might disavow any concern I had. Even now, with ten minutes in the Jancis glass (the wine, not me) there is more varietality than was first discernible.
As a rule the red flight showed the most development over the days; none more than this one. It located its Zweigelt-soul without losing its poise and moderation. I wasn’t wrong to find it initially somewhat plausible, and if I owned any I’d decant it a few hours out. It says a lot about Michael that his desire to push Zweigelt into the community of “serious” wine gives him something like this, not gaudy, not stressing toward significance, but rather this even tempered companionable beauty that has a larger agenda than simply to ingratiate.
2021 St-Laurent Reserve
To remind you: this variety entails extremely labor-intensive vineyard work and “rewards” with mingy yields (!) and even if it’s handled perfectly the wines are prone to show reduction until several minutes in the glass—and sometimes longer. The reason to grow it is the wine it can give, a wine so inspiring it can create a community of aspirants who’ll undertake the quixotic battle of bringing it to life.
To further remind you: the result is something like Burgundy-plus-Gigondas, or put another way, like 90% Pinot Noir with 10% Mourvedre. It’s Pinot-polish with some mud on its boots. It’s like blood sausage. It confuses you because it’s so fine on one hand and so earthy on another. But good St-L, of which this is one, is uniquely satisfying especially with the added pleasure of seeing a grower beat the odds.
This is excellent St-L. I love its lumpen grace. I love its clean animality. It isn’t feral and it isn’t dubious. It is characteristically spherical and dense in its extract. It’s large-bellied without flab (wish I could say the same….); it’s tallow and iron. But mostly it is well behaved without being denuded of the things we love it for. This is by no means easy to do.
Considering all the stunning wines on the marquee of this amazing estate, these reds could be thought of as afterthoughts. Certainly there are no Lamm GVs or Heiligenstein Rieslings among them. Yet they stake a worthy claim if you look closely.
2021 Pinot Noir Reserve +
Obviously there’s the association with the Cistercians; PN isn’t “trendy” here.
The limpidity is striking after the blood-black St-L. The ethereal fragrances will also draw you in. We who revere PN for just such virtues may be surprised to find them here, all the way a thousand miles east of Burgundy (let alone hundreds of miles east of the fabulous community of German PN growers), yet this vaporous being seems to recite the whispers of centuries of monastic tranquility.
It makes you ask, how quiet must we be to hear these things? How do we make ourselves lambent enough to taste them? Are they merely mesmeric, and is all this PN worship a bunch of woo-woo?
It isn’t and I’ll tell you why. When the bell peals, the overtones you hear and that linger in the aftermath of the pealing are tangible and actually there. They’re not ghosts drinking a diet of ether. They’re not anything only the “spiritual” can hear. Everyone hears them. Anyone can appreciate them and listen for them. But let’s wrench it down to earth: did you ever wonder how Eddie Van Halen accomplished the effects he did? He exploited the guitar’s overtones. Every good drummer understands the pauses between the beats. Every good chef understands white space.
Every dog hears things we can’t. And don’t get me started on echolocation. Pinot Noir is the wine of allusion, inference, and mysticism, but the true mystic attends to the wonder of things that are there, because he has no need to insist on the nebulous. But back to the matter at hand!
This is an artichoke-like PN that works its magic with overtones and enigmas. It appreciates a little quiet around it, but it also has plenty of flavor, loads of pleasing texture, and all the body it needs. It’s not a reduction, it’s a jus. It is, basically, a beautiful wine of a type that doesn’t “wow” you but that offers many rewards to the attentive drinker.
Schloss Gobelsburg Tradition wines
I will always be a little sad that the single-variety single-vintage wines they called “Tradition” were discontinued, and I say that in full throated appreciation for the superiority of these wines. We’ve gained more than we’ve lost, but that loss, while small, is real.
It comes up now because I wonder to what degree successive editions of these wines will differ from their forbears. Maybe that’s part of the point.
If you don’t know, there are three wines. One is three years old, the next one 10 years old, and the sine qua non is 50 years old. You could say they are built on a platform of Amontillado Sherry, the first one a VOS and the next one a VORS and finally the last one is like one of those casks hidden away deep in the cellar whose wine contains such a spectral concentration it sends you into a drowsy kind of ecstasy.
They are like golden-hour sunlight on a verdigris façade. They are finely weathered, and the way they taste is full of mercy. I love the (relative) liveliness of the 3-year-old and I’m convinced the 10-year-old is one of the world’s great wines.
They are of course meditative and introverted and conducive to reverie. They’re redolent, as old wines are, but they don’t taste “old,” only antique. They manage quite a magic trick, being both energetic and serene. You can describe their flavors associatively if you insist, but you’ll be lost trying to put their overwhelming umami into words.
Old wine is one of the world’s great igniters. It makes you burst, into tears and into flames. It is perhaps the most powerful experience of beauty that cannot be explained. It is clear that something’s being shown to you, but it hasn’t a name nor a title and it lives nowhere and everywhere and it lights up a part of us like a room behind a trap door, and it ever so gently banishes the clamor. Wines like these can teach you things, but there’s no syllabus, no argument or rhetoric. Just a charged and nameless loveliness, an uprush of meaning and purpose that forces us to ask: where is this usually? (I’ll have to hold a séance and try to find Abraham Maslow, so I can ask him.)
So yes, they are exquisite wines, and even more so coming from an estate making so many wines in the “explicit” idiom. If you tasted, say, Renner and then the 10-year Tradition you’d swear you travelled 800 miles across Europe and arrived in another country. And who knows, you might have …
