Alzinger 1995 Loibner Steinertal Riesling Smaragd
What a treasure from Chambers Street, a teenage Alzinger Steinertal for pretty much the same tab as the current vintage. Sorry, I already bought the last six. The amazing thing about this bottle is how age has intensified its mineral element while actually seeming to brighten the fruit rather than deepen it. In fact it’s so aggressively rough and rocky (in taste and in texture) that it feels more like consuming solids than liquid. Molecular gastronomy in a glass. The word “bright” seems like the perfect way to describe the fruit not only because it’s bright in complexion but because the fruit seems to be a property of the wine more as light than as juice. It makes the stuff taste fresh and vivid and basking in cold sunshine but it still feels more like drinking sifted crushed gravel than grape juice. You could imagine the fruit deepening with another 10 years in the cellar and it would still be the same wine but at dusk instead of in the morning, like those Monet haystacks. Steinertal has definitely become one of my favorite riesling vineyards in the world.
Prager 1995 Weissenkirchner Achleiten Riesling Smaragd
Another from Chambers’ recent stash of older Austrians. This one’s a demonstration of how a wine can be impressive without necessarily being wholly pleasurable. I forget the brand but awhile ago there were these TV commercials for some juice drink where people would drink it from a straw and its tartness would cause their faces to get sucked backwards down the straw. Anyone else remember these? Well, that’s sort of the sensation you get here - to say the sourness is wincing is an understatement that doesn’t quite capture the vacuum-in-a-vortex properties of this wine. But if you can handle it, if you’re the kind of guy who can bite into a lemon and not even flinch, this is a pretty damn impressive riesling, with acute neon-yellow fruit that seems to scrape rather than flow across the palate. A bit of a challenge for us, though. There were leftovers.