Berserkers,
I am in Montreal for the week for a Canadian Thanksgiving holiday and naturally stopped by the SAQ Signature downtown store. They have reorganized a bit and now put all of their sweet wines in one section as opposed to putting them with the other wines from their native countries as they used to do, making things a lot easier to find.
And so it was that I found a new type of sweet wine from Austria that I have never heard of before: Ruster Ausbruch. I immediately recognized both the language on the label as well as the telltale trademark white and red circle foil cover over the cork and screwcap on each bottle that this was an Austrian sweet wine. However, I was also a bit perplexed as every Austrian sweet wine I have encountered to date used the same classification system as the Germans to identify them as Ausleses, Beerenausleses and Trockenbeerenausleses. This was the first time I had ever seen the term Ruster Ausbruch.
I picked up one bottle each of the two that were available: The Weingut Feiler-Artinger 2010 Ruster Ausbruch and 2008 Ruster Ausbruch Pinot Cuvée. The former is their flagship sweet wine composed of botrytised Chardonnay and Muscat while the latter is a blend of of botrytised Chardonnay, Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc on a pure impulse buy. As soon as I got back to my sister’s place and on a PC, I went to research right away.
While the literal translation “rust breakout” doesn’t really inspire much confidence, it turns out these babies are right in between the Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese classifications but for all intents and purposes are the same as a TBA. Also, the “rust” in the name refers to the Rust or Ruster region of Austria and the “breakout” referred to the old method of making the wine which was similar to a Tokaji. I actually found this more interesting as an idea than a straight TBA.
So it turns out that there is something new to learn about sweet wines even for me. Never heard of this before eyeing them today. Pricewise, they are very similar to what I would pay for a Kracher TBA in Ontario or Quebec so I have a certain expectation of the same level of quality. We shall see. If anyone has ever had one of these before, please do let me know.
