The Less Famous Veltliner

 

        I was standing on a bank by the side of a sloping and narrow kellergasse (a road bordered by old wine cellars) in Fels am Wagram. Franz Leth Sr. of Weingut Leth was showing me the loess (pronounced ‘lurse’ in English) soil, which rose like walls on either side of the road. A compacted mélange of wind-blown sand, limestone and clay, it crumbled as I squeezed it between my thumb and fingers. Close by was a very short row of vines.

        ‘What grape is that?’, I asked him.

        ‘Do you work with wines every day?’

Like most people I met in Austria, he spoke excellent English. It didn’t occur to me at the time that he probably meant ‘vines’, though, so I said yes.

        ‘What do you think it is?’, he asked.

        The berries were small and green, having not yet gone through véraison, when the grapes change colour. I’d been told a couple of hours earlier by Horst Kolkmann Jr. of Weingut Kolkmann, another noted Wagram estate, that over 60 percent of his family’s vineyard was planted with Grüner Veltliner. Ergo, it was most likely Grüner Veltliner.

        ‘No’, Franz Leth said, with an air of disappointment. ‘It’s an American hybrid.’

        I’d never seen an American hybrid. Nor, if someone were to show me one today, would I recognize it. I would, however, be able to tell them plenty about Wagram and the grape Roter Veltliner, thanks to Franz Leth and other winemakers I met in Austria.

        Wagram is a green, peaceful and bucolic area to the west of Vienna. After the mind-blowing stress of driving on what was, for me, the wrong side of the road in the capital, it was a pleasure to head through the flat and sparsely populated countryside. Vines and other crops like corn and sunflowers grew to the north of the motorway and a wall of mountains loomed on the western horizon. Frost being an issue in Wagram, the vines were planted on the hillsides.

        I was here to try a lot of Roter Veltliner, which, despite its name, is used to make white wines. Nor is it related to the Austrian superstar grape, Grüner Veltliner. I was intrigued by Roter Veltliner, for it’s a wine which is rarely seen in my home country, the U.K.; in fact, I don’t think I’d ever tried one. Wagram is the main area for the grape, which is one of the three varietals in that region which can be used to make single-vineyard wines (Riedenwein).

        Roter Veltliner is nicknamed ‘the diva from Wagram’, according to Horst Kolkmann Jr. He reeled off the reasons why it has this reputation. In the vineyard, you need to ‘work double the time’ on it compared to Grüner Veltliner. Rather than growing upwards, the shoots grow out to the side or sink. It's prone to mildew and requires a green harvest after flowering and careful canopy management. Half of each bunch needs to be removed to promote ripeness. In other words, fifty percent is dumped. Franz Leth showed me precisely what this entails by pulling off the bottom half of a bunch in front of me.

        Roter Veltliner is evidently worth the considerable effort, for the wines can be really outstanding. As Rainer Christ of Weingut Christ in Vienna expressed it, the grape is ‘very interesting when you have the perfect terroir’. The growing environment in Wagram suits this late-ripening varietal, which demands dry soils and a warm climate. South-facing vineyards like Ried Scheiben and Ried Brunnthal are exposed to abundant sunshine and the region’s deep loess soils drain water very well, while retaining sufficient moisture for the vines.

        Having tasted a substantial number of wines in situ, I can report that Roter Veltliner has ample acidity, which endures even in old bottles. The wines do not lack weight in the mouth and it’s highly aromatic. It has a lovely flavour reminiscent of tropical fruits, coupled with some kind of spice, which I found hard to pinpoint.

I had read that Roter Veltliner could be disappointing when young, but that was not true of the bottles I tried. It clearly ages well, for I had a number of older wines which were wonderful. I have to mention Kolkmann’s Roter Veltliner Vision 2013 in particular, for it brought a smile to my face. From Ried Scheiben and aged for 12 months in acacia then 10 months in used oak barrels, its super ripe nose and flavours brought to mind a late harvest wine, but it contained just 3 grams per litre of residual sugar. The finish was never-ending.

        My final visit in Wagram was to Weingut Josef Fritz, in the tiny hamlet of Zaussenberg. As was often the case during my time in Austria, I couldn’t find his winery, and had to enlist the help of a tough-looking and shirtless man.

Josef Fritz is renowned for producing Roter Veltliner, and he was amused by an old press clipping on his wall in which he was described as a Traminer specialist. He was emphatic that Roter Veltliner has great potential for ageing. He said that he’d done a vertical tasting going back to the 2010 vintage, and the only year that didn’t show well was 2014, a wet year. (The many winemakers I spoke to in Austria were unanimous that 2014 was a bad year, with one exception.)

A genial and generous man with a fabulous cellar of wines, Fritz opened a bottle of his 2006 Chardonnay from the limestone-heavy Ried Steinberg. Beads of condensation were on the bottle, but the wine was astonishingly good, medium-bodied with a subtle smoky oak character. I found it almost impossible to believe that the harvest was nineteen years ago. The name of the Steinberg vineyard can no longer appear on the label, because from 2021 only wines made from Riesling, Roter Veltliner and Grüner Veltliner may be labelled as Wagram DAC single-vineyard wines. Look for his Chardonnay Grosse Reserve instead.

The last wine I tried in Wagram was not even from the region. It was a half-bottle of the storied Ruster Ausbruch dessert wine from Burgenland, which had been kindly gifted to me. It tasted like a Sauternes, but contained only 7 percent alcohol. Like many wines I had in Austria, it was stunning. On my next visit I’m definitely going to Rust.

The Wines of Central and Southern Spain: A Review

              The first book I bought in the Classic Wine Library series was Richard Mayson’s Port and the Douro. I used to read it in restaurants around Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square when I was preparing for the Fortified Wines paper of the WSET Diploma. It was a book I enjoyed immensely, Port being one of my favourite wines as well as the one which had provoked my worst hangover. The book is now somewhere in Italy, never to be seen again.

        Since then I have read many of the books which followed Richard Mayson’s fine work, the latest being The Wines of Central and Southern Spain by Sarah Jane Evans, a Master of Wine and an authority on Spain. I was excited to read this, for I have travelled widely in Spain and like many of the wines a lot.

        This follow-up to 2018’s The Wines of Northern Spain is divided into six sections, starting with Catalonia. The writer notes that although this region ‘sits in northern Spain, its history and character is altogether Mediterranean. Hence its presence’ in the book. I’m not particularly interested in Catalan wines, but I make an exception for Priorat, which can cast a spell on any lover of wine: a remote appellation of hills and mountains encircled by another, and loaded with old vines. The book’s back cover features an image of the village of Poboleda, revealing the majesty of the setting.

        The section on Priorat is a microcosm of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. There is plenty of useful information and some lovely prose:

        The early morning journey had taken me from Barcelona along the coast and up through the clouds, with the hilltop villages of Priorat appearing above the cloud, and the magical Montsant mountain.

        Very evocative! The general discussion of Priorat, however, is restricted to four pages, whereas ten are dedicated to notable producers making the wines. I think it should be the other way round. There’s so much to say about a place like Priorat. We read, for instance, that there are ‘12 village sub-zones’ which comprise the Vi de Vila (village wine) category, but there’s very little here about them. It’s a pity, for it’s a really fascinating subject. (Admittedly, this skewing of the text in favour of producers is common to all of the titles in the Classic Wine Library series.)

        A chapter is devoted to sparkling wine. Again, it’s not a style of wine that appeals to me, but I learned a great deal. I was also pleased to read that Sarah Jane Evans shares my feelings about Macabeo, deeming it a ‘too-often plodding’ grape. 

      I enjoyed reading about ‘the heart of Spain’ very much, for it’s an area whose wines receive scant attention in the U.K, and it reinforced my desire to go there. Places like Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha, both part of ‘España vacía’ (empty Spain) hold a fascination for me. In the author’s words, La Mancha is ‘a remarkable landscape’, where ‘vineyards extend as far as the eye can see’.

        One of the curiosities of the wine regions in central Spain and the Levante (the focus of chapter four) is the unexpected presence of certain grapes. I learned that the aforementioned Catalan grape Macabeo, for example, is the main white grape in D.O.s like Manchuela and Utiel-Requena, and that Albariño has migrated south to feature in the latter. Indeed, the book is full of interesting facts: Picapoll Blanco is not the French grape Piquepoul, sweet Monsatrell is made in Alicante and Jumilla, and ‘a plague of spiders’ brought a halt to organic production at an estate in Ribera del Guadiana in 2017.

        In my opinion, sherry could be the greatest of all wines. Reading about it was somewhat chastening, though, for I realised that parts of my recent presentation about the wines were in fact incorrect! It filled me with a strong urge to return to Jerez, however, for the prospect of trying an Amontillado with ‘an average age of 50 years’ at Bodegas Emilio Hidalgo left me salivating.

        To sum up, The Wines of Central and Southern Spain is a very well-written work which will appeal to lovers of Spanish wine, WSET students and those planning a trip to Spain. Only one thing is missing: a chart of vintages. I will continue to rely on a rule of thumb I picked up somewhere: if the year ends in the number 3, it probably wasn’t the best vintage in Spain. Or maybe that’s Rioja.

Published in The Wine Merchant, August 2025.