2012 Gruner Veltliner Achleiten Smaragd

The Prager 2012 Gruner Veltliner Smaragd Achleiten delivers a scintillating aromatic bouquet of iris, green tea and herbal essences. On a glossy, silken, buoyant palate, ginseng, iris root, beet root, citrus rind and Bosc peach are suffused with those elements found in the nose, conveying a metaphorically cooling yet piquant as well as both soothing and refreshing impression. The savory interface of herbal essences, mineral salts, iodine-tinged crustacean shell reduction, and roots renders the long finish here saliva-inducing and next sip-compelling. This beauty should be worth pursuing through at least 2025. Weissenkirchen, opines its mayor and most-famous vintner Toni Bodenstein, had luck in the lottery that determined whether in the generally dry growing season of 2012, enough rainfall occurred where you were to keep the vines steadily metabolizing. In apparent testimony to that luck, harvest here was finished already on the third of November with the picking of the Wachstum Toni Bodenstein Riesling. I did not have opportunity to taste the entire range of Prager 2012 Gruner Veltliners: there was so little wine (due largely to disrupted flowering of this variety) that they were sold out very quickly; several were not available stateside; and Bodenstein confesses to cellaring among them only his Achleiten bottlings – else, he notes, his library would grow cumbersomely large! Importer: Winebow, Montvale, NJ; tel. (201) 445-0620