Drinks of the Month
Wine of the week: Weninger Horitschoner Blaufränkisch 2013
This gorgeous fruity Austrian red ticks all my boxes. It’s exactly the sort of wine I want to drink at this time of year - light (12.5%), fragrant and juicy - the type I can equally well drink with fish as meat.
It benefits from being lightly chilled but you don’t have to. The bottle looks great on the table and is sealed with a screwcap for hassle-free opening.
I find Austria one of the most exciting wine producing countries in Europe right now and Blaufränkisch (known as Kekfrankos in Hungary) its most appealing red wine variety. Think Beaujolais if you can't quite imagine it.
The producer’s website is worth a visit too not least to find out about the Weninger Wine orchestra which plays on instruments made from materials used in winemaking. You can hear them play the theme from Hawaii Five-O on YouTube. Endearingly nutty.
Given the wine is organic and biodynamic It’s well priced at £13.99 from Noble Green Wines, £14.40 from eclectictastes.co.uk or £14.95 in London branches of Vinoteca. It’s imported by (who else?) Les Caves de Pyrène who send me a sample to try.
Weingut Brundlmayer Grüner Veltliner Alte Reben 1999
A cellar clear-out at our French house this week unearthed this neglected treasure from 1999. I couldn’t imagine that it would still be drinkable having travelled from England to France when we moved most of our belongings here six years ago.
In fact it was astonishingly fresh and delicious - not remotely oxidised - and didn’t even fall apart in the glass.
Obviously it wasn’t cheap (£11.15-£15.56 back in 2001, I would guess) but I still couldn’t imagine it would have aged so well. There were still some bright fruit flavours (grapefruit and starfruit) and a wonderful complexity - the kind of wine that could take almost anything fishy or vegetable-based in its stride.
Looking it up on wine-searcher the most recent vintage of the Alte Reben I could find in the UK was the 2007 which is stocked by AG Wines for £23.99 (minimum order 6 bottles) - a baby by 1999 standards.
There are plenty of other Brundlmayer Grüners on wine-searcher.com though. The Old Bridge has halves of the 2011 Berg Vogelsang for £9.95 (Ocado has full bottles for £16.99) while The Sampler has the Gruner Kamptaler Terrassen 2012 for £15.75. It would be fascinating to buy a case to dip into over the next decade, assuming, which of course is by no means certain, that this bottle wasn't an aberration.
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