2010 Prager Grüner Veltliner Weissenkirchen Achleiten Smaragd

The Prager 2010 Gruner Veltliner Smaragd Achleiten displays pristine white peach, blueberry, citrus, and sweet pea fruit in shimmering interplay with diversely saline, wet stone, and crystalline mineral nuances. Hints of green tea, chamomile and gentian add allure from the nose to this wine’s long and vivacious tail. There is buoyancy, near delicacy such as you’ll seldom encounter in a Smaragd, yet with no sacrifice in succulence of ripe fruit. Palpable CO2 enhances this wine’s sense of lift and refreshment and, thinks Bodenstein, will enhance its longevity as well. I would expect this beauty to be well worth following for the better part of two decades. “True, we had higher than normal acid levels,” relates Toni Bodenstein, “but I did things differently than in other years; three things, namely. The first was to let the grapes hang especially long, and all of the Smaragd was harvested in November. Then, I employed up to 17 hours of skin contact, which reduced the acidity by a gram, sometimes even more. Of course, that was tartaric acid, but due to the long hang time and healthy fruit, we had a high ratio of tartaric. And after long fermentations – not ended before February – we added no sulfur whatsoever and retained the fine lees, which we then stirred weekly through April, making for even higher extract levels and more buffering. And given the high extract and low pH levels, these wines needed comparatively little sulfur at bottling, which with the exception of one early portion of Federspiel, took place in May. To have de-acidified them,” he concludes emphatically, “would have been to risk stripping them of their souls.” Given the tiny size of his crop, Bodenstein elected to forgo separate bottlings from two sites each in Riesling and Gruner Veltliner, instead supplementing his two Federspiel bottlings with that fruit (even if their vineyard designations on the labels stayed the same) “and even then,” he notes, “with Weitenberg and Liebenberg added into the Hinter der Burg, for example, I ended up with less than 50% of the volume of that Federspiel in 2009.” Importer: Winebow, Montvale, NJ; tel. (201) 445-0620