Austrian wine week begins today!

Austrian wines were virtually unknown by the American public just ten years ago. Now, beginning today, May 8^th, they have an entire week dedicated to them, more here http://www.austrianwine.com/. With their unusual grapes and lack of marketing most people weren’t even aware of them. This store has always been a little ahead of the curve and we did have a couple of Zweigelts, St. Laurent, Blaufrankisch, and Gruners on the shelf but they were strictly a hand sell and really only the experimental “wine geeks” like ourselves and native Austrians had any interest.

Then something fun happened… The 1ltr bottle! I remember our first experience with it (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) about 10 years ago our salesmen from Michael Skurnick stopped in with a green 1 litre bottle from the Hofer vineyard. Of course the bottle immediately got our attention because it was and unusual size and shape, our sales rep pulled the cork that he had used to stop up the bottle as he was traveling around and proceeded to pour each of us a taste. A nice stoney, minerality and bright green apple nose jumped out of the glass and it carried through on our palate. Mmmm, this is a good one, a great summer quaffer and the price was great, $10 a bottle on the shelf, that is an extra glass in each bottle and it is really affordable! “We’ll take five cases please.”

The next day when it showed up the cork had been replaced with a soda bottle or beer cap.

“I’m not sure that people are going to be ok with this, maybe we should skip this experiment” I said to William.

“Hmmm, lets give it a try.” He said.

Needless to say the rest is history. In fact it has become THE iconic package for Gruner Veltliner and almost all of the producers are now using it. Fun!

So how big is the mark that Austria has made on the wine world? The Gruner Veltliner grape is quite mainstream now. The other grapes… well, they have had varying success. St Laurent has not really gotten much mass attention and Zweigelt has been a bit more successful in the mainstream but I wouldn’t say that it is a daily request like the Gruners. That is unless you are talking about Rosè… Gobelsberger has been one of our top selling Rosès for the past five years and it is 100% Zweigelt. This year Artner, also Zweigelt is tremendous! In fact it may out sell Gobelsberger this year here at Harry’s, Time will tell.

Greg recently brought in a certified Organic Gruner and it will be interesting to see how it is received. You never quite know how people will react to a given wine but since we are celebrating “Austrian Wine Week” we will keep our eyes and ears open. We have a special Saturday wine tasting happening this week and it will feature Austria. A good friend to Harry’s, Eric Litchfield, will be in to help us with the tasting. For those of you that have listened to me drone on about the man that taught me everything I know about the Riesling grapes or if you have been to our wine class that featured Riesling, you know this man.