Best White Wine on Earth by Stuart Pigott

Author:Stuart Pigott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2014-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

The greatest of them is the Riesling Smaragd from the Achleiten site of Weissenkirchen, and its greatness begins with the enormous diversity of aromas ranging from herbal and licorice notes through black currant and citrus to peach. Then comes that special Rudi Pichler balance between the ripeness, the “firmness” from the grape tannins, and the mineral freshness of the aftertaste. However, all Rudi’s other Riesling Smaragd, the blended Terrassen, and the single-vineyard bottlings from the Steinriegl, Kirchweg, and Hochrain come close to matching it. In a way, his much more moderately priced Riesling Federspielis is the more remarkable wine, because this is a category in which many Wachau producers fall down. It has a cocktail of fruit aromas (apple, peach, citrus), is juicy and harmonious, and is an ideal introduction to the region’s Rieslings for a price that isn’t inflated by the aura of the Wachau.

Much of that aura goes back to Josef Jamek (1919–2011) of the famous restaurant and winery that still bear his name. The combination was decisive for the region, since from the late 1950s the restaurant was a day-trip and weekend destination for the well-to-do, famous, and successful Viennese. “Lass uns zum Jamek gehen!” Let’s do Jamek! That wasn’t just the announcement that you’d selected a fancy restaurant, but also a statement of your social position, or at the very least the serious aspiration to become “somebody.” The restaurant was both a business that turned a healthy profit and Jamek’s stage, and a visit here was a highly ritualized performance. I was lucky to experience it several times before Jamek’s retirement in 1996 at age 77. The understated graciousness of this would seem very old-fashioned today, but this is undeniably the backstory to the region’s contemporary pretensions to grandeur.

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