I taste a bunch-o-wine (technical term for more than most people). So each week, I share some of my wine reviews (mostly from samples) and tasting notes in a “mini-review” format.
They are meant to be quirky, fun, and (mostly) easily-digestible reviews of (mostly) currently available wines (click here for the skinny on how to read them), and are presented links to help you find them, so that you can try them out for yourself. Cheers!
2016 Henschke Henry’s Seven (Barossa): Violets, leather, smoke, blackberries, black cherries… but then, I guess we should expect that a lot can get packed into something this big and lovely… $45 A-
Back in May (I know, I know…), I was a media guest for the 2019 Austrian Wine Summit, during which I was lucky enough to participate in a tour “along the Danube,” visiting and tasting through Austria’s classic wine producing regions.
It was pretty much as awesome as that sentence makes it sound.
Even so, I’ve (obviously over-)hesitated to jump into the coverage of that jaunt, mostly because such media group travels rarely lend themselves to overt story-lines. You visit; you taste; you all scramble to take pictures and find coffee; you eat; you drink; you move on to the next visit.
You also learn; in some cases, quite a lot, even if the stories being told lack the obvious dramatic flair of conflict. And so I think for our humble little coverage of Austria here, the stories will be the regions and wines themselves; many of which you almost certainly won’t have tried, because many lack appropriate representation in the USA (sorry!).
Our first stop: tasting at one of Austria’s oldest wine estates, Freigut Thallern, in Thermenregion. Bordering Vienna and the Wienerwald woodlands, where a mere two thousand or so hectares of vineyards are divided into a whopping forty-two different community villages, Thermenregion’s average plots are understandably small – and the average yields even smaller (in fact, the lowest in all of Austria). You’ll find a thermal fault and plenty of thermal springs here, but interestingly no volcanic soils. Another interesting tidbit: Thermenregion’s white wines (which dominate in the region’s north), tend to see a bit of skin contact during vinification, an historical remnant used to help preserve the wines for travel. Speaking of the wines…
I taste a bunch-o-wine (technical term for more than most people). So each week, I share some of my wine reviews (mostly from samples) and tasting notes in a “mini-review” format.
They are meant to be quirky, fun, and (mostly) easily-digestible reviews of (mostly) currently available wines (click here for the skinny on how to read them), and are presented links to help you find them, so that you can try them out for yourself. Cheers!
Not all of CA wine country is ablaze. Yes, the impacts are horrifically devastating to many, and the situation is extremely fluid and, buy the time this publishes, undoubtedly will have changed again (hopefully, for the better).
Most importantly (in my view), as a wine lover, you should continue to drink and buy wines from the impacted areas (primarily Sonoma County). Not just now, but long after the smoke from these horrendous fires has cleared (and before you ask… harvest is almost totally completed in the impacted areas, so there’s little chance of smoke taint from the current fires making its way into anything that will be bottled with a 2019 vintage on the label). That might be the best way to ensure a speedy recovery for the wine brands that get hit the hardest by the current blazes.
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