Austria’s Great Dry Whites, Plus Chile’s Inspiring Cinsault and Pais: Weekly Tasting Report (March 29-April 4)

We rated 681 wines from 14 countries for our latest Weekly Tasting Report, with chardonnays and pinot noirs dominating the top scorers. James Suckling covered the lion’s share in his tasting report on Santa Rita Hills earlier this week, but Senior Editor Stuart Pigott caught up with a number of late-bottled Austrian dry whites from the 2021 vintage that were spectacular in various ways.

“The Velich Chardonnay Austria Tiglat 2021 is both super-concentrated and super-elegant with an almost endless finish,” Stuart said. “It’s the greatest Austrian chardonnay I have ever encountered."

Winemaker Heinz Velich first produced his single-vineyard chardonnay from the Tiglat site on the eastern side of the Neusiedlersee lake back in 1991. Heinz has been perfecting this Burgundy-inspired style since then. “I remember tasting with him in the winery’s cramped old cellar back in the late 1990s and being impressed,” Stuart said. “The 2021 Tiglat is close to perfect!"

READ MORE TOP 100 WINES OF AUSTRIA 2022

On the northern side of that lake, which straddles the border between Austria and Hungary, Leo Sommer has been reinventing the nation’s signature dry white gruner veltliner and riesling wines.

“The most extraordinary of these is the Sommer Riesling Austria Handwerk 2021, which combines the flintiness of a top Loire dry white with the focus and minerality I associate with Austria,” Stuart said. “Leo Sommer’s gruner veltliners from the Himmelreich and Halser sites are also remarkably expressive in 2021, tasting nothing like the wines this grape gives in the Danube regions."

Stuart was also able to get his first taste of German wines from the 2022 vintage at a trade event attended by dozens of the leading producers. 2022 was extreme in Germany not only because it was very warm, but also because of the worst drought in living memory.

“The grape vine can root deeply, but it is not a cactus, and it either needs to rain in intervals during the growing season or water must flow out of irrigation tubes,” Stuart said. “In 2022 there was no significant rain between late June and the beginning of the harvest. Traditionally in Germany that’s not a problem, so few vineyards have irrigation systems. A lot of low-tech improvisation happened as a result."

Many of the wines Stuart tasted were cask samples that will be bottled shortly. We prefer not to rate white wines like this until after bottling. For that reason you won’t find notes below for the 2022 vintage wines from, for example, Carl Loewen in the Mosel or Donnhoff in the Nahe, although Stuart tasted them. “However, these tastings gave me a good feeling for this extreme vintage, and my first impression was much better than I initially expected," he said.

For Stuart, the just-bottled Robert Weil Riesling Rheingau Kiedricher Trocken 2022 is an excellent example of the new German vintage. “It has stacks of citrus and exotic fruit along with something exotic, but also lively acidity and a well-integrated tough of tannin,” he said. “The surprise is how light on their feet the best 2022s like this wine are."

Some of the weaknesses Stuart found were no surprise: “Tannins aren’t talk about much when it comes to German white wines, but in 2022 tannin management was the winemaking challenge. There’s more tannin than normal because the drought resulted in grapes with thicker skins, and the tannins are in the grape’s skins. There are a few wines with tannins that stuck out."

There were also a couple of downright strange wines, Stuart said: “I never came across a dry white that smelled like it had volatile acidity, i.e., a hint of vinegar, but analytically does not have that problem. I put it down to young vines and the drought.“ The wine in question was a cask sample so is not included below. Stuart will retaste it in a couple of months.

It’s early days, but Stuart thinks he spotted an important tendency in 2022. “Limestone holds water like a sponge, so it is logical that in an extreme drought year wines that grew on limestone, like the Luckert Silvaner Franken Sulzfelder Alte Reben Trocken 2022, should shine.“

It has a breathtaking chalky minerality fora village wine and is simultaneously ripe and generous yet bright, “ending with a starburst of Amalfi lemon, garden herbs ad stony character,“ Stuart said. See the notes below for the other excellent Luckert wines from the 2022 vintage.

READ MORE TOP 100 WINES OF GERMANY 2022

Among the highlights of our tastings in Hong Kong over the past week were Pedro Parra’s inspiring cinsault and pais wines from Chile. Parra comes from a family of lawyers and started late in the wine business. In his own words, he “lost his virginity to wine” in Vosne Romanee, France, in 2003, at a time where he was more interested in wine terroirs while working as a soil geologist.

Parra is now one of Chile’s most respected terroir specialists, and he consults for many wineries in Chile as well as producers in other countries and regions, including Burgundy. But he also makes his own delicious, dry-farmed cinsault and pais in his hometown, Itata – where he said a touch of Burgundy’s Chambolle wines can be found in his cinsault and more austere pais offerings.

“This Chambolle expression rests more with cinsault, as there is no pinot noir here, so cinsault is my pinot noir,” Parra said during a Zoom interview with Senior Editor Zekun Shuai.

Indeed, the Pedro Parra y Familia Valle de Itata Newk 2021 and Pedro Parra y Familia Valle de Itata Miles 2021 push the limits of cinsault, showing great clarity, airiness and drinkability. These two wines, which Parra named for two of his favorite jazz musicians, Sonny “Newk” Rollins and Miles Davis, are simply delicious to drink.

READ MORE TOP 100 WINES OF CHILE 2022

Compared with the Miles 2021, which is akin to a Vosne Romanee wine, the Newk 2021 is nervier, more mineral and also more austere. The Miles is fleshier on the palate with chalky but well-dissolved tannins, but both are slyly reductive with white pepper funk, wild raspberries, pomegranate and grapefruit citrus underpinned by bright color and superb clarity. Whole clusters help cinsault keep on its feet.

Parra says that both cinsault and pais are terroir-selective and terroir-reflective. As a more generous grape, cinsault needs austere soils such as granitic sand, which gives acidity and tension. For pais, which is quite austere in the sense that it can have a very light color and bold tannins (like nebbiolo in Barbaresco), it needs more generous terroir, such as basalt soils.

His Pedro Parra y Familia Pais Valle de Itata Soulpit 2021 comes from century-old, dry-farmed vines in silty basalt soils and shows dark-earth, white-pepper and tiger balm notes in the wild berry fruit, along with assertive tannins.

All the wines from Parra are full of life and soul, and they are reminiscent of the wines of Envinate, from Tenerife on the Canary Islands, which is also known for its pais (or listan prieto) wines. Both producers use the tea infusion method in their winemaking, which perfectly reveals the innate beauty of the fruit and, more important, the essence of the place. For Parra, the result is wines that are delectable, characterful and dangerously drinkable.

– Stuart Pigott and Zekun Shuai contributed to this report.

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the past week by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.

Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.