When I say Austria, probably the first thing that comes to
mind is Vienna…or possibly the Anschluss. Skiing and sausages and Sigmund Freud
and strudels and schnitzel and maybe even schnapps, but not wine. If you
extended it to Germany, most of those things would also apply, along with beer
and a host of other sundries, but wine might be restricted, if one thought of
it at all, to Blue Nun, ice wine and/or Riesling.
One of the best things about the internet is that it makes
the world a bit smaller and in many ways, this wine sort of highlights the
purpose of this column and list. Our story with this wine begins during the
last week of December 2013, when I was at the liquor store to get some mead for our
customary New Year’s Eve celebration. As I was no longer working in fairly
close proximity to this wine store, I’d started trying to load up whenever I
went shopping, buying a month or so at a time, depending on what’s on SPA at
the time.
In this case, I can’t remember if I stumbled down a wrong
aisle or how I got there, but I found myself in the German section, which is
notable only for how little of the available store shelf space it takes,
percentage-wise. On an earlier trip, I had noticed a wine with a lizard on it
that looked interesting, but as I already had a full basket, I made a mental
note and then forgot about it for a few months, until the last week of 2013.
Bad job doing that as this wine from the St. Laurent grape
has many similarities to a good Pinot Noir, but with the additional bonus of
being relatively undiscovered and unknown. It is fairly prominently berry and
the mouth heft is probably about in the middle, but it has some intriguing spicy
notes to it and requires a fairly decent airing time to really gain some of the
smoother tones. It is almost like a gamier version of a good Pinot Noir.
This is ultimately sort of a middle of the road wine, coming in at
between $11 - $13 most of the time I’ve seen it. I have never seen this
particular brand on SPA, ever, which precludes it from SPA Only. While I did
greatly enjoy the bottle, I didn’t love it enough for it to be a Standard, so
by process of elimination, this comes in as a Mixed.
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