Gumpoldskirchen - Thermenregion, Austria

The Village of Gumpoldskirchen

Today's post is a first for Fringe Wine.  The bottle that I will be looking at today was kindly provided as a sample by Circo Vino, an importer located in Evanston, Illinois, and is the first free sample that I've ever been sent.  They sent two bottles my way, this one and a varietal Rotgipfler which I will be examining tomorrow.  I know there's a lot of hullabaloo surrounding wine writers/critics/bloggers and the acknowledgement of free stuff, so I just want to put it right here up top.  This bottle was a free sample.  That said, I plan to evaluate it exactly the same way as if I paid retail price for it.

The title of today's post, Gumpoldskirchen, doesn't refer to a grape name, but rather to a place.  That place is the village of Gumpoldskirchen, located in the Thermenregion of eastern Austria (so named for the many spas or thermen found here), about 20 miles south of Vienna.  This region's climate is marked by hot summers, cold winters, and moderate rainfall.  The soils are littered with ancient marine fossils and, in general, are marked by heavy loam, gravel and clay.  This village was one of the shining stars of Austria and was at the forefront of quality production in the 18th and 19th Centuries.  Even into the early 20th Century, the wine from here was so well thought of that it was served at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip in 1947 and, further, was served at a 1961 summit meeting in Vienna between president John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev.  The wines made within the Gumpoldskirchen district were known as Gumpoldskirchen Königswein, or the King's wine, a reflection of their reputation and lofty status.

And then disaster struck.  In 1985, a few wineries in Austria were caught adding diethylene glycol, one of the main ingredients in antifreeze, to their wines in order to boost their body and sweetness.  The Austrian classification system is very similar to Germany's and is based on the sugar content of the grape must prior to fermentation. It was (and is) illegal to add any sugar to the fermenting must in order to boost your wine into a higher classification tier. The problem that the Austrian producers had was that many of them had contracts that specified that they had to provide a certain amount of wine from each tier to their buyers and when a series of cool vintages struck in the early 1980's, the grapes weren't able to ripen fully and the producers were stuck with an excess of wine at the lower tiers and a dearth of wine at the higher ones.  Simply adding sugar would have raised the overall sweetness level of the wine (illegally), but the body of the finished wine would be thinner and it would be more apparent than some doctoring had taken place.  Diethylene glycol tastes sweet and is viscous, meaning that if it were added to the must, the wine would taste sweeter and have the unctuous texture that consumers would expect to find in wines in those quality tiers.  Diethylene glycol also happens to be toxic and when the adulteration was discovered and brought to light in 1985, it ignited a huge scandal that had a devastating effect on the Austrian wine industry.  Exports dropped 90% virtually overnight and did not reach their pre-1985 levels until 2001.

The village of Gumpoldskirchen was not directly implicated in the scandal, but the tarring brush was wide and the wine industry across all of Austria suffered greatly and equally for the transgressions of a very few.  It has recovered, as has the rest of the Austrian wine industry, over the past few years, though it would be difficult to say that the current fame of Gumpoldskirchen in particular matches its illustrious past.  Gottfried Schellmann made wines in the Gumpoldskirchen region for over forty years, long enough to experience both the zenith and nadir of Austria's vinous reputation.  He owned nine hectares of vineyard land scattered throughout the Gumpoldskirchen region and was a driving force in attempting to elevate the reputation of these wines to their former glory.  He is quoted as saying "the pinnacle has not yet been reached in the Thermenregion," and one can imagine that the statement is not tied to any particular time, but is rather intended as a motto for ever striving to greater things.

Fred Loimer

And then there's Fred Loimer, a well-regarded grower and winemaker from the Kamptal region of Austria.  Fred ventured into the Thermenregion in 2002 looking for new challenges and new opportunities in the different climate and with the different indigenous grapes that the Thermenregion offers.  Fred and Gottfried partnered up in 2002 and when Gottfried passed away in 2005, Fred stepped into an ownership role with the Schellmann properties and has continued to make wines from their estate fruit.  All of the vineyards in the Gumpoldsregion that are bottled under the Schellmann label are biodynamically farmed and Fred is one of the founding members of the "Respect" association of biodynamic farmers in the region.

There are several different wines in the Schellmann portfolio, but perhaps the most interesting is the basic Gumpoldskirchen cuveé.  The wine is based on the Michsatz, a traditional field blend from the region that consists of Rotgipfler, Zierfandler, Muskateller, Traminer (our old friend Savagnin), and Riesling.  In the next few days, I'll be posting more about Rotgipfler and Zierfandler as I was also generously given varietal bottlings of these two grapes.  Muskateller is the Austrian word for the local member of the Muscat family of grapes, and it will also likely get its own mention here before too long.

The bulk of the Gumpoldskirchen cuveé is made up of Rotgipfler and Zierfandler, a classic blend in the Thermenregion that is called Spätrot Rotgipfler when they are the only two grapes used.  According to the winery's fact sheet (in German, as the English version contains a typo here), this bottling has a touch of Muskateller and Traminer, but no Riesling in it.  The grapes are crushed and left to macerate with the skins for a short period of time before being pressed.  Fermentation takes place in both stainless steel and large, neutral oak barrels, where the wines are matured for a further eight months after fermentation ends.

The wine I was offered was the 2008 Gumpoldskirchen cuveé, which I am told retails for about $25.  The wine is not currently available in Massachusetts, but should be by the end of the year.  It is available in NY, NJ, IL, CA, FL, OR, and WA.  In the glass, the wine was a medium lemon color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with juicy pear, ripe grapefruit, honeysuckle flower and a distinct Muscat-like peachy, flowery smell.  I am a sucker for intensely aromatic white wines and this was pushing all the right buttons for me.  On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were racy grapefruit and orange citrus flavors with honeysuckle flowers and a bitter, pithy finish.  There was a distinctive chalky kind of minerality to the wine that I don't always find welcome (hello there Chasselas), but here, the primary fruit flavors were well defined enough that the chalkiness wasn't to the wine's detriment (whether it's to the wine's benefit is a more personal question that you should probably answer for yourself).  As the wine warmed and opened up, nectarine stonefruit started to become more apparent and the Muscat-like character calmed down a bit.  The wine gives the sense of being perhaps a bit off-dry, but the residual sugar content is purportedly only 2.9 g/l, so it's probably just the ripe fruit flavors here that are contributing to the illusion.  Overall, this was a very enjoyable wine that is definitely suited for fans of interesting, complex, aromatic whites like Muscat or Riesling.

Savagnin: Two Traditional Expressions - Jura, France

Yesterday we explored the family history of the Savagnin grape and took a look at two bottlings from the Jura that were made in a more modern style.  Today I'd like to talk a bit about some of the more traditional wine-making methods in the Jura, especially the methods used in the vinification and maturation of the Savagnin grape.

The word that sums the Jura up for most wine enthusiasts is "oxidation."  In almost no other wine region on earth is the production of wines (white wines, in any case) that have been excessively exposed to oxygen considered a good thing, but in the Jura, it's the most defining characteristic.  Is it because they just love the unusual flavor compounds that are created when their wines are exposed to oxygen during maturation?  Well, kind of.  In order to understand the oxidized white wines of the Jura, it's necessary to first understand something about the signature wine of the region, Vin Jaune.

To make Vin Jaune, first you need really ripe Savagnin grapes, which sometimes go by the name Naturé in the Jura.  You vinify these grapes like you would any white wine and then you pour the wine into 60 gallon neutral oak barrels.  It's at this point that things start to go a little off the rails for Vin Jaune.  For most wines, when you pour them into a barrel for maturation, you try to fill the barrel as close to the top as you can so that there is virtually no air in the barrel.  Since wood is porous and the barrel is curved, some air is introduced to the wine anyway either through the small amount of headspace (air in the top of the barrel) or through the pores of the wood, but you try to limit that contact as much as you can.  Some of the wine evaporates and the barrels have to be continuously refilled to keep the headspace in the barrel as small as possible.  This is the method that the two wines I wrote about yesterday were made with and is the method that most barrel-aged wines all over the world are made with as well.

With Vin Jaune, the process is different.  The wine is poured off into the neutral oak barrels and a larger than usual amount of headspace is left to expose as much of the surface of the wine to the air as possible..  As the wine evaporates, the barrel is not topped up and, with a bit of luck, a film of yeast called voile forms on the top of the wine.  Those of you who are Sherry aficionados will no doubt be reminded of the flor that forms during the maturation of Sherry.  The voile of the Jura is similar to the flor of the Sherry region, but it is a different strain of yeast which thrives in the lower alcohol base wine of Vin Jaune and is better suited to the colder winters of the Jura.  The film can take between two and three years to fully develop and it never gets as thick as the flor of Spain.  The voile imparts its own nutty, tangy flavors to the wine while also serving to protect it from bacterial spoilage and from excessive exposure to oxygen.  In order to be bottled as Vin Jaune, the wine may not be bottled until six years and three months after the harvest and while the wine doesn't need to stay in barrel for that long to be eligible for the Vin Jaune label, it often stays in for the overwhelming majority of this time period.

Sometimes the process goes awry.  For one reason or another, the voile may die off prematurely before the wine has developed sufficiently to meet the standards of the producer for Vin Jaune.  Six years is a long time and everything really needs to go exactly right for a barrel to make it to the finish line, especially since many, if not all, of the estates in the Jura rely on nature to see the voile process through the end.  Very few producers inoculate their barrels with yeast culture so the formation of the voile is always something of a gamble and when it's gone, it's gone and not coming back.  When something does go awry, what happens to the wine?  Well, it is often bottled as-is, provided that whatever went wrong in the barrel didn't spoil the wine or make it undrinkable.  A large number of the bottles that you see marked as Naturé du Jura or Savagnin are wines that didn't complete the full Vin Jaune maturation process.  These wines show a bit of the tang and oxidative nuttiness that marks full blown Vin Jaune, but are not nearly as deep or complex as those wines can be.

I do have some bottles of Vin Jaune at home, and I will open them and write about them once they've properly matured, but they do require some time in bottle to reach their peak and mine aren't quite there yet.  What I do have, though, are a few Savagnin based table wines from the Jura made in the more traditional, oxidative style.  The first bottle I tried was from Domaine Rolet Pere et Fils (who longtime readers might recognize from my Crémant de Jura post).  I picked up a bottle of their 2007 Naturé du Jura for about $17 from my friends at the Wine Bottega.  In the glass, the wine was a medium gold color with nutty aromatics of pine nuts and hazelnuts.  There was a touch of appley fruit and a kind of a buttered popcorn kind of smell to it. On the palate, the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of pine nuts, sesame seeds, dried apples and again that buttered popcorn flavor.  The wine was savory and incredibly interesting.  It was just screaming out for some nutty salty cheese and since I didn't have any Comté cheese, a specialty of the Jura, I made do with some Parmigiano-Reggiano slivers that really hit the spot.

The second wine I tried was something that Matt at the Wine Bottega found especially for me.  It was a bottle of the 1998 Domaine Berthet-Bondet Cotes du Jura Savagnin bottling which he sold to me for $25.  In the glass, the wine was a medium gold color with an attractively aromatic nose filled with toasted almonds, hazelnuts, and toasted pecans.  The fruit was mostly gone from this wine, but it was still kicking with those savory, nutty smells.  The palate followed the nose pretty closely with buttered nut flavors and a kind of sawdust/old barn kind of taste that doesn't sound particularly appetizing, but hear me out for a second.  When I was a little kid growing up in rural Georgia, my grandparents used to have these massive pecan trees in their yard.  When we'd visit, we'd go out and pick the pecans off the ground and then go out to my grandfather's old barn to crack them open with an old vise and eat them.  Drinking this wine brought me right back to that place and to the smell of the fresh nuts especially the shells of those nuts and the smell of the old wood and the sawdust in that old barn that my grandfather built.  He passed away over ten years ago, but I still miss him quite a bit and drinking this wine was such a nice way to go back to that time in my life.  It's difficult for me to tease out the parts of me that enjoyed this wine on its technical merits and the part of me that enjoyed it for the emotional resonance it had with me.  Frankly, I'm not all that interested in the question and will just submit that it was a deeply pleasurable and rewarding experience to drink this wine and my hat is off to the winemaker and to the shop that enable me to have that experience.

I'm writing this post and a related Savagnin post (which was published yesterday) to celebrate the publication of a bit I wrote on the Jura for the AG Wine team for use in their wine app.  You can check out AG Wine's website here or you can go here to download the app for your iPhone or iPad.  It's definitely one of the most informative and useful wine apps that I've used and I enthusiastically recommend it for people interested in learning more about wine and less about wine scores.  I've also written the section on Alsace and the section for Savoie as well.  Their free Wine News app also syndicates my posts so you can follow Fringe Wine and many other great writers on the go for free.  In the interest of full disclosure, I do not receive any financial compensation from AG Wine for any of the content or promotion that I provide to them.

Savagnin: Two Modern Expressions - Arbois, Jura, France

Savagnin is a tough grape to write about.  It has the difficult double-distinction of being a very old vine and of being genetically unstable.  Put the two together and you get a recipe for widespread mutation over a long period of time which, of course, leads to confusion.  We'll do what we can with it, though, and see what light we can shed.

Savagnin is currently best known for its role in white wines of all sorts in the Jura region of France.  The French ampelographer Pierre Galet, though, had a hunch that the grape known as Savagnin in the Jura might actually be the same as a grape called Traminer from the Südtirol region of Italy despite minor differences between the leaf shapes and chemical makeup of the two plants.  Traminer, named for the town of Tramin in Südtirol, was once widely planted throughout Germany, Alsace, Hungary and Austria, though it is rare to come across a grape by that name today (the grape called Traminer in Austria is actually Roter Veltliner, a totally unrelated grape).  Recent DNA profiling has proven that Traminer and Savagnin are actually one and the same grape.

And that's the end of the easy part.  Somewhere along the line, a Savagnin plant mutated into a vine that grew pink-skinned instead of green-skinned berries.  This pink-skinned version is known as Red Traminer or Savagnin Rose.  At some other point in its history, this pink-skinned version mutated again and picked up a much headier, more muscat-like aroma and spicier flavor profile and thus Gewürztraminer was born.  Over time, people in many places confused the Red Traminer vines and the Gewürztraminer vines, since visually they look nearly identical, to the extent that it is currently theorized that many of the vines known in Germany as Gewürztraminer may actually be Red Traminer and they point to the German Gewürztraminer's tendency to have muted aromatics as proof.  There's also an obscure grape in Alsace called Klevener de Heiligenstein which is also believed to be Red Traminer, though this grape is not related at all to the grape called Klevner in Alsace which is actually Pinot Blanc.

We're not done yet.  There are other grapes grown in eastern Europe that may or may not be Savagnin or a mutation of it.  There's a grape called Frankisch in Austria, one called Heida or Païen in Switzerland, and one called Formentin in Hungary that may be Savagnin or one of its clonal variants.  In the cru of Ayze in the Savoie region of France, a sparkling wine is made from a grape called Gringet that has long been thought to be identical to Savagnin, but which is now believed to be something totally different.  In Australia, much of what had been grown as Albarino is in actuality Savagnin, though the two grapes are not genetically related.  The Savagnin Noir of the Jura is none other than Pinot Noir, which Savagnin is somehow related to somewhere down the line.  Savagnin is also thought to have some link to Viognier, though the exact familial relationship is unclear.

And all that only covers trying to figure out exactly what Savagnin is as a grape.  Once you actually get into the Jura and try to navigate the enormous number of different styles that the grape can be put to, well, then things get really crazy.  I'll get into some of the more traditional styles that Savagnin is put to in a post later this week.  Today, though, I'm going to be looking at two wines that are made in a more modern style in the Jura.

The first is a wine made from 100% Savagnin grapes that are vinified in a more or less straightforward white wine style.  The grapes are picked and selected before being partially fermented in temperature controlled stainless steel.  The partially fermented juice is then moved to neutral oak barrels, where malolactic fermentation also occurs.  Usually in the Jura, when white wines are placed into barrels, as the juice evaporates through the pores in the wood, the barrel is left alone so there is an increasing headspace in the barrel that allows oxygen (and sometimes a yeast film) to come into contact with the wine.  To make this wine, though, the barrels were topped up every 10 days to prevent oxidation and dosed with SO2 to prevent the voile from forming and to preserve the fruit characteristics of the grape. This is a very unusual, very modern way of treating Savagnin grapes in the Jura and this bottling is the only example of that style that I've been able to find (though I know others exist).

The wine that I'm talking about is the 2008 Domaine de la Tournelle "Fleur de Savagnin" which I was able to pick up from my friends at the Wine Bottega for about $33. This is a small, biodynamic estate located in the town of Arbois in northern Jura.  In the glass, the wine was a medium gold color with a very aromatic nose of peaches and apricots, honey, melon, honeysuckle and flowers.  On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with high acidity and flavors of lemon, grapefruit, honeysuckle, apricot, ripe apples, creamy citrus and a touch of nuttiness.  The wine was wonderfully balanced as the creamy mouthfeel was grounded very nicely with a solid, nervy vein of acidity which can be distractingly high as the wine warms towards room temperature.  The flavors and aromas were complex and well-integrated.  Overall, this was an exceptional experience and is definitely something to seek out if the oxidized white wines from the Jura aren't exactly to your liking.  Even if you are a fan of the nutty white wines of the Jura, check this out to get a sense for the grape in a more unadulterated format.

The second wine that I was able to try is the 2007 Philippe Bornard "L'Ivresse de Noé," or, "The Inebriation of Noah."  This wine is made from late-harvested (in November) Savagnin grapes that are also vinified in a non-oxidative style.  I was able to pick up a 500mL bottle from my friends at the Wine Bottega for about $40.  In the glass, the wine is a medium gold color with a powerfully aromatic nose of grapefruit and citrus peel, buttery hazelnuts, honey and ripe apples.  On the palate, the wine was full bodied with high acidity and flavors of apple, pineapple, lemon curd, honey and a touch of nuttiness.  The wine is just off-dry, though it's tough to notice it thanks to the bracing acidity.  This is a decadent experience to drink and is probably one of my favorite wines of the past year.  Intense, ripe, honeyed fruits drape themselves all over your palate and linger for what feels like an eternity.  If I could afford to drink this every day, I would do it in a heartbeat.

I'm writing this post and a related Savagnin post (which you can read here) to celebrate the publication of a bit I wrote on the Jura for the AG Wine team for use in their wine app.  You can check out AG Wine's website here or you can go here to download the app for your iPhone or iPad.  It's definitely one of the most informative and useful wine apps that I've used and I enthusiastically recommend it for people interested in learning more about wine and less about wine scores.  I've also written the section on Alsace and the section for Savoie as well.  Their free Wine News app also syndicates my posts so you can follow Fringe Wine and many other great writers on the go for free.  In the interest of full disclosure, I do not receive any financial compensation from AG Wine for any of the content or promotion that I provide to them.

An additional note, this post has been translated into Ukrainian and that translation can be read here.