No one talked about it. I had no idea what to expect. This is very odd; growers are always sending you their vintage reports, and friends are always calling to report the new wines they’ve tasted, but the silence around the Austrian `05s was almost ominous, as if no one wanted to talk about them. So I arrived a little wary.

I was bemused by the first wines I encountered, two `05s I drank with Peter at dinner the first evening, and the collection of the first grower I visited. The wines seemed adamant and unyielding and I thought “I’m in for a long eight days…” but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

In essence the 2005 Austrian vintage boils down to rain, specifically that which occurred in September. It was over-plentiful, and did damage, some of which could not be mitigated by the perfect “golden October” that followed. Ironically, the rain was most damaging to the best grapes, i.e., to those most ripe when it fell. There were frequent reports of red grapes literally exploding; waterlogged thin-skinned berries simply came apart from within. More ominous were reports of red grapes rotting from the inside, in the juice, sometimes invisible from looking at the skins. Other reports described a dilemma faced by white-grape growers, whether to pick before physiological ripeness or risk rampant botrytis by waiting. All in all it looked like the kind of strugglesome year after which one has lots of new gray hairs.

On day-2 I saw my first collection of absolutely delicious wines, and heard my first reports of a vintage not only “managed”, but indeed absolutely superb. And as the days proceeded I became more impressed, and at the end I saw wines the likes of which I have never seen.

Among the whites are many wines so uncanny as to compel thoughts of miracle. First, they are gorgeously creamy, and yet also amazingly detailed, mineral and herbal. When was the last time you ever saw those two facets in the same wine? Normally a creamy texture goes with overripeness, lack of structure; normally a detailed articulation of mineral-herbal nuances goes along with a vigorously bright, acid-driven structure. 2005 unites them both. Mineral-meets-cream!

But you needed steel nerves, or unerring canopy work, or relentless bunch-thinning, or all of the above, and at the end you didn’t get much wine. No one who’s any good got much wine.

I was truly convinced the reds would be diluted and possibly even unclean, but what I tasted was completely lovely, though I can only cringe at the effort and sweat required to make them. Not to mention the mingy yields.  But again, elegant, charming, substantive and clean.

Oh those words again. “Elegant”….are there still any holdouts who still think this is a euphemism for undernourished? I promise I don’t use it that way. Elegance is not the absence of substance; it is the presence of grace, form and proportion. Similarly, charm isn’t the absence of “seriousness”; it is the presence of deliciousness.

Riesling and Veltliner fared about the same, and I can’t claim a preference. For each grower whose Veltiners prevailed, his neighbor made better Rieslings. These things were extremely grower-specific, and more to the point, weather-specific, as storms were selective where they struck. I saw this with my own eyes standing in a violent hail-storm (marble-sized hailstones fell for five entire minutes) in Mautern, whereas no one more than two miles away reported any hail at all. Tempting as it is to scoff when anyone tells you “We got the rain but the next village didn’t”, the inconvenient fact is it’s sometimes true.

Botrytis is a theme of the `05s, but it’s cleaner and more integrated than the sometimes-mushroomy flavors it bestowed upon certain unfortunate `04s. Indeed the vintage more than once called to mind 1998, and showed me how far the growers have come since then. Because 2005 is neither overripe nor unclean. Apropos 2004, now that it’s behind us (and trust me, in Austria the year-old vintage is history in that white-hot market) I was able to speak candidly with several growers about the thing I couldn’t fathom: how they said they selected obsessively but the wines still tasted botrytisey. I told them my theory that botrytis could create in effect an ambience in a vineyard which would show in the wines even if optically detectable berries were discarded. This was confirmed. One grower said “Even if you throw away the grapes you can see, there’s still botrytis on the leaves and stems, and sometimes it’s in the juice even if it’s invisible on the skins. Imagine, if you have it on the stems then you have it throughout the harvest buckets even after you green-harvested and “selected;” that’s why it’s so important to use small buckets you empty more frequently.”

After the amazing success among the “little” wines in `04, I had the strong sense the growers tried hard to repeat. Some of them succeeded. It is touching to see them go to such lengths in a short vintage to ensure the everyday wines will be so delightful. It means even more than their brilliance at the level of the stellar.

Speaking of stellar….

WINERY OF THE VINTAGE

Can’t stop at one.  They are Schloss Gobelsburg, who are starting to exhibit a Midas-touch across the range, and Nikolaihof, who confounded the mighty odds against a biodynamic estate in a botrytis vintage and produced an astonishingly meditative collection; if Gobelsburg embodies brilliance then Nikolaihof embodies wisdom.

GRüVE OF THE VINTAGE

A toss-up between Hiedler’s Thal-Novemberlese and Gobelsburg’s Lamm.

RIESLING OF THE VINTAGE

Not a scintilla of doubt: Alzinger’s Steinertal. Strong runners-up include:

Berger Steingraben

Hirsch  Gaisberg

Bründlmayer  Heiligenstein “Lyra”

Nigl Hochäcker

Alzinger  Loibenberg

THE WINE OF THE OFFERING IS – WITH NO DOUBT WHATSOEVER:

Nikolaihof: 1991 Grüner Veltliner Vinothek (fifteen years in cask!)

THE BEST VALUE OF THE OFFERING

Schloss Gobelsburg “Gobelsburger” Riesling

 All in all 2005 is a pleasure-giving vintage, just unpredictable enough to be interesting, full of supernal wines, the best of which unite typically disparate elements; digital articulation of mineral and herb along with lush creamy textures. I like its best wines more than any vintage since 1999.