Seven years underground, in a century-old 2,400L barrel, in a cold cellar in Austria, not terribly far from the Czech borer.
Today’s wine is an Austrian Grüner Veltliner, though it has very little to do with what you might think of as Grüner Veltliner.
The near-decade in barrel has transformed this wine into something else, something more. Grüner Veltliner, often bulky or unwieldy, has, here, become elegant, perhaps not lean but lithe, glossy and airy, nearly levitating and alive. This is Grüner at its most perfumed, sweet apples and pears, nearly caramelized while also mineral – there is that woolly sweetness that shows in Chenin Blancs with some age.
Even with nearly a decade already behind it, there is an obvious freshness that drives through this bottle.
There is just no way to reproduce the effects of such extended barrel aging. And there are few precedents for this kind of wine, for this extended an elevage. The only one that comes to mind immediately, are the revered and mystical “Vinothek” bottlings of Nikolaihof – wines that, we might add, command prices of $150-$200+ a bottle.
Today’s bottling should retail somewhere below $35, which is, frankly, ludicrous. To find out where to buy this wine, email orders@vomboden.com.
This bottling, “Sonntag Geschlossen” (the translation would be “closed on Sundays”) is a project of Florian Schuhmann and Marcus Sonntag, a farmer in Weitzendorf near the Czech border. Marcus has a day job as a computer scientist.
If he is not a serious winemaker, he is a serious farmer. When Marcus took over the family’s two hectares of Grüner Veltliner he immediately converted the vineyards to biodynamic farming (this was 2009).
The truth is, Marcus is very into vineyard work; he’s just not very much into cellar work. Thus most of his production has remained (and remains) in barrel (large barrels up to 4,000 liters in size) for many years.
In fact, it was only after many barrel tastings and enthusiastic requests from Florian Schumann, who some of you might know from the Quantum winery not far away,that Marcus finally agreed to bottle some of the wine. Or, to be more precise, he agreed to let Florian bottle the wine.
This is the first release and it comes from vintage 2011; this is the first barrel to be bottled. The wine spent 2,555 days in this barrel (that’s over seven years), being regularly topped up and only lightly sulfured. This wine was bottled only in 2019.
Bottles like this are slow in the making; quick in the disappearing. Email orders@vomboden.com.
2011 Sonntag Geschlossen Grüner Veltliner ~$35