AUSTRIA

It’s always exciting taste a new vintage and it’s even more exciting when that new vintage turns out to be glorious. The 2019 vintage in Austria is a case in point—turning this into a happy hat trick of stellar vintages ending in nine like 1999 and 2009.

That lip-smacking freshness and intensity show across the board, not just in the higher-tier wines.

After the heatwave vintage of the previous year, 2019 in one way was a “return to normal” as the Austrian Wine Marketing Board put it. It was a happy combination of budding after spring frosts had passed, spring rains to replenish groundwater levels, great flowering conditions, a warm, even hot summer—the hottest, driest June on record in fact—followed in late August and September by cool nights and a warm October.

This meant healthy grapes first and foremost, but it gave them ample time to develop complex aromatics without heat or dry stress. The great single-site wines of the 2018 vintage showed that retaining freshness is something the Austrians are good at even in hot years. In 2019, however, that lip-smacking freshness and intensity show across the board, not just in the higher-tier wines.

Even the most affordable entry-level wines are crunchy and joyous, offering tons of refreshment and flavor for relatively little money. It begins with the bone-dry and superfragrant Gelber Muskatellers that clock up a mere 11.5% alcohol by volume (abv) and continues with Austria’s peppery flagship Grüner Veltliner, which manages to shine in every guise—from light-bodied to serious and concentrated. The dry Rieslings show