Brundlmayer Gruner Veltliner Kamptaler Terrassen

The Dogma... Oh, dogma. My taste buds annoyingly often enjoy flavors from foods that exist outside of the political and philosophical parameters that some other part of my food-tasting brain sets up. For Sunday brunch at home I like ketchup on my hash browns. I know that ketchup has the subtlety of an atom bomb, but it makes me happy with salty, herby potatoes. So I use it, and chalk it up as an exception proving the rule. I think that if we don’t give in to these anomalies, we actually cease being human in some way. We end up fleshy representations of a point of view, mired in a concrete and false set of principles. We become liars, actually, or at least we take a dangerous step away from who we really are. Wow, what a windup. I’ve blown this a little out of proportion, but I think you’ll see what I’m getting at. I believe wine needs to maintain its relationship to the place that grew it in order to be more than an intoxicant. This often occurs best at small estates, and politically I prefer giving our dollars to smaller farmers, so here exists a happy symbiosis. Except that Willi Bründlmayer isn’t a small farmer. His estate is huge, pushing 200 acres. Ok, not huge by Aussie or San Joaquin Valley standards, but the fact remains that he is one of the biggest grape farmers in the Kamptal, and (annoyingly for my shoebox categorization of wine) also very obviously one of the best. His wines speak very clearly of their terroir and of an attention to detail and commitment to quality production methods, rare(r) in large operations.

The Land... One of the least mentioned aspects of terroir is the human that works the vines. Willi Bründlmayer has a clear perspective on what makes for quality wine in the fields surrounding his native Langenlois. His vineyard sites are a mixture of rocky, dry hillside sites that drain well while ably collecting sunlight to provide wines of a fuller, riper texture, and more fertile, calcareous vineyards closer to sea level that can naturally possess a fine chalky minerality, a soil characteristic that keeps wine from being one-dimensionally fruity.

The Wine... Bründlmayer is a traditionalist in many ways. The wines here age in deep, cold cellars in oak and acacia casks. This estate offers us a textbook example of appropriate use of wood. The wines are affected but not excessively flavored by this time in barrel. They change into a more wine-like substance, rounder, deeper, more interesting. All vineyard work is performed according to organic principles, meaning no chemical fertilizers, herbicides or chemical sprays.