Knoll Loibenberg Grüner Veltliner 2002

Posted on 1 February 2011

I opened this on a whim yesterday. I was unsure whether it would be ‘ready to drink’ – the wines of Knoll are long agers, and I don’t have many recent data points on 2002.

It was the year of that terrible flood in Wachau (many cellars were completely flooded) but as vines are planted on high slopes, it hasn’t influenced the grape quality. The vintage actually went on fine and in my book, is one of the more successful in the decade.

 

In the end I am glad I opened this bottle. I caught it at a good moment of its life – it’s still got considerable power and is nowhere near declining, but it has the complexity and dimension of a wine with some years to it. That feeling of restrained power and potential is crucial: I prefer it to a wine that’s slightly waning.

The winemaking at Knoll’s is very traditional – the wines are aged in large oak casks that look like museum pieces, and there is even a bit of maceration on skins that everyone else in the Wachau region have long abandoned. This wine is from the Loibenberg vineyard, Wachau’s hottest, with a loess soil as opposed to the gneiss rock of neighbouring crus: this results in very rich, ripe wines that often are over the top, especially the Grüner Veltliners. It’s been the case in 2006 and 2009 where I’ve found many wines from the Loibenberg difficult to drink with their late-harvest fruit and 14–15% alc. This bottle is a different story: the richness is unquestionable but there is a lovely core of stoney coolness for balance. The wine is really big as per the Knoll style, concentrated, tight and solid, but there is a lot of minerality too and excellent balance. The whole just clicks for me.

Disclosure

Source of wine: own purchase.