WEINGUT NIGL, KREMSTAL
With a single exception (the Muskateller) all of the wines tasted one way and “sipped” another. This was repeated over three nights, with almost weird consistency.
My first impression of the three GV and two Rieslings was that they were driven by aggressive acidity, especially the Veltliners. I tasted them from Spiegelau and Jancis. Allowing for the “screwcap distortion” (whereby many white wines are constricted by sulfur until they get some air) I drank bits of all the wines while dinner was cooking, using the MacNeil Fresh & Crisp, which elevates the hedonic. Having warned my wife to beware of “expressive” acidity, she said she wasn’t noticing it, and as I sipped, neither was I. Was this the stemware, or the exposure to air, or both or neither?
On the second day I jettisoned the Jancis and did MacNeil and Spiegelau (which sounds like a law firm; “Use the wrong glass? Our lawyers are standing by to protect you from litigious sommeliers…”), and I’ve incorporated the results into the notes.
2022
2021 Freiheit Grüner Veltliner
“Freiheit” is now a trademark for what used to be a Grosslage-labeled wine, one up from the bottom of the winery’s range, but the “basic” wine sold in the U.S.. Alcohol can range from 11.5% in light years to 13% in superripe ones. This is right in the middle with 12.5%
It smells superb, and you can smell it halfway across the room. I was taken aback when a sample I tasted at a trade event last June was pyrazine-y, but no hint of that here. Spiegelau is more citric, MacNeil more meadow-flowers.
The palate is taut, salty, intricate and acid-driven, but what was spiky on day-1 became minty and peppery the next day. The round shape of the MacNeil gave breadth for the nuances to appear more vividly – but it also shrank before the wine’s imposing acidity. As always it’s in the loessy lentil direction, but my goodness, the diction of this wine! It comes on seemingly slim but billows on the mid palate to encompass Darjeeling tea flavors, with some of the lyric clonal notes of 2nd flush and some of the taut herbal notes of 1st flush. Then it has a beautiful sting on the finish.
Is this too racy and snappy for the use it will be put to? It purports to be a casual glass of wine, but this guy has attitude. The wine over-delivers, but the thing it over-delivers isn’t necessarily what its customer looks for. The crashing energy is huge fun, the complexity is greater than you dared to expect, and then you decide if you relish the stiletto pointedness of the finish.
It is, by the way, downgraded from Kremstal to the more generic Niederösterreich, for reasons I cannot explain, or even fathom.
It is, by the way, downgraded from Kremstal to the more generic Niederösterreich, for reasons I cannot explain, or even fathom.
2021 Piri Grüner Veltliner
Piri is also a trademark now, but we’ve been promoted to the KREMSTAL appellation. I understand “Piri” to be (or have been) a grosslage encompassing most/all of the Senftenberg hill.
The primary-rock GV aromas are scrupulously detailed and transparent. The landing impact is cressy and snappy. While Piri is often more lapidary than Freiheit, these ‘21s seem animated and jittery. This in fact is a curiously lovely wine, showing an odd sort of calmness in the middle of a beehive of activity.
Minerality and greens, herbs, fir and conifer, tansy, scree, those kinds of things. A silvery kind of wine, yet not nearly as serene as that moony languid image suggests.
I’ve written a lot about Nigl, using images like tweezer-food and micro-pixilation and flavors seen under a microscope, all of which are present now, driven by a galvanic acid drive which can’t quite subdue the serenity at the core. Have you ever had a perennially tardy companion, and if you try to rush him along he makes a big point of going slower, as if he’s rubbing your face in his galling calm? This wine is you going “Come on! We’ll be late!” while he just hums and pauses, deliberately, trying to decide which blazer to wear.
It’s also a lesson in the things we place value on. This wine also has 12.5% alc, it’s no riper nor more intense than the Freiheit; to the extent it is “better” it’s because it has a finer flavor. But this is subtle and requires your attention. If Nigl has a reputation for chiseled, cerebral wines, this would justify it. I find it admirably fascinating and not remotely delicious.
With both of these wines, I suspect they were bottled too early.
2021 Alte Reben Grüner Veltliner +
My shorthand for this aroma is “wax beans,” but you could also say romanesco or even sunchoke or salsify. It’s polished, not really herbal, more yielding than the primary-rock wines.
The palate is curiously both generous and aloof. The fruit recalls the 2013, but that vintage had nothing like this one’s acidity. I think it’s a bit of a cacophony at the moment, but hoo boy, that fragrance….
For all its incipient intricacy, it’s better in the less “expressive” Spiegelau white-wine glass. Jancis exaggerates the wine’s starker elements, but the implosive complexity doesn’t need assistance; it needs juiciness.
Some wines you just know; this is a classic, and should develop classically. This isn’t such a wine. Here it’s “This is demanding and turbulent and amazing and it isn’t easy to drink right now but it’s crazy fascinating, and I have no earthly idea how it might develop.” The aroma of the empty glass, usually a reliable predictor, is as complicated and ambiguous as everything that preceded it.
Having tasted everything twice and sipped once, I must say my tasting impression is consistent, for whatever that is worth. This trio possesses up-front attributes with which it’s easy to be impressed. They only falter in the final act, in which the residue of all that complexity dissolves abruptly and leaves a caustic acidity in its wake. The answer, I guess, is to eat.
2021 Urgestein Riesling
13% alc, Kremstal, not sure if this is the artist formerly known as “Dornleiten,” but if it’s the basic Riesling, one is struck by that 13%.
This I must say is of another order than the Veltliners. It has zing and whip-energy but it doesn’t have the overweening acids of that group. It also has Nigl’s usual focus and calligraphic precision, along with a swell of mineral and the typical fragrance of irises.
The overall vibe is on the stern side, but the flavors are absurdly (and elegantly) described, as if it were a transcription of the soil, and of the many little flowers that grow along and among the vines. The Jancis glass brings forth scents of hyssop and fennel seed.
This, too, is a little strict in its gestalt, but the nature of the material is compelling enough for me to forgive some austerity. You may feel differently, but I’d wager you’ll agree that it’s crazy that wine can taste like this. That said, it’s a severe sort of pleasure, mitigated a little by the blandishments of MacNeil’s glass.
2021 Piri Riesling +
Also Kremstal and also 13% alc.
The restaurant Michel Bras made famous a dish with 32 vegetables (give or take) in a mystic simmery braise, and the folks at Nikolaihof serve a salad of 17 herbs. Add a potion concocted from 41 different stones and minerals, and finally add water and stir. I mean, you really don’t know which complexity to let grab you and wheel you around the dance floor, the herbal one or the mineral one, until it’s like “OK, whatever, let’s just dance.”
This, alas, is as good as it gets for me today. The top wines from Pellingen, Goldberg, and Hochäcker shimmer away out of my reach – but if those didn’t exist, I’d still be impressed with this beauty.
The texture is more sedate now, though you wouldn’t describe it as calm (or “somnolent”), but you would – and will – notice that you stand in the vestibule where you glimpse the first attributes of greatness, as if you hear their voices on the other side of the wall. At the conclusion the finish is still chewy, as has been the case with all of these. Yet you delight, because you’ve been plunged into the arcane depths of primary-rock Austrian Riesling for a price you can afford, and as the mints and peppers linger into their gradual farewell, you get to be pleased at the world and all its probing, delicious questions.
2021 Gelber Muskateller +
Bounced back down to “Niederösterreich” and sporting its usual 11.5% alc.
I doubt that Martin Nigl looks at Müller-Catoir as a deliberate “model” for this wine, but they share a certain resemblance, which I’d call “precise basil and a cattiness that isn’t feral.” And way curiously, for all its fervent spiciness and brash aromas, this is the most yielding of all the wines structurally.
If perfectly ripe Austrian Muscat goes all the way to elderflower, this one stops at lemon blossom. Until day-2, when it zoomed past any known thing that blossoms, and entered the Platonic perfection of blossoming itself.
For all the usual Muscat noise, this wine has an incongruous and silky silence at its core.
For all that such a wine is a “line-extender” for Nigls, it expresses them as well as any of their wines do, I think. It is meticulous, giving but not gushing, extroverted but not cloddish, and in the context of the emphatic variety, wonderfully refined.
2025
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2021 Pinot Noir
The first aroma is volatility, but that appears to pass along in a minute or so.
The palate, indeed, has the peppery urgestein bite, and the alcohol is obtrusive but not obnoxious. Minerality is a mitigating factor, and I also have some of the blame for warming the bottles too far in advance (it’s 66º in my “tasting chamber” a.k.a. the kitchen). So the stewiness of the fruit could be a false impression.
I actually rather like this, without exactly relishing it. It’ll be better at 62º and I’ll add to these impressions then.
Second look, at a more suitable temp (decidedly cooler than “room temp” but not at all cold) and the wine becomes a great gnarl of terroir, burned herbs, truculent rocks, and only a hint of excessive alcohol. It’s interestingly weird and I won’t mind drinking it, but I wouldn’t seek it out.
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2020 Pinot Noir
Cutting to the chase, I question whether these wines have the mid-palate density to carry their sugar-ripeness. I can see why they’re pleased with them, this one especially, and I love when a vintner just Goes For It, but unless you get green flavors if you pick below (say) 96º Oechsle, I’d say the wines are works in progress.
This, though, is the better wine by far, and I’m tasting it under the same conditions as the ’21. Here we have a lovely material swell on the. Mid palate and the wine pivots on a solid tannic structure that averts the fruit-sprawl of the ’21. Even the coconutty notes of oak are well integrated. The classic artichoke note appears when tasting in the open air – which today is all of twenty degrees after an overnight snowstorm. So these are my polar vortex impressions….
We’d have a way to go to enter the quality echelon of Bründlmayer and Gobelsburg, next to which this wine is “interestingly rustic,” but you have to applaud the ambition.
The second time through, again cooler, the frontal attack of the wine actually diminishes, but the mid palate and finish are more expressive, and more impressive.
2023 Grüner Veltliner “Freiheit” +
This was a wine called “Kremser Freiheit” which I understood to be a Grosslage. Now “Freiheit” is a registered trademark (interesting, as it means freedom and would seem too common a word to trademark) and the wine is declassified to Niederösterreich. I’m very sure this has made the world better, but am too obtuse to understand how.
For my international readers – all seven of you – this is not the entry level wine (that one is the Gärtling, and it’s adorable) but instead the “volume wine” for the U.S. market, so that the wine is effectively Niglfreiheit and is often so good as to preclude exploration of the better wines. This rankles me.
The wine, though, does not rankle me; in fact it is the best of its type I’ve tasted thus far from ’23. I expected the finishing rasp the others have shown, but this takes the structural compactness of the vintage and transmogrifies it into a shimmering mineral finish. It’s especially impressive from the Jancis. It is especially impressive full-stop.
In fact it’s excellent GV in any echelon but in this one it’s a masterpiece. And it’s reassuring to learn that it could be done – get a fine compact focus and avoid the shrill finish I tasted in the others.
I confess to have drunk a glass last night while dinner was cooking. I had to see if it is really this good. It is really this good, polished, insanely drinky, teach-a-class GV, it is so articulately varietal and yet so yummy.
2023 Grüner Veltliner “Piri”
Same labeling complaint as with the “Freiheit,” and I’ll spare you my repeating it. This one has always come from closer to the estate and where Freiheit shows loess Piri shows primary rock.
As such it’s a different kind of wine, and here, if you wait, you’ll taste the usual asperity at the end of so many ‘23s. What precedes it is mostly classic Piri, the concatenation of herbs and mineral and petrichor in a sleek framework with flavors as focused as rime-ice.
Though it’s more refined and intricate than its predecessor, it’s less yummy, more aloof – not diffident, but introverted. The Jancis glass clarifies the best elements – the articulation of all these silvery, pretty nuances – and forget the little snap at the end; this wine is really showing me how much I’ve missed with my hiatus from Nigl, whose wines have always, at their best, been an experience where feelings and spirit meet so seamlessly you wonder why they don’t always travel together.
With air the most remarkable aroma of laurel appears. Plus, amazingly, the structure changes and extends a juiciness only implied at first. You have to walk a long way to get to that bit of snark at the very end – but who waits to the very end except us clearly deranged “tasters?”
I drank a glass of this too, as I was curious whether its diffidence would persist in a warm fragrant kitchen while Karen and I schmoozed about our days. It was in fact reassuringly expressive, and tasting it again now I see what it means to say. Yes it’s the more cerebral side of GV and there’s the finishing cat-hiss of so many ‘23s, but even after tasting these wines for thirty two years (!!!) it still amazes me that these flavors can exist in a wine.
2023 Grüner Veltliner Alte Reben +
Usually a loess-grown wine. At times it’s been the summit of their vintage.
In effect it’s the demi-glace of the Freiheit, with flavors that only arise with such concentration but which are also based in umami, such that they’re hard to designate. I could try, could suggest morels, rosemary, thyme, marjoram, even winter spinach (“sweeter” and less metallic/slimy than ordinary spinach) or mizuna – but the pith of the wine is strong, and elusive.
The fond, that is the umami-core of the wine has a saltiness less like it had been shaken in, than that it was extruded by the things that went into the liquid you’re reducing, so that even the saltiness is dramatically present and also entirely implied. A highly dense, sophisticated and fascinating wine.
2023 Grüner Veltliner Ried Pellingen “Privat” +
Formerly (and sometimes still) their top GV, it has always been slow to unfold and I have sometimes underrated it. Not this time.
The aroma is diffident at first, but the palate floods in on waves of iris and pepper and campfire and shoot-smoke. It is the terroir antonym to the Alte Reben, and also distinct from the Kirchenberg coming up. Where that wine has crunch to its texture, Pellingen is fluid and flowy, which makes the sternness of its flavors all the more arresting.
I mean, Pellingen is fascinatingly almost-great. The Riesling from this site is the same. You have the flavors on the tongue (which dart and weave) and the larger umami flavors which perfume the deliberate tertiary finish. These things remain even as the wines age, which they do, and very well.
The wine’s unfurling nature reveals a haunting physio-sweetness. The flavors encase you, whereas the Kirchenberg jabs at you. This is a remarkable GV and an improbable ’23, whose best days lie ahead.
On second look, this is mostly confirmed, though the finishing bite of ’23 is now evident, though not disturbingly. The fragrances are even more compelling, mysterious and allusive. I wonder if translucence is inherent in wines from this site. My layman’s suspicion, based on years of rapturous cask samples, is that the wines are less able to “defend themselves” against filtration. Who knows. They’re certainly congenial in their professorial way, and they can be profoundly interesting and lovely if you listen carefully. And, they do tend to tease.
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2023 Grüner Veltliner Ried Kirchenberg “Herzstück”
The sirloin parcel from this mica-schist site often gives Nigl’s most explosive GV. The label says 14% alc but the website says 13.5%, which I’d prefer to believe….
The aroma is quite ripe and the “tobacco” note they cite is accurate. The palate has some alcohol bite – what I call the jalapeño heat – and it seems like it isn’t eager to come out and play.
Still it’s impressive, if intensity is your lodestar. As it seems to have been for the trio of reviewers who “scored” it in the high-90s. Maybe they liked the smell of pork-cracklings that comes out with air. Also the flavor of sweet rhubarb. At this very moment I consider two options: one, those tasters are too easily seduced, or two, I’m not being patient enough. A bit of air and I’m made a fool of. So let’s say the “jury is deliberating,” while the hapless writer – that would be me – awaits his verdict.
If the latest sip from the Jancis glass is an augury of anything, I’ma have some words I gotta eat.
Two days later, untouched in the interim, I’m waiting for the wine to elucidate itself. It doesn’t seem to want to, or it needs more cajoling. Even if it isn’t 14% alc it shows the coarse ripeness so many white wines get when they reach or surpass that level. That said, the incipient flavors I sensed from the Jancis glass are here again, and they are compelling enough that they don’t have to chew the scenery. Funnily enough, the longer the wine’s on the palate the more discreet the basic flavors become, so that the final echoes of flavor are actually quite tasty, free from the alcoholic bellicosity of the first impressions.
I still think there’s a fine wine in here somewhere, but where it is hiding and why, are imponderable to me today.
2023 Riesling Piri
High alc (13.5%) for this usually-12.5% wine. But wow, it smells good.
Tastes good too, though it doesn’t quite reach what it grasps, and I think it’s better with more moderate alc.. Oddly this wine feels stretched out and diluted by its greater ripeness, as though the strength of fruit and mineral couldn’t keep up with the sugars.
That said, the signature flavors are present, albeit behind a sort of veil. Piri is always “sweet” herbs, flowery pepper (not far from baises rose) and minerality either solid or dusty depending on the year. The great vintages bring a winsomeness along, and the equipoise of serious flavors encased in an enticingly aloof affect is often poignant.
Yet as has often been the case with Nigl ‘23s, air is kind to this. The interior flavors start to catch up with the assertive ripeness, and though they don’t get to the neck-and-neck, we still have a very good wine whose only “drawback” is not to achieve the excellence of the best vintages.
But! This is a classic example of the benefits of “slow-tasting” because a day later this is a very different wine, much more mineral, much better integrated, much more of-a-piece. I still wonder whether Piri Riesling *should* be a 13.5% wine, but I must surrender, at least a little, to the curious freaky charms of this very good Riesling.
2023 Riesling Ried Hochäcker “Privat” +++
Martin Nigl sometimes teases me, that this is almost always my favorite Riesling from him. “You like the little bit of sweetness,” he chuckles, and it’s true, I do – but not only the pinch of RS (and it’s not more than a pinch) but rather what that homeopathic bit of fructose does.
It places you underneath an apricot tree in full blossom, holding a bowl of spices and potpourri. It offers a complexity of multiple dimensions that are simply unavailable in bone dry wines. And in most vintages it is clearly and dramatically among Austria’s very greatest Rieslings. We even had a “100-point score” in the recent past, from an experienced and responsible taster. So, there’s that.
And now there’s this, and what exactly is this doing? It does what amazing wines always do, throws so many elements at you that it takes time to order them in orders of salience, and I’m not sure it can actually be done at all. There’s the pitted-fruit front and center but also the scent of lemon-blossom honey and also the scents of ginger and yuzu and matcha. Then the palate tricks you.
It shows an almost tactile rise, reaching upward to culminate in a point of lemony solidity, and after that there’s a swollen flow of sorrel and wintergreen and purple lilac. And the finish is so long and intricate it’s almost reprehensible, seeming almost to unite factions of Gaisberg and Heiligenstein into an entente cordial offering the best of both, combined.
A day later the fruit recedes and the mineral pith advances and the density of finish – you can almost chew it – becomes even more dramatic.
I still have many of the icon-wines to taste in the ’23 vintage, but I’d be amazed if any of them were better than this. It is an almost ludicrous masterpiece showing each startling and haunting thing that great wine – not just great Riesling – great wine – can do.
2023 Riesling Ried Goldberg
The amphibolite soil has always described its signature scents and flavors with admirable clarity: carraway, fennel, anise, hyssop, always to be gleaned whenever this soil type is in play. And I’ve often loved this bottling.
I’ll tell you the end first. After I had (as you’ll see) all kinds of fussy caveats with this wine, I drank it while I chewed raw bok-choy leaves last evening. The greens are so sweet in the dead of winter! I couyldn’t stop chomping them, and sipped the wine while doing so, and the wine was – perfect. It even seemed to resonate with the sweetness of the leaves, and what I thought was “the alcohol problem” simply didn’t register. Please know this before you read the following.
“I have the dreaded 14% alc to contend with.
What it does is to emphasize the grosser elements of the terroir in a way that will remind you of some bellicose uncle who shouts his imbecile views at the family table. “Too loud, Uncle Phil. We know about the Jewish space lasers already, you told us last Thanksgiving, so you can lower your voice and we can still hear you….”
Problem is, the wine isn’t beset by crackpot theories; these are actually very good flavors that don’t need to yowl to be tasted. It’s always this way for me. When you hit this alcohol you get distorted flavors and screwed up structures, at least in white wines, and I think growers should take pains to forestall it. Nigl has sometimes shown a sang froid about alcohol levels, and I’m sure he thinks I’m a wuss about them.
Where this wine works is in the umami mid palate, in which a fine angular physio-sweetness emerges. When it arrived I worried I might be too uncharitable. A chorus of minerality starts to show, ameliorating the alcohol. It remains an outsized wine, with flavors that tend to shout when they might have sung, but I must admit the wine seems to be attempting balance on a large scale. I’ll taste it again several times and will happily admit I misjudged, if indeed I did.
The second time through I am glad to concede the fine-ness of the flavors and the fidelity to terroir and the Sencha-drenched mineral finish. I also think it is telling that the wine is much better from the smaller more compact Spiegelau, which suppresses the alcoholic boorishness. I only wish I didn’t need to diddle the wine to make it tolerable, as its virtues are too impressive. It’s like a fine piece of music ineptly recorded.”
So, what’s true?
2023 Sauvignon Blanc +
I’ve almost always admired and sometimes loved this wine. It emphasizes the flint of Pouilly-Fume rather than the red-pepper of many other SBs. This ’23 is a juice-bomb of redcurrant and currant (and tomato) leaf, expressive but not gaudy. Free-range SB that knows how to behave.
Indeed it does. After the forthright varietal yelp of the fragrance and front-palate, it starts to seize up in the middle, and accesses a minerality you don’t see at first. And this seems to be the secret of SB; how to make a wine of decent comportment that doesn’t have to sacrifice its ornery flavor in order to act civilly.
A salty wild fennel powder flavor arrives to see us out. A lovely rendition of a difficult variety.
2023 Gelber Muskateller glug-glug-glug
11.5% alc. Does he pick in early August, or what?
Martin once asked me if I knew the Muscat of Müller-Catoir, and I said I did and that I’d imported them for many years. He’d had one at a fair both wineries attended, and was properly impressed as well he might have been.
I wonder at this wine. Often Muscat with this ripeness tastes one dimensional and catty, and you need more ripeness to obtain the elderflower flavor that balances and tempers the varietal bite. I have no idea how he squared that circle, but this is compellingly delicious Muscat you can glug all night and that has neither the rude underripe flavors nor the assertively flowery ripe flavors.
Instead it is herbal, albeit the aromas strike sparks. Those riotous aromas give way to a palate full of bay leaf and laurel and other things you weren’t looking for. The wine is “deceptively straightforward” and thoroughly delicious – if you like Muscat. Me, I’m in a thrall to it, especially when it’s this tantalizing.