Retailers: Le Cru (100% Champagne), Vienna

For me, a good wine store should have a thoughtfully selected collection of wines, preferably with a focus on artisanal estates. It should be run by someone who is passionate and knowledgeable, and it should be aesthetically pleasing and comfortable to spend time in. I found exactly such a wine store this morning while walking around in Vienna’s 1st district. What’s more, this store, Le Cru, focuses exclusively on champagne.

Christian Weininger opened Le Cru only two weeks ago, in a sleek, modern space close to the Stephansplatz. A former architect, Weininger spent ten years as a wine retailer in Vienna, and over that time he traveled frequently to Champagne, developing relationships with many growers there. The selection at Le Cru includes prominent names such as Pierre Peters, Michael Arnould, René Geoffroy and De Sousa, as well as lesser-known growers like Daniel Caillez and Bergeronneau-Marion, and a few houses such as Bollinger and Louis Roederer are represented as well. “We work with about thirty different producers,” says Weininger, “but we don’t necessarily take all of their wines every year. If I’m not 100 percent confident in a wine, I would prefer to wait until the next year.”

As he deals largely with grower champagne, Weininger is of course very conscious about terroir, and Le Cru’s handsome catalog is divided by region (Montagne de Reims, Vallée de la Marne, Aube and Côte des Blancs), which I particularly appreciate. I’m looking forward to getting to know this store better: with its ideal location and terrific selection of wines, Le Cru is a top-notch address for buying champagne.


Le Cru, Petersplatz 8, 1010 Vienna, www.lecru.at

Bründlmayer’s Sparkling Wines

I’ve said before that some of my favorite sparkling wines outside of Champagne are those of Bründlmayer. Today at VieVinum, I had the opportunity to taste the new releases of Bründlmayer’s Brut and Brut Rosé after enjoying his magnificent collection of 2007 grüner veltliner and riesling.

Willi Bründlmayer has been making sparkling wine since the 1989 vintage, and has always bottled it as a vintage wine. For that first vintage, he and his wife Edwige, who is French, actually took a trip to Epernay to have the base wine analyzed by the oenological station there, and to ask for advice on fermentation and production. Today, the Bründlmayer Brut has a finesse and complexity that surpasses much of what is being made in Champagne, although it presents an array of flavors that is all its own.

The vintage brut is composed of roughly equal parts chardonnay and pinot noir, along with about ten percent pinot gris (which Bründlmayer is increasingly favoring over pinot blanc for the sparkling wine) and ten percent grüner veltliner. Veltliner might seem like an odd choice for a sparkling wine, but Bründlmayer cites its versatility with food as the primary reason for its inclusion. “I love very much to drink sparkling wine with food,” he says. “Grüner veltliner is the most harmonious wine with food, and I would like to introduce this ability of grüner veltliner into the sparkling wine.”

The excellent 2005 Brut has just been disgorged a few months ago, and will be released shortly. Its yeasty, autolytic nose could easily be mistaken for champagne, and I love the tension between its ripe, firm depth of fruit and its undertone of saline, savory minerality. It’s bigger in body but also finer in texture and longer on the finish than the 2004, which I drank a couple of nights ago at my favorite Viennese wine bar, Vis-a-Vis, owned by restaurateur Hans Weibel.

Bründlmayer has also just released his second bottling of Brut Rosé, made from pinot noir, zweigelt and St. Laurent. It’s currently blended from approximately 80 percent 2005 and 20 percent 2006, although Bründlmayer would eventually like to make it from a single year. “The objective is to make vintage rosé,” he says. “Maybe one day we will, but right now we feel more secure if we blend a little bit.” The wine is superb, and very original — I’m not sure I can relate it to anything being made in Champagne. It’s creamy and rich in texture, with a sappy, staining depth of strawberry and red cherry fruitiness on the palate. Its vivid concentration makes it feel bold and extroverted, yet it’s not very large in body, and its fine texture and long, fragrant length combine to give an impression of delicacy and elegance.

Bründlmayer told me today that when they were in Epernay back in ’89, they were waiting for the lab oenologists to finish testing their wines, and the oenologists were talking amongst themselves, thinking that Bründlmayer and his wife didn’t speak French. “If these guys can make base wines like this in a country like Austria,” they said, “we’d better watch out.” Today, I think that there are quite a number of people in Champagne who could learn a thing or two from Bründlmayer.

The First Day of VieVinum

It seems rather non sequitur, but I’m now in Vienna. It’s been a strange day — first, my friend wound up in hospital (he’ll be fine, but it was a good thing that he got there when he did), and second, it’s become apparent that I am increasingly unlikely to ever see my suitcase again, which was lost by the airlines — multiple times, in fact — between Jerez, Madrid, Paris and Vienna. I suppose it serves me right for checking in my baggage (always a foolish and perilous decision), but it’s mightily perturbing all the same, as that particular piece of luggage contains many things that are extremely valuable to me, not the least of which are my favorite pair of Crockett & Jones handgrade monkstraps.

As a sort of consolation, I tasted a number of phenomenally outstanding wines today at VieVinum, the grand, bi-annual Austrian wine fair. The 2007 vintage is right up my alley — less dramatic and less alcoholic than 2006, and perhaps less consistent, yet the best wines are equally as fine, with the terroir signatures very clearly and keenly expressed. If I had to pick a wine of the day, it might have to be Hirtzberger’s 2007 Riesling Singerriedel, although F.X. Pichler’s 2007 Riesling Kellerberg and Undendlich provided stiff competition, as did Nikolaihof’s 2004 Riesling Steiner Hund. But then, these are all incredibly blue-chip wines — you don’t need me to tell you that they’re great. The collection of the vintage so far for me, however, at least in the Wachau, is Alzinger.

The other collection that struck me today was that of Johannes Hirsch. I’m already a huge fan of Hirsch’s wines — he makes it easy, with great vineyard sites and pure, natural and conscientious winemaking. Not to mention that the prices are very kind for the quality, plus you get wonderfully goofy labels like this Trinkvergnügen. Since 2006, Hirsch has begun converting the estate entirely to biodynamic viticulture, and he couldn’t be more pleased with the results. Even after only two years, he already notices a markedly different character in his vineyards: “The great thing about the biodynamic wines is that they are physiologically ripe earlier, with less alcohol and an extra layer of minerality,” he says.

Everything he poured me today was utterly fantastic. I would happily drink the 2007 Trinkvergnügen #6 as my house wine, and the “village” wines, Kammerner Heiligenstein Grüner Veltliner and Zöbinger Riesling, were both disarmingly fragrant, focused and pure. Gaisberg Riesling was deliciously vivid and refined, and Heiligenstein Riesling perhaps even more so, with both of them clearly and poignantly demonstrating the personalities of their respective sites. The 2007 is as good a Lamm Grüner Veltliner as I’ve ever seen from Hirsch, feeling extremely expressive and soil-driven, and what’s more, it’s only 12.7 percent alcohol. The Heiligenstein, by the way, is only 12.3 percent, and the Gaisberg is 12.2 percent. Do I like biodynamics? Yes!!!