After tasting through the lineups of Kamptal Riesling and Grüner Veltliners, we broke up into groups to spend the evening with several local winemakers. Our group jumped into vans and headed up to the Heiligenstein Vineyard overlooking Langenlois where we were officially introduced to our hosts. Alwin Jurtschitsch, Josef Grillmaier, Rudi Rabl, and Alois Höllerer (Steininger was planning to attend but a family event got in the way - we drank his sekt anyway).
The view from the vineyard was amazing, but it wasn't as if the wines needed the atmosphere to show well.
Each winemaker poured one of their wines, talking about their vineyards (Heiligenstein and Spiegel, primarlily) and giving us a general feel for the history and geology of the area. I thought that the 2010 Jurtschitsch Riesling Zöbinger Heiligenstein Kamptal DAC Reserve Erste Lage particularly stood out, as did Alois Höllerer's 2010 Grüner Veltliner Alte Reben that was grown a couple of towns over.
The cover crop in the Heilegenstein Vineyard was about as colorful as I can recall seeing in any vineyard:
After tasting throught the first round of wines, we climbed back into the vans and headed off for the Käferberg Vineyard across the valley. Willi Brundlmayer is probably the best known producer from this vineyard, but Jurtschitsch, Grillmaier, Loimer, Rabl and others source fruit from this beautiful site.
We tasted another flight of wines (Grillmaier's 2010 Weissburgunder Käferberg tasted especially good, possibly because we were drinking it a few meters away from where it was grown)(but that's why you go to visit vineyards). As the sun started to set we headed back down to the Loisium for dinner.
While a beer might have been called for, we went directly to the table, whereupon they plied us with five courses of food, accompanied by five different wines with each course. While the intentions were good, it may have been just a little bit too much of a good thing, particularly as it was a Sunday night, the restaurant was a little understaffed, and we'd tasted quite a bit of wine already that day. The food was on the creative side, with more than a touch of molecular cuisine appearing at the table. The dinner's pace was slow, to the point where we opted to do away with the cheese course entirely and we took the final flight of wines to the bar where we were joined by other members of the group who were returning from their winemaker dinners.
By the end of the night, we'd added 35 more wines to the tasting talley, bringing the day's total to "way too many". The winemakers were good sports about it and guided us through their favorites in the last two flights. As it turned out,the 100+ wines we tasted that day served as a good warm up for Monday's schedule. It would have been easier if the wines hadn't been so consistently good. It wasn't a matter of quality analysis, simply one of deciding what you liked at that moment a little more than another wine. Not exactly a bad situation to be in.
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