Ask anyone: Alzinger is a region-defining producer in Austria’s Wachau, but their reach extends well beyond the banks of the Danube. Today’s intricately detailed Riesling Federspiel is the kind of bottle you put on a table alongside other great white wines of the world and watch them battle it out—Grand Cru Chablis and Alsatian whites, the best German Rieslings of the Mosel and Rheingau…these are Alzinger’s contemporaries as much as Wachau neighbors like Emmerich Knoll and F.X. Pichler. 
Only recently have we been able to acquire enough Alzinger wine to offer to SommSelect subscribers, so I’m looking forward to opening the floodgates; if you love Austrian Riesling and Grüner Veltliner, this is an essential name to know. It is part of the wide-ranging import portfolio of Terry Theise, a specialist in Austrian and German wines whose book-length catalogs include fervent passages like this one, wherein he shares his impression of Alzinger wine: “It enacts a quality of evanescence,” he writes, “as though some divinity was floating in the air around you, which laughed and gleamed when you tried to grasp it. I have to wrench myself out of reveries to ‘describe’ the wines.” I don’t know about you, but that’s exactly the kind of wine I want to drink!

Located in the riverside town of Unterloiben, Alzinger meticulously farms roughly 30 acres of vines, with most situated on steep, terraced hillsides in Loibenburg and Steinertal. Today’s Riesling is sourced from vineyards in Dürnstein, an idyllic hamlet just across the river. All the vineyard work is carried out manually and hand-harvesting happens at Alzinger later than most of his neighbors. The grapes are sent across the way to their winery where they are crushed whole-cluster and allowed a very brief maceration on their skins. Afterward, the wine is left to settle for a day before commencing a cool fermentation in stainless steel.

In the tradition-rich Wachau, where some winemaking family’s go back centuries, the ascension to icon status has been relatively rapid for the Alzinger family. Past generations of Alzingers had been barrel coopers before they began farming vineyards in Dürnstein in the 1930s, selling their fruit to the local cooperative. In 1983, Leo Alzinger, Sr. began estate-bottling wines and has since handed the reins to his son, Leo Jr., who has kept the house style consistent—the focus here is on purity and soil expression, even as recent vintages in the Wachau have seen an influx of richer, more extracted styles of Riesling and Grüner. Today’s wine carries the federspiel designation, the middle tier in the Wachau’s three-tiered ripeness scale, yet while it shows excellent concentration it doesn’t spill over into ‘sweet’ territory. The freshness and minerality give it razor-edge precision.

Today’s 2018 is quintessential Alzinger—and thus quintessential Wachau Riesling, seemingly weightless yet delivering a lasting impact. Bone-dry and deeply mineral, it is sourced from several vineyards in Dürnstein rooted in soils of clay/loam mixed with weathered primary rock such as gneiss and schist. It was spontaneously fermented in stainless steel and aged in mostly in tanks along with a small percentage of used, large-format Austrian oak. In the glass, it’s shimmering and silvery with flecks of straw-gold and green, with perfumed aromas of white peach, grapefruit skin, lime blossom, green apple, green herbs, white pepper, radish, wildflowers, and flint. Medium-bodied and racy at this young stage in its life, this will continue to put on weight over time and take on more ‘secondary’ notes of petrol and stone fruit, all while maintaining its pulverized-rock minerality. Some wines are violins, some are cellos; this one is the former, taut and tingly, ready to be enjoyed now and over the next 10  years. Serve it in all-purpose white wine stems at 50 degrees with the bold winter salad attached. For all its ethereal finesse, you won’t soon forget it!