Cool, Calm and Collected

What wines do you serve to a man who not only tastes widely, but grows weird and wonderful himself?  The V-Man is an adventurous sort in wine for sure, and few would take the gamble on the odd plants that he and E-V have in their back garden.  Yet these two are very happy in their space with what they have got, and are really quite cool, calm and collected about it all, growing the grapes, making the wines and selling them, such work quite frightening to others.

The upshot is that SWMBO and I put out a couple of wines from the Sudtirol region, something a little different, yet not too unfamiliar.  The white was a 2009 Peter Pliger ‘Kuenhof’ Eisacktaler Veltliner, 100% Gruner Veltliner, fermented to 13.5% alc. and dry.  Pilger is a fan of the Rieslings of the Mosel, and maybe this might be similar?  But no, this was not the case.  The wine was not clearly Gruner at first, being a little flinty reductive, but with that white floral and minerally north-east Italian feel, and pretty decent acid and alcohol cut.  I was thinking austere, but as it gained some air time, it developed richness and texture.  No grip, but driven core and mouthfeel with real weight and power.  With the food, fatty duck, prawns and salty beef dishes, it went remarkably well.  The V-Man was particularly happy with this, as he has a little Gruner Veltliner at home and could see another expression of it.  The home of the variety is of course, just over the border…

I thought the red we dug out might also be one that would go well with the range of Asian food we had in front of us.  Georg Ramoser’s 2009 Weingut Untermoserfof St Magdalener Klassisch Sudtirol.  Made from the Vernatsch variety with a little Lagrein, this was surprisingly light in colour and weight, though the label said 13.0% alc.  Quite a ‘pretty’ wine with light cherry aromas and flavours and rather on the less-constituted side in the mouth, the extraction quite modest.  Lovely to drink on its own actually, the food tended to come out stronger.  The gentleness is certainly appealing, however.  These two Sudtirol wines from a cool growing area were indeed quite settled in their styles, calm and collected with their expression, and no forced nature from trying too hard.  Drinking them put us in that mood too.