Zweigelt, an Austrian delight...

I don’t know about you but some of my favourite moments with wine are discovering, re-discovering or just being reminded how much you love a certain wine that you haven’t had in a while. This happened recently with this fellow, Jordan Pulka made from a grape called Zweigelt. I’ve talked about Austrian reds before so I won’t bore you with too many technicalities. Austria remains essentially, I’d say, a boutique wine producer; outside of Austria that is. That’s no bad thing on one level, but it keeps availability rather minimal, particularly for Red wine. White Austrian wine especially, its flagship, Grüner Vetliner is better known, more widely available and quite trendy these days. But don’t let that put you off. It’s a fine varietal, with a range of styles from bone dry to big and rich like a Chardonnay from Burgundy.

            Anyway, I’m here to talk about red wine, so back to the delightfully named Zweigelt. Austria’s most planted red wine, it’s no doubt available in every restaurant in Vienna and everywhere else over there. Lucky them. It is- this is another factor for me that make a wine, a favourite wine- probably impossible to identify in a blind tasting. This one had spice, lots of pepper, great depth of mostly black fruit, lovely round tannins and medium weight on the palate.  That covers a lot of possibilities. It’s that uniqueness that makes it such fun. This one has three years of age and could have aged a bit more. Some Zweigelts, in fact many of them are drunk young, but this had a bit more complexity and was all the better for it. A perfect food wine, we actually had it after dinner, in fact, after a kind of homemade Chicken fried rice so not an obvious match to have together but afterwards it worked perfectly, it’s pepper and spice notes complementing our palates and the delightful fruit and mouth filling tannins working like a low calorie port. Cheese or chocolate would have worked perfectly, in fact, it was crying out for chocolate but we didn’t have any so we had to make do with the wine and that was quite fine. A fascinating and delightful wine that isn’t quite like anything else I know; I recommend it highly though it may not be easy to find but keep your eyes peeled. Worth pursuing!