The Oberösterreichische Nachrichten newspaper’s wine show has an unusual set of rules: the guests taste the submitted wines blind so as not to be confused by labels or familiar names. The wine whose twelve bottles are drunk first emerges as the winner of the wine show. Before that, the sommeliers also taste the wines undercover, judge them according to the 20-point system and choose their favorite. At the end of the wine show, the audience’s assessment is compared with the sommeliers’ assessment.
It is not often that the audience chooses the same winery as the sommeliers as the winner, but on June 16, a rare case occurred during the tasting of 22 Austrian single-vineyard Rieslings: Our Riesling Ried Moosburgerin 1ÖTW 2022 won both the experts’ and the public’s vote.
An old friend
Ried Moosburgerin is one of the oldest (first mentioned in a document in 890 AD), smallest (6.6 ha) and best-known vineyards in the Krems Valley. One reason for its fame is certainly our Riesling Ried Moosburgerin. It was one of our first wines that we vinified and marketed as a single vineyard, and the wine with which we were able to celebrate our first great successes as a young winery.
The steeply sloping terraces of the Moosburgerin are located in the upper part of the Gedersdorfer vineyard. The extremely favorable terroir invites the grapes to ripen longer in autumn and thus develop more aromas. And that is exactly what we do. Every year we try to make the most of the site and harvest the grapes as late as possible. This makes the Riesling more diverse and full-bodied, providing structure and expressiveness.
Our Moosburgerin presents itself with subtle stone fruit aromas and a slight hint of exotic fruit on the nose, elegant, taut, full of finesse and minerality on the palate, with a long finish. Due to the late harvest, the Riesling Ried Moosburgerin takes longer to develop. It is characterized by the fact that it often changes its taste over time and only reaches its peak form after a few years in the bottle.