Drinks of the Month

Weingut Brundlmayer Grüner Veltliner Alte Reben 1999

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on January 18 2014 at 08:10

A cellar clear-out at our French house this week unearthed this neglected treasure from 1999. I couldn’t imagine that it would still be drinkable having travelled from England to France when we moved most of our belongings here six years ago.

In fact it was astonishingly fresh and delicious - not remotely oxidised - and didn’t even fall apart in the glass.

Obviously it wasn’t cheap (£11.15-£15.56 back in 2001, I would guess) but I still couldn’t imagine it would have aged so well. There were still some bright fruit flavours (grapefruit and starfruit) and a wonderful complexity - the kind of wine that could take almost anything fishy or vegetable-based in its stride.

Looking it up on wine-searcher the most recent vintage of the Alte Reben I could find in the UK was the 2007 which is stocked by AG Wines for £23.99 (minimum order 6 bottles) - a baby by 1999 standards.

There are plenty of other Brundlmayer Grüners on wine-searcher.com though. The Old Bridge has halves of the 2011 Berg Vogelsang for £9.95 (Ocado has full bottles for £16.99) while The Sampler has the Gruner Kamptaler Terrassen 2012 for £15.75. It would be fascinating to buy a case to dip into over the next decade, assuming, which of course is by no means certain, that this bottle wasn't an aberration.

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