I love a good Grüner Veltliner. It has all the refreshment, food-friendliness and ability to age of a fine Riesling but with a little more weight on the mid palate and plays around more in the vegetable/pickle space than the floral/mineral one.
When the super-fastidious British wine importer Mark Savage MW first met Bernhard Ott 22 years ago, he told me, Ott was known in Austrian wine circles as ‘Herr Grüner Veltliner’, so passionate was he about Austria’s signature white-wine grape. He still is. Only about eight hectares of his now 60 ha (148 acres) of vineyards are planted with anything else, and he offers a wide range of bottlings including many a single-vineyard wine, drawn from his 80-plus different parcels, mostly in the south-western corner of Wagram but also in Kamptal’s Stein vineyard.
His estate wines are certified biodynamic by the equally fastidious respekt-BIODYN group, which he helped found in 2007. We’ve been tasting and admiring them since 2004 and the biodynamic viticulture is, as so often, maximising terroir expression and allowing him and his team to pick at lower alcohol levels without sacrificing flavour. He’s a champion of regenerative viticulture, cover-cropping, dry-farming, hand-picking (unusual in this area), stem inclusion, spontaneous fermentation, and ageing in traditional large-format Stockinger Fuders.
I was sent the range of bottlings now being offered in the UK by Armit Wines and was knocked out by the first I tasted, the 2024 vintage of Ott’s entry-level wine Am Berg, a blend of wines from younger vines mainly, as Savage puts it, ‘within a short bicycle ride on the gentle, south-facing slopes of deep loess soils lying above the village of Feuersbrunn in the Wagram district on the left bank of the Danube’. Ott himself explained to me by email that ‘some are still in the process of transforming to biodynamic – and therefore only certified as organic’. Because the blend contains fruit from over the border in Kamptal, Am Berg carries the Niederösterreich appellation rather than Wagram.
It’s also the least potent of Ott’s many Grüners at just 12.5% abv. I could hardly believe that this much flavour was packed in to a wine retailing at under £20 a bottle, reckoned it was well worth a score of 17 out of 20 and that it should be drinking well for the next five years. All of the philosophy described above applies to this entry-level wine, except that only some of the Am Berg ingredients were aged in Stockinger Fuders, the rest in tank.
Here’s my tasting note on the 2024 Am Berg:
Full screwcapped bottle just 1,251 g. Blend of wines from younger vines (although the tech spec says they are 15 to 25 years old) in the villages of Feuersbrunn and Gösing in Wagram and Engabrunn over the border in Kamptal. Certified organic. RS 2.1 g/l, TA 6 g/l.
Greenish straw. Full of life and energy on the nose, not to mention herbal fruit on the palate. So much taut energy bound up in this wine. This is his entry level so I'm really looking forward to tasting the rest of the range! 12.5% Drink 2025–2030
£18.59 Armit Wines
I did go on to taste the rest of the range Armit are selling, including three single-vineyard 2022s costing about £45 to £55 a bottle, and gave those wines a score of 17.5 (although one or two are not yet ready), but it seems to me that the difference in price is much greater than the difference in pleasure – current pleasure anyway.
I asked Ott why the 2024 is so very expressive and he replied, ‘in April 2024 late frosts damaged the small green shoots of the vines at lower altitudes around the villages. The second vegetative growth had delayed budding, resulting in a lower yield with higher acidity compared to the first growth. This precise and elegant wine was produced from the blend.’
Apparently 2023 is the last vintage of Am Berg that Mark Savage will be selling because he feels the producer is now ‘too big for us. Savage Selection has a great track record for long-term relationships with its growers, many of whom have been with us for over 30 vintages, even 40+, and most for over 10 years. When trying to select estates for our catalogue, I am always looking for that kind of long-term relationship and that means that I am always looking for estates that are truly compatible, in various ways, but most obviously in terms of size. The most common reason for an estate leaving our catalogue is because it has become too large and will therefore be making demands on us that we have no desire or ability to satisfy. Other reasons tend to be brought about by changes of ownership or even simply a new generation taking over from the parents and having what we might call “other ideas”. Anyhow, we are, as I think you know, more interested in refinement than growth and our aim is always to get better rather than simply bigger.
‘Bernhard Ott is a very good grower and a very nice man. He was one of the earliest trailblazers in biodynamic viticulture and GV has always been his thing so he regards himself as virtually synonymous with the grape variety. But his estate has doubled in size since we first took it on 22 vintages ago and I am sure that he wants to see his wine in every Michelin-starred restaurant in the country, something that we are never going to help him to achieve. I wish him the best of luck with Armit. We will fill the vacancy in our catalogue with the excellent GV and Riesling from Gerhard Deim, a much smaller estate in Kremstal. It has the added advantage of offering us good Riesling, unlike Ott. (I never yet had a great Riesling from loess soils. It seems to much prefer the primary rock.)’
Savage still has Am Berg 2023 for sale at just £15.95, as well as the 2022 bottling of the one known as Der Ott at £23.55, so I asked him for a sample of the former to compare with the 2024. The difference between the two is not unlike the difference between the two UK importers: Armit’s 2024 is much bigger and louder than the more restrained 2023 on offer from Savage. My tasting note on the 2023 Am Berg:
Full screwcapped bottle just 1,249 g. Certified organic.
Not quite as intense on the nose as the 2024, but very classically varietal with fine acidity and freshness. Long, too. 'Cooler' somehow and a little sleeker and more citrus than the 2024. Another lovely wine that's definitely VGV. 12% Drink 2024–2027
£15.95 Savage Selection
Wine-Searcher lists so many retailers that it must be made in pretty large quantity (around 7,400 cases apparently). The 2023 is available in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Sweden, the US and the UK while the 2024 is already in Austria, Germany, Czechia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Hungary, and Italy, as well as the US and the UK. The wine is particularly well distributed in the US; it almost seems from Wine-Searcher to be ubiquitous there.
I made Der Ott 2021 a wine of the week in 2023 and there is much useful information in my description of it and its maker. I strongly recommend that you read that article, too! You will also find a mass of information such as what converted him to biodynamic viticulture, when he declined to bottle any single-vineyard wines, and his fanatical devotion to compost in this description by his US importers Skurnik.
About his 8 ha (20 acres) planted with something other than Grüner Veltliner, Ott writes, ‘there are experiments with Welschriesling in dry areas – we work in all vineyards without irrigation – as well as some red wine areas, for example Blaufränkisch which my son vinifies under his own label’, Moritz Ott.
Explore Austrian wine through more than 170 articles tagged Austria on this site, and both Julia and Tara plan to taste many more Austrian wines when they spend a week there next month.
