Few wine bottles telegraph their intentions as clearly because the 1-liter bottle of grüner veltliner: “I would like you to drink me now, as shortly as potential, ideally within the firm of others.”
In contrast to different outsized codecs—notably, the magnum, which producers typically use to boost the getting old potential of great, cellar-worthy wines—the purpose of the crisp, clear grüner liter is implicit in its conveniently crown-capped packaging. The primary wave arrived on U.S. shores within the Nineties and early 2000s, when importer Terry Theise launched a collection of high-quality, low-cost bottlings from his venerable secure of Austrian producers. These early touchstones included the organically farmed wines of H&M Höfer and Weingut Berger, now broadly thought to be benchmarks of the style.
Based on Weingut Berger’s Erich Berger, providing liters of easy, cheap desk wine to lubricate the native populace was nothing new for Austria. “We had been bottling our grüner veltliner on this form for a few years as a lightweight, uncomplicated and at all times drinkable wine,” Berger explains. To a quickly democratizing viewers of American drinkers, nonetheless, who had been simply studying to deal with wine as a quotidian affair, the class got here to characterize one thing surprisingly liberating: the unique all-purpose social gathering wine.
At this time, the traditional 1-liter bottle of grüner stays a stalwart of the modern retail panorama. What’s modified, in the meantime, is the broader world of wine. With the fast mainstreaming of pure wine, it didn’t take lengthy for the scene to take the fundamental idea—i.e., “Let’s put a complete lot of yummy, reasonably priced wine right into a fittingly big-ass bottle”—and inject it with its personal “lo-fi” aesthetic. In consequence, the liter has turn out to be synonymous with a brand new breed of cheap, easy-drinking pure wines (see Choice Massale’s La Boutanche and Ampeleia’s Un Litro, to call simply two) that overdeliver on refreshment with out requiring a lot in the best way of sustained meditation.
It’s a well-known irony: The grüner liter that impressed a complete subgenre now not hits the identical for youthful shoppers reared on edgier, extra esoteric fare. However in Austria, considered one of Europe’s nice hotbeds of progressive winemaking, one other chapter of the story has began to unfold. Upstart and established winemakers alike are rethinking what may go into the serviceable format they’ve relied on for many years. Maybe inevitably, a budget, gluggable liter of grüner acquired bizarre.
Latest releases radically reinterpret the style, recasting the dependable staple within the picture of Austria’s thriving avant-garde. Contemplate, for instance, the work of fifth-generation winemaker Gerald Diem. Based mostly within the Weinviertel area, a historic supply of 1-liter bottlings, he’s considered one of a handful of producers—lots of them working in a pure idiom—who’ve began experimenting with macerated expressions of the grape.
Because it seems, grüner veltliner affords itself as an excellent candidate for the orange-wine remedy, which noticeably performs up the grape’s innate savory, natural character. Bottled unfined and unfiltered after three weeks on the skins, Diem’s aptly named D’Ora Orange liter—a mix of 90 p.c single-vineyard grüner with a smidge of roter traminer—occupies that sudden sliver of the Venn diagram the place “orange” and “chuggable” overlap in stunning concord.
In the meantime, in Vienna, there’s rising star Jutta Ambrositsch. A Burgenland native, she has earned her status channeling the distinctive identities of the historic hillside vineyards which have fueled town’s vibrant wine tradition for hundreds of years. Identified for her various variations of Gemischter Satz (actually “blended set”), Vienna’s conventional subject mix, she produces a number of site-specific cuvées which have turn out to be extremely coveted rarities. Arguably, although, it’s her grüner-dominant Ein Liter Wien (a play on phrases that roughly means “a liter of Vienna”) that finest articulates her mission to translate town’s native terroir for a brand new technology of wine lovers.
“We’ve insisted from the start that the wine we produce for our liter bottling needs to be as critical as any of the opposite wines we make,” says Marco Kalchbrenner, Ambrositsch’s husband and enterprise associate, who oversees the undertaking’s every day operations. An unusually complicated mix of second-press juice from all her single-vineyard holdings, together with a plot of old-vine grüner planted within the Sixties, Ein Liter Wien is Ambrositsch’s trendy tackle the hyperlocal harvest blends of the Viennese heuriger, or wine tavern. Juicy, fleshy and floral, it strikes the right stability between drinkable and thinkable that defines the class’s new wave.
Fortunately, Ambrositsch and her compatriots’ success proves that seriousness of intent doesn’t imply sacrificing all of the the explanation why the liter of grüner went viral within the first place. Their aesthetics and kinds could differ, however the bottles at present repping this motion by no means depart from the format’s unique promise: delivering a big amount of scrumptious, drink-me-now wine for a minimal quantity of {dollars}.
