Thank God it´s Friday!

Why weird? This is the combination Alois Kracher loves, telling that chardonnay is for power and structure, while welschriesling adds the finesse, thus taking the classic Sauternes formula (where semillon and sauvignon play the same roles) as an example.

Btw, what was the vintage?

M.

Thanks again for your eloquent postings, Nils. (I hope that the Royal Swedish Academy takes notice, for possible prize consideration, you never know ...)

The petroleum aroma is certainly a familiar signature of Botrytis but I don't know if that was the kerosene that your brother-in-law smelled.

Also by the way, today my first wine-newsgroup posting turns 21, and since I will be dining at a favorite restauant anyway I might raise a glass to its maturity. (It was a list of US wine publications, posted 5-Oct-83, net.wines of course, but owing to the spooling with the HP "Notes" software and the store-and-forward delays in those days it was fully public

Best to all -- Max

Michael, sorry for the sloppy follow-up (I had already deleted the message I wanted to respond to): Are you familiar with a Welschriesling from Josef Wurzinger in Tadten (Burgenland)? I had this (don't remember the vintage) while in Vienna in May and recall flavors of pineapple and candied fruit. I haven't been able to find a Wurzinger Welschriesling here in Germany, and the ones I have found have been nothing like it.

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide.

Dave Devine

Sorry, no.

That's the problem with Welschriesling. It makes beautifully fresh quaffing wines in the 10.5 to 11.5% range, espacially in Styria, where it's always the basic wine from every producer. Then it has been proven perfect to yield the best base wines for sparklers, in the Weinviertel region. As to "better" dry examples - 12.5 to 14%, unchaptalized of course - it's not nearly as successfull as many other grapes, and your Wurzinger example might have been a kind of a bingo hit that might not have been reproduced in a similar way the vintage. (And then, of course, there is Welschriesling with botrytis, where it's potentially world class).

M.

That's the clue:

Their homepage being quite informative - with a large pic of bvrothers Horst and Georg Schmelzer -, I am sorry to say that not only I never met them, but I haven't even seen a single bottle yet. They are not among the first or second rank producers, but made it into the recently published "wein burgenland" book:

M.