2017 Rudi Pichler Gruner Veltliner Federspiel Wachau Austria 750 ml

Uncompromising Grüner Veltliner

Expressive and energetic, the 2017 Rudi Pichler Grüner Veltliner Federspiel is the best $25 white wine money can buy. Our own Master Sommelier Sur Lucero poured vintage after vintage of this cuveé as a sommelier at The French Laundry and has already put in an order for a case himself. Owner Rudi Pichler—whose family has been in the Wachau for generations—is a meticulous purist who produces a focused and precise Austrian white that is textbook in its varietal expression: It is extremely vibrant, with generous notes of grapefruit, white pepper, and lemongrass. Serve with fresh-picked garden herbs, artichokes, capers, and your late-season tomatoes for one of late summer’s greatest pairings. We scored as much as we could, but for a wine-industry insider favorite, this legendary wine is bound to sell out. $25 per bottle, shipping included on 6.

The Wachau, northwest of Vienna, is Austria’s most prized wine region. It consists of sloping and terraced vineyards that quickly ascend out of the banks of the Danube. This is where the Pichler clan has been cultivating vines since the early 1730s, and where Rudi Pichler grew up in a house that his family has owned since 1884. In his youth, he would wake up to orders to milk the cows, then work until the evening in the wine cellars. Those early days doubtless instilled the work ethic that paved Pichler’s way to Vintner of the Year honors, which he won in 2010 from Austria’s prestigious Falstaff Wine Guide. But they also instilled in him a traditional sense of winemaking.

Grüner Veltliner can be rich, and some of the best-known examples are vinified with concentration in mind. But Pichler takes the opposite tack. He refuses to permit the influence of botrytis like some other growers do, which results in wines that are leaner, and show more focus and purity. Rudi’s uncompromising attention to detail has earned him a global reputation as one of the elite producers of Grüner Veltliner, and his pristine expression of the grape—a racy, high-acidity style that will absolutely thrill fans of Sauvignon Blanc and Albarino—has earned him status as a favorite among industry insiders.

Fond of referring to himself as a “wine caretaker” instead of a winemaker, Pichler carefully monitors the property’s 37 acres of vineyards, where many of the vines are over 60 years of age, and which showcase the full geological range of the Wachau area: Classic soils—calcium-rich, water-retaining loess and infertile gneiss—characterize the plots from which this Grüner hails. He keeps yields low, removes botrytized grapes by hand, and does multiple passes each harvest because the berries, scattered across different microclimates, inclinations, and exposures, ripen at vastly different speeds. Finally, the grapes are crushed by foot and vinified in stainless steel tanks. The resulting expression is what many consider the perfect textbook Grüner, and the dream pairing for a late-summer produce haul.