2019 Schloss Gobelsburg Grüner Veltliner Ried Steinsetz Kamptal 750 ml

For 850 years, Schloss Gobelsburg has defined the quality and character of Austria’s Kamptal region. The intense, assertive wines they produce year after year make us perk up every time we hear the name. 

Master Sommelier Sur Lucero sees them as the pinnacle of the Kamptal region, a small but mighty river valley north of the Danube. “I don’t know of a single wine professional who can speak about Austria without speaking about Schloss Gobelsburg,” he said. “It’s just a textbook expression.”

Their focus and consistency have landed the estate on Wine & Spirits magazine’s Top 100 Wineries list three times in recent years. And winemaker Michael Moosbrugger’s vision earned him the coveted Winemaker of the Year title from the Austrian magazine Falstaff.

Kamptal lies directly east of Kremstal and Wachau, the other two most important wine regions in Austria. The little valley tucked into those hills around the Kamp River faces due south, and the slopes of this region capture just enough warmth to grow grapes.  

The estate’s Steinsetz vineyard sits on a breezy plateau just south of the castle, where the Grüner Veltliner grapes can hang on the vines deep into the fall and ripen without fear of rot from excess moisture. Beneath the ried’s thin loess topsoil lays a deep bed of Danube river rock, more exposed than in most of Kamptal. The resulting wine exhibits a singular minerality, with a snap of spicy radish beneath the gorgeous green juiciness that prevails. Perky and energetic, it manages to evoke all manner of garden herbs and spring shoots while slaloming between mouthwatering and tongue-tingling pleasures. 

On the whole, the 2019 vintage was extraordinary. A small amount of rain fell at just the right times, and the summer heat peaked in June, just as the berries formed. Like a child home from camp, suddenly tawny and long-limbed, that dry and evenly warm season transformed this wine into a braver, bolder version of itself. Its inherently clean and lean style met an added richness and muscle that we feel marks the arrival of the site’s full maturity.

“In my eyes, it’s a perfect vintage for us,” Moosbrugger said. “It will be one of the three remembered vintages of this decade.” 

Moosbrugger took over the estate in 1996, and has since become one of Austria’s leading lights. He heads up the country’s quality consortium, and in that role has advocated for a tiered system to identify the great sites in each region, not unlike the cru systems in Alsace or Burgundy. 

As a winemaker, he sees the history he’s inherited as an object lesson and a guide, drawing wisdom from vineyard management documents from the 18th and 19th centuries and applying a steady hand to his modern estate. 

“We do not have to be on the edge of each trend,” he said recently. “Gobelsburg belongs to the classics. In that sense, we have a duty to be true.” 

Revered wine writer and importer Terry Theise, who has been demanding the world pay attention to Austrian wines for far longer than the world has listened, recently tasted through all of the 2019s from Schloss Gobelsburg. He could hardly contain himself. 

“Even banishing (or attempting to banish) ‘the centuries,’” he said, referring to the outsized history of the place, “I was very much mindful that something superb and precious is taking place right now, and for that alone Schloss Gobelsburg is an estate of great consequence.”