Know your étiquette! Wachau Federspiel Riesling

Know your étiquette! No, this series isn’t about minding your vinous Ps and Qs, but rather—taking the French word for label—an occasional series on looking for clues as to what the hell the drink inside the bottle might taste like.

We’re going to start the series with a place dear to my heart. Having spent years working with CellarHand, Australia’s foremost importer of German and Austrian wines, I was fortunate to rub shoulders with many of the great growers of Austria.

It might seem like a fringe player, but Austria has a very rich wine-growing heritage, and has made incredible strides in getting its message out in the past few years, thanks to the ambassadorial efforts of certain estates, as well as clear quality messaging from the Austrian Wine Marketing Board. What may sound like a rather drab organisation is in fact a cutting-edge resource for discovering and understanding the wines of this pocket of Central Europe.

Domäne Wachau is one of those estates—in fact it’s a very high-quality cooperative of motivated growers with outstanding holdings—that has helped get the message out about Austrian wine. It is based in the country’s most revered region for whites, and its wines are well distributed across the globe. This means you stand a good chance of tracking them down. As well as being tasty, good-value and accessible examples, they also provide a handy reference point for the style and quality of wines from the Wachau specifically and the Danube Valley in general.

For all the supposed confusion scribbled on Germanic labels, they are chock-full of information. Here, I pick up a bottle of Domäne Wachau’s Riesling from the Bruck vineyard, to help you decipher the not-so-hidden symbols on a AU$40-bottle of single-site wine from this special, and highly picturesque, region.