I've been blogging again...
Gemischter Satz at Gruner
In which I continue my fascination with a particular wine from Austria known as "Gemischter Satz".
Having had occasion to meet up with old friend and bon vivant Jake Parrott and his wife Christina, Roxi and I ended up having dinner at Gruner in Portland, OR, an "Alpine-influenced" restaurant dedicated to bringing Alpine cooking from all the countries, regions, and cuisines of that area.
The wine list is a wine geek's dream, but we never got past the whites on this night, because the selection was so good, and whites suited our food choices so well, that we didn't have to go any further.
Which means, of course, we'll just have to go back and focus on the other side of the excellent wine list.
With so many choices, and with Jake and my own humble self being so devoted to Austrian, German, Friulian and Jura wines, we diddled for a long while and then compromised with the Wieniniger Wien Gemischter Satz 2009, a wine with which I was both very familiar and very fond of.
It's imported now by Winebow, and handled in Oregon by Lemma Wine Company.
The Wieninger Wien was all I had hoped for.
Served too cold for total enjoyment, it needed to warm up at the table, so we (barely) managed to restrain ourselves until the wine warmed and the apps arrived---said apps being an outstanding classic maltauschen, a Germanic pasta and ricotta that was so sublime you could hardly tell where the ricotta stopped and the pasta began; a concoction of eggplant, tomatoes, blistered red peppers, and delicious gypsy peppers in oil; and a thin, crackling, comfort food to the max, Alsatian flammenkuechen. (Yowsa! is, I believe, the technical term to apply at this point.)
The Wieninger then proceeded to explode with flavor, and since the rule of the Gemischter Satz, a tiny little zone/type found only on the outskirts of Vienna (Wien) is that of various un-announced field blends, we had the further wine geek's delight in trying to figure out what the hell was in the glass!
We knew there had to be Gruner Veltliner. And we were all pretty sure there was a sizable component of Pinot Blanc. Jake even went so far as to remark that the wine reminded him of Trimbach's Pinot Blanc from Alsace. But finally, we just gave up, gave in, and simply enjoyed the mingling of varieties of the wine.
The wine was profoundly responsive to the foods on the table as well (spaetzle with herb roasted chicken, house-made sausages with sauerkraut (which were truly exceptional, by the way, and I say that as a guy who lived for three wonderful years in Germany devouring as many great sausages as I could; plus the sauerkraut was more in the manner of French choucroute, one of the best dishes known to man), and a trout wrapped in speck that Jake was chowing down on.
The wine handily accommodated everything and adapted to it---hey, with all those field-blended varieties in there, it had to be flexible, right?---and made the meal a success.
And as a bonus, when opened the wine bottle made that most romantic of sounds that transported us into the land of bliss, that singular sound that all true wine lovers adore----the neat, crisp crack of the screwcap being snapped loose!
So go out and get yourself some Wieninger Wien Gemischter Satz, avaiable (hopefully) wherever Winebow's extensive tentacles reach in the U.S. You'll be glad you did.
