February 3, 2023

Bottle image of WEINGUT HIRSCH “Kammern” Grüner Veltliner (Kamptal, Austria) 2021

WEINGUT HIRSCH "Kammern" Grüner Veltliner 2021

( Kamptal, Austria) $33

Icy sheets of refrigerated sunlight. Crystalline and precise. A delicious trajectory beginning with salty minerals and ending in white pepper. Can you tell I really liked this wine? Austrian Grüner Veltliner—especially from a top appellation like the Kamptal—is perhaps one of the world’s most underappreciated of all the great white wine varietals. And the small artisanal family-owned Hirsch winery is one of Grüner’s greatest practitioners. Intense yet graceful, this wine pulls you into it and showers you with purity and freshness. It’s one of my favorite white wines with a pork roast or roast chicken. (12.5% abv)

94 points KM

Available at Wine.com

What is tasseography?

A. The practice of determining the clarity of a wine by looking at it in a tastevin (shallow silver tasting cup).

B. The practice of reading tea leaves to divine a drinker’s future.

C. The historic Burgundian practice of smelling and tasting vineyard soils to determine their merit.

D. The 16th century practice of tracing important trade routes for ships that carried wine and goods (like coffee beans and cacao) that could be made into expensive beverages.

According to Atlas Obscura, the early 20th century was a time of great fascination with the occult. In particular, tasseography (the practice of reading tea leaves) became so popular that fortune-telling tea cups were manufactured. From the outside, these often looked like elegant, normal, porcelain tea cups. But on the inside, they contained arcane symbols. Depending on where your tea leaves landed and the symbols they touched, anyone so inclined could tell your fortune. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with wine. Nonetheless, we at WineSpeed are convinced that the appreciation of tea and the appreciation of wine are correlated, and that the two manifest enormous similarities in their dependencies on terroir.

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Number of millions of bottles of Champagne shipped last year from the region. Almost 22 million of these were shipped to the U.S., an increase of 6.3% over 2015. The U.S. is the top export… Continue reading

WEINGUT HIRSCH "Kammern" Grüner Veltliner 2021

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