REFINES PROVENANCE

A sublime entrance for Styria's most successful white wine variety: in a total of five categories, 72 Styrian vineyards submitted 169 Sauvignon Blancs for blind tasting.

Over the past few years, Sauvignon Blanc has firmly established itself as a flagship in Styria’s wide range of varieties. The semi-sweet properly structured wines have even made the leap beyond their Austrian borders and are raking in accolades on the international stage. This success is in part due to its clear and transparent provenance, which holds true for all three regions – Steirisches Vulkanland, South Styria and West Styria – and which has created a solid foundation for the Sauvignon Blanc in every sense of the word. As a basis, regional wine (“Gebietswein”) serves as an introduction to the multifaceted world of Styrian Sauvignon Blancs; as a next step, we speak of local wine (“Ortswein”) to distinguish the variety based on climatic conditions and geological characteristics on an even smaller scale; at the top of the pyramid are so-called “Riedenweine” – vintage wines – that clearly showcase the vintner’s individual signature as well as the special conditions of a precise location. The wines presented here were judged by a panel of experts, invited by Wein Steiermark, in a blind tasting at Fachschule Silberberg, a technical college for agriculture and forestry. The wines with the highest scores went on to a final tasting round. The panel consisted of Johannes Fiala, Boris Penkoff, Wolfgang Pfanner, Helmut Gramer and René Kollegger, as well as Falstaff editor-in-chief Peter Moser. The theme for this year’s retrospective on Sauvignon Blanc varieties was local wines from 2021 and 2020; the top vintage category featured wines from 2020, 2019 and 2018. All wines evaluated at this tasting can be found at falstaff.com.

With vineyards on gentle hillsides as well as steep slopes, the Styrian wine landscape is home to great wines.

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