Heinrich Blaufänkisch 2019

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Growing up in Portugal in the 90s and early 2000s led me to the establishment of a certain taste profile that way too often ignored the fascinating variety that you have in wines from all over the world.

Even though I ended up growing a fan of completely different kinds of aromatic profiles such as Riesling or Sangiovese, there are certain characteristics that directly awake in me a smile of pleasure.

One of them is the iron taste, often also described as blood.

Whenever I come across a wine which is dominated by such an iron taste, I feel myself surrendering to it and purely enjoying it. 

At first I thought this was something exclusively from the Douro region.

It did not surprise me that it was also to be found in most Ribera del Duero wines as it is the direct region when you go into Spain and that Tempranillo is Tinta Roriz. Same grape, same soil, all good.

But having a wine from Burgenland , Austria, where the soils can be completely different, has opened a new brave world ahead of me.

Sure they also have slate soils like in Douro, but Blaufränkisch is one of the grapes that has recently  been gaining a special place in my preferences.

In this particular case that I have chosen, I was confronted with a deep but fresh  and intense Blaufränkisch which has somehow always found new ways to present itself anew whenever I got back to it within the two days that the bottle has lasted.

Without being a high end wine, it is an incredibly pure expression of the grape and all its features. This is the kind of wine that you definitely have to have in your cellar as it can imprint a higher value to your daily wine consumption. 

Bio Dynamically farmed, Heinrich is one of the most fascinating and consequently good wineries in Austria and always a safe choice at the time of picking up a wine in case you  like authenticity allied with some well controlled funkiness. 

In fact, I have been following their work for a couple of years now and I am just surprised with myself why I haven't written anything about them before. 

But today was the day.  

 

16/20

Country: Austria
Region: Burgenland
Grapes: Blaufränkisch
Winemaker: Gernot and Heike Heinrich
12,5%
Link: https://www.heinrich.at/de/shop/blaufraenkisch19

 

Location: Hamburg, Germany

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