Winemonger.com

The Slanted Door restaurant is easily considered to be the best Vietnamese restaurant in the United States. Sommelier Mark Ellenbogen pairs their incredible menu with a laundry list of Austrian wines, including those from your favorite Austrian wine importer: Winemonger. Here is a sample menu with recipes from The Slanted Door so you can try this food pairing at home. Continue reading

The vintner association Vinea Wachau Nobilis Districtus of the Wachau wine region in Austria aims to produce the purest wines in the world. With their codex released in May of 2006, the Vinea Wachau says another decided farewell to modern winemaking techniques. Continue reading

Here are the ingredients for a great Sauvignon Blanc: perfect climate, influence from a talented vintner, correct technical winemaking process, and superior terroir. Simple, right? The perfect climate includes warm days, cool nights, humidity, and a long vegetative cycle. Warm days are needed to get the grapes to ripen. Cool nights assure that the fruit notes of the grape make it into the glass: without this cooling period, the aroma particles of the grape become, in the words of winemaker Eduard Tscheppe, "kind of fried". Continue reading

This is what Grüner Veltliner is, this is what Grüner Veltliner does, and that is why you want some fine Grüner Veltliner white wine. Continue reading

Smaragd? Qualitatswein? Trockenbeerenauslese? What does it all mean? Continue reading

A few days ago I received a call from a customer asking about white flakes he had discovered in a bottle of Trockenbeerenauslese by Gsellmann and Gsellmann. What he had come across are tartaric crystals, commonly referred to as wine diamonds or Weinstein ("wine stone") in German speaking countries. Continue reading

Robert Parker Jr., the famous American wine critic, calls the best Rieslings of the Wachau “some of the finest white wines made”. On how they compare to Rieslings from other regions, he goes on to say that “Austrian Rieslings are extremely distinctive from those produced in Alsace or Germany. They have a harmony between acidity and fruit found in French Rieslings, as well as the sharp focus found in the Germans.” Continue reading