Dorli Muhr Ried Spitzerberg Kobeln 1OTW Erste Lage 2021

Cellar for up to 10 years. Decant for 1 hour or more before serving. After a groundbreaking career in wine PR, Dorli Muhr established her own winery in 2002 based around a tiny 0.17 hectare vineyard that was a wedding gift to her grandmother in 1918. She immediately got stuck in with unorthodox methods like treading her grapes by foot and painstakingly picking the grapes by hand which led her new neighbours to nickname her the “crazy woman”. Over the years Dorli has acquired more and more prime vineyards in Spitzerberg planted with old Blaufränkisch vines and her dedication to the region helped it receive Erste Lage or “Premier Cru” classification in 2019. Her wines like this spectacular Spitzerberg Kobeln are regularly ranked amongst Austria’s top red wines. This bottling comes from the highest point in Spitzerberg which is especially dry, rocky, and exposed to the wind and sun. These harsh conditions help create powerful wines with firm tannins that can age beautifully in the cellar and only reach their peak some 5-6 years following the vintage. Dorli just produces a thousand bottles of Kobeln each year, ageing the wine in large neutral casks for 20 months before bottling without filtration. The result is what James Suckling describes as “dark and mysterious”, an opulent style of Blaufränkisch with a strong structure and decadent ripe fruit topped with a surprising smoothness on the palate.