We have a baker’s dozen of wines for September, and I shall split that two ways, seven wines here in Part One, the six remaining to follow in Part Two. Below, we begin the usual eclectic mix with a classic single vineyard Wiener Gemischter Satz, jumping to a Bergerac “Moelleux”, a Herefordshire Perry, Pinot Noir from Lorraine, a Slovakian white blend, and an Alsace Petnat, before finishing with a very classy Cider from Scotland. I’ve just noticed that the six wines which will appear in Part Two all come from different places to these drinks, so we are really doing that “wide world of wine” thing justice.

Wiener Gemischter Satz “Ried Rosengartel” 1OTW Nussberg 2017, Wieninger (Vienna, Austria)

Wieninger is possibly the biggest name amongst the winemakers of Vienna, the operation having been run by Fritz since 1987. The Wieninger reputation internationally is based on classic wines made from classic French varieties, but in Vienna they are very well known for a range of traditional gemischter satz. These range from inexpensive and generic to very classy single site iterations of the style. These latter bottles are as much wines of stature as the classic wines I mentioned, and are just as capable of ageing.

There are many opportunities to try a Wiener Gemischter Satz in the city, and there are now several very good producers. These include small, artisan, cellars like that of the inspirational Jutta Ambrositsch (whom Fritz mentored), but, the last point being relevant, it was Fritz Wieninger who pretty much singlehandedly revived this traditional appellation.

Although the Wieninger holding is large, at 50ha, it is all farmed biodynamically (Respekt certified). Wieninger now manage (but keep entirely separately) the producer Hajszan Neumann. They are based below the Nussberg, but Wieninger’s own cellar is in Stammersdorf, just below the Bisamberg, on the other side of the Danube.

Rosengartel is a hemmed-in plot of vines on the slopes of Vienna’s Nussberg which consistently renders fine wines. The “1OTW” classification effectively translates as 1er Cru. Fritz Wieninger and his team farm biodynamically, and the wines produced from this plot are often long lived. In essence, we think of these field blends as wines to drink soon, but Wieninger always proves that assertion to be wholly incorrect. This 2017 is a wine which has aged magnificently so far.

We have nine co-planted and co-fermented varieties. The wine looks remarkably like the colour of a fine Chablis. The bouquet has elements of both herbs and flowers (particularly honeysuckle) with some lemon citrus and orange blossom as it tails away. The palate is dry, mineral, but soft rather than hard-edged (the soils here in this central section of the Nussberg are Muschelkalk).

This is a very fine bottle, complex, but not super complicated making it a versatile food matcher. Very highly recommended if you can find it. This was purchased at the domaine on a visit in 2018, when we were also taken to see Rosengartel, a slice of the hill I hadn’t previously come across. I think it might cost between £40-£50/bottle now. I forget what this cost me but I do have a photo of a magnum in the tasting room, which cost just €54 back then.

Source des Verdots Moelleux 2019, Côtes de Bergerac, Domaine des Verdots (Bergerac, France)

Bergerac languished from lack of interest in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Sometimes we saw its red wines, usually pale Bordeaux imitations. There was a certain popularity in the UK for Bergerac-grown Sauvignon Blanc towards the middle and end of that period, thanks to the Ryman family (of the stationery chain) and their Château de la Jaubertie. But that was about it. The region has not really taken off since, although there has been a revival on a tiny scale of the sweet wines that were traditional, usually under the once moribund Monbazillac appellation.

Monbazillac was, and still is, a sweet wine, similar to Sauternes, perhaps with a little more Muscadelle in the mix, and a whole lot less potential for botrytis. Wines of various degrees of sweetness were made in the wider region, and when I first visited in the mid-80s, just getting interested in wine, you would easily find white wines labelled both moelleux and demi-sec.

Bergerac was the first French wine region I visited, at least after I was legally able to drink wine, so I was very interested to have been invited to a tasting hosted by Maison Wessman who own the Domaine that made this wine. This was one of two bottles given to me on leaving, so I didn’t pay for it (unusual enough that I should mention that).

We have a blend of Semillon and Muscadelle made in a style once traditional here. Labelled “moelleux”, to my palate it was less sweet than a similarly made Loire wine thus labelled, but then it tasted a little sweeter than your average demi-sec. I don’t think it matters. It’s not dry. I think it’s a shame this style has fallen out of favour as it makes a nice aperitif, in a similar way to a Muscat de Beaumes de Venise, drunk as such in France but which the English seemed, at the height of its popularity in the 80s/90s, to have considered a dessert wine.

As well as an aperitif it does work with food, either quite rich food of the type you’d serve a Sauternes with, or with spicy (but not too spicy) food. Sauternes can be a challenge with food, unless you consume a lot of foie gras, but this is less concentrated and perhaps therefore less of a battle between food and wine. The abv is still 13% though, so perhaps not one for a mid-morning slice of cake.

Golden yellow in colour, the bouquet had notes of honey and apricot. The palate had stewed yellow stone fruits like peach, nectarine and apricot. The finish lingers reasonably long. It’s a well-made wine, obviously not having the concentration of a top Sauternes but I think that gives it an advantage in some circumstances. Occasionally you really just want something uncomplicated, smooth, that slips down easily.

The producer is looking for an importer. That’s why the tasting. Westbury Communications organised it. I thought all the wines were good and should sell if taken on. But this one is a style few will buy nowadays. I think they are wrong. If you get the chance to try anything like this, give it a go and see what you think.

Hendre Huffcap “Pét Nat Perry” 2023, Little Pomona (Herefordshire, UK)

Cider has become very popular once again. On the back of the success of the commercial ciders we are seeing many smaller artisan producers gaining a reputation. One of those is Little Pomona, based at Brook House Farm in Bromyard. Susanna and James Forbes launched Little Pomona in 2017 after finding “their dream orchard”, 120 trees with four cider varieties of apple in Thornbury, moving to Bromyard in 2019. Their rise to fame as one of the country’s top producers has been swift.

Perry is like cider, but made from pears. In some ways it is a niche product, which has nowhere near the level of production, nor exposure, as apple cider. However, it is slowly gaining the interest of those drawn to cider, many of whom are natural wine fans who perhaps see cider as a super-refreshing (and often cheaper) alternative to petnat. Another similarity to the natural wine scene is this producer’s desire to experiment, and here is one result, a perry made using the methods for a petnat, and equally much of the philosophy of natural wine.

It is made using a single pear variety, Hendre Huffcap, grown by Guy Thomson at Lyde Farm near Hereford. The first thing you notice, after the fine bead, is its fragrance. A hazy lemon colour reveals a soft and almost creamy texture on the palate, combined with firm, almost slate-like, mineral acidity. The label suggests a yuzu note, and I’m a sucker for Yuzu fruit (I just saw that the revived Body Shop has a yuzu-scented shower gel, but I digress there). But let’s not forget that this is made from pears, and you can taste creamy pear, for sure.

Most will say, quite rightly, that cider and perry lack the complexity of wine. But wine isn’t always complex, and cider (as we shall see below) and perry are not always “simple”. This is delicious and has a lot going for it. So far, it is the best perry I’ve ever tried, though I’m not an expert.

Price? Just £14.50 from Aeble Cider in Anstruther, Fife. That, I would say, is a bargain. Little Pomona has several mixed case options on their web site.

“Pulsations” Pinot Noir des Joncyns 2022, Du Vin aux Liens (Lorraine, France)

To date, Vanessa Letort has been bottling wines from Alsace and The Loire for her Du Vin aux Liens label. She has been moving her operations over the Vosges mountains, to Lorraine, and this is where this cuvée comes from. It is a collaboration with her partner, Farid Yahimi, and a friend, Naoufel Zaim. It comes from seventeen-year-old vines on clay-limestone at Domaine de la Légèreté. This is where the three have purchased a hectare of vines at Bulligny and a further 3.5 hectares at Lucey.

The very keen-eyed reader might notice that Bulligny is close to where Maison Crochet is based, a Lorraine producer (in what was the Côtes de Toul, but the new wave here prefers Vin de France on their labels). I have thoroughly enjoyed the Crochet wines, and Maison Crochet have been very helpful to Vanessa et al in establishing the domaine  .

In this bottle we have 100% Pinot Noir, whole bunch fermented with a one-day maceration before very gentle, slow, pressing. Aged 18 months on its lees, this fully follows a natural wine philosophy, including zero added sulphur. The nose and palate combine raspberry, strawberry, all fine with the red fruits, with water melon and pink grapefruit. There’s definitely pink grapefruit on the finish. If you think that’s weird, it doesn’t taste weird.

There is definitely a resemblance to a natural wine Pinot from Alsace, for certain. It mainlines glouglou drinkability (I’d say smashable but someone beat me to that today). It’s a palish, lighter, red wine that is smooth fruited and very refreshing. The alcohol clocks in at 12.5% but the gentleness of the wine makes it seem less.

Vanessa’s former partner, Yannick Mekert, is getting a lot of attention right now, with a new UK importer (Tutto Wines) and a chapter in Camilla Gjerde’s new book, I noticed. From those I trust, I have heard that is very well deserved, but I also hope Vanessa has great success in Lorraine. Another obscure wine region to seek out is never to be ignored. This is a tasty Pinot to whet the appetite alongside the wines of Maison Crochet.

I bought this from Cork & Cask in Edinburgh’s Marchmont, for £26. They joked that they now have a Lorraine Section on their shelves (they also have some Crochet). The importer is Sevslo in Glasgow.

Oranžový Vlk 2021, Vino Magula (Little Carpathians/Trnava, Slovakia)

Magula is one of the handful of estates at the forefront of Slovakian natural wine, yet this is a fourth-generation family estate farming biodynamically at Suchá nad Parnou in Western Slovakia, northeast of Bratislava. I’ve written about Magula quite a few times, and this wine, the “orange wolf”, more than once. I like it a lot. Harvested quite early, in mid-September, it is a blend of 50% Grüner Veltliner, 30% Welschriesling and 20% Gewurztraminer. Actually, 0.5% of this wine consists of Devín and some other aromatic varieties.

Spontaneous fermentation takes place in open vat with (in 2021) fourteen days on skins. It is, of course, the pinkish Gewurztraminer skins that give the wine most of its colour, although Devín is a red variety. That colour, to me, appears somewhere between orange and salmon pink, but definitely with an almost gold-like glint in the right light. Ageing is in a mix of used oak barrel, and amphora and stoneware. This cuvée is never sulphured. Bottled after just over a year ageing in October 2022, just 3,206 bottles were made.

The wine is ever so slightly cloudy before standing (lees). The bouquet is pure orange blossom and apricot with a touch of sweet and sour. The palate has good salinity and acidity. Perhaps white peach flavours persist most. There is a gentle mineral texture. The wine lingers on the palate and has a lovely soulfulness, which I just love. All Magula’s wines are worth seeking out. This orange wine might be my favourite, after this bottle at least.

Imported by Basket Press Wines Wines. On their web site it is sadly currently out of stock, but check for new deliveries, or check out the other Magula cuvées.

“Gaz de Schistes” [2022], Anna, André and Yann Durrmann (Alsace, France)

I regularly grab a few Durrmann wines ever since I visited them pre-Covid. Luckily, they now have a UK importer, because though I liked their natural wine cuvées back then, the quality here has definitely got even better. This is down to André’s son, Yann, fully taking over and focussing on taking his father’s ecological efforts to another level, as well as increasing the number of sulphur-free cuvées here (labelled “Cuvée Nature”).

The family now farms around nine hectares in thirty sites around Andlau, which if you read Part One of my previous article on my favourite wine regions to be a tourist in, you will know is right at the centre of natural wine in Alsace (though the epicentre of natural wine creeps ever northward in this exciting region).

This is an orange petnat, a wine born of skin contact Pinot Blanc and direct pressed Pinot Gris and more Pinot Blanc, all taken from Schist terroir. The colour is a kind of burnt orange. There’s no cloudiness as this was disgorged. The nose is somewhere between apricot and quince. The palate is dry, mineral and savoury with herbs plus a note of apricot and apple. The apricot has that ever so slightly bitter edge of dried apricot, the apple coming through in the acids.

If 2022 was a difficult vintage in northern Alsace, this was a great success and it went spectacularly well with a sweet potato katsu curry oddly enough (I wondered whether I was being a bit too experimental, but it worked).

It cost £27 from Cork & Cask, who now seem to get a drop of Durrmann wines from importer Wines Under the Bonnet every year. This is out of stock but they do have instead a petnat called Toqué PG (Pinot Gris), a bit of a nod to the past pun there! That cuvée is only £24. It is also a sulphur-free “Cuvée Nature”.

Traditional Method Cider Brut Vintage 2020, The Naughton Cider Company (Fife, Scotland)

Peter Crawford has a backgound in Champagne, but he harvests his apples principally from the family farm on the banks of the Tay in Fife, almost opposite Dundee. Fife is actually a wonderful source for apples, and indeed many other fruits which I am lucky enough to have access to. The fruit there is superb and so are Peter’s ciders. In fact, I hope to pay him a visit next year to see how he does it.

This cuvée is made from fifty varieties of apple, possibly more. It is “vinified” (well, you know what I mean) 35% in ex-Champagne barrels, the rest in stainless steel, where it spends ten months before bottling on its lees, effectively the “traditional method” used to make Champagne. This is almost a natural cider, so no chemicals are used in the orchard or the cuverie, no sugar is added (chaptalisation), and the cider isn’t filtered. Peter does use a minimal addition of sulphur though. I only say “almost” natural because I think (?) they do need to use a cultured yeast to start the fermentation.

As with Grower Champagne, you get a good level of back-label information, so I can tell you that this was bottled in August 2021 and then disgorged in July 2023. This means that it had nearly two years on its lees, so not as “aged” as the 2018 cider I wrote about in my article on Tim Philipps recently, but nevertheless nicely aged. More proof that it works!

This really is a very elegant and refined bottle. It has tiny bubbles, actually the tiniest I can remember seeing in a cider, and a crisp acidity, unusually filigree and rapier-like for (again) a cider. I wonder whether blind you might wonder whether this is a “no-malo” Champagne for the first moments when it hits the palate? The bouquet probably gives it away as it is all fresh apples, perhaps with a hint of lemon citrus. The palate has pure salinity, toasty apple peel, but also is clean and thirst quenching.

The bottle looks more like Champagne than any other cider I have seen, but this is unrepentantly a cider, if a very fine one. That informative back label suggests it should be drunk 2023-2030. I would certainly say that this has everything to enable it to age, and I would like to get some more to try out that suggestion, or at least to give it another three-or-four years. Only 1,550 bottles were made, though.

I bought this, once again, at Aeble Cider in Anstruther, where it cost £25. That is more expensive than most artisan ciders, although Aeble has ciders from affordable right up past £25 if you want to try them, including the famous Swiss Cidrerie du Vulcain. Naughton’s “Overture” cuvée comes in slightly cheaper at £21.