The UnCorker

Weird Wine of the Week: 2007 St. Laurent Klassisch, Hannes Schuster

March 28, 2009 | In WINE REVIEWS | No Comments

The day will come when Austrian or German reds don’t automatically qualify for “weird” status in North America, but country of origin is not the only unusual aspect of this wine.  The varietal, St. Laurent, was once near extinction – a forgotten distant cousin to Pinot Noir – and the wine-making itself here flies boldly in the face of what the North American market supposedly demands from a red wine.  A  first whiff immediately reveals that this bottle is all about the fruit, which is farmer’s market fresh.  When you visit a winery and get a chance to taste the must – when the grapes have been crushed, but are not yet wine – you realize that the tannins at this point in the process are sweet and soft, like white tea.   And when the fruit itself is delicious, you can taste it – full, mouth-filling, sweet, and distinctive.  It is only during vinification, and the oak barrel aging that often follows, that red wine makers strive to tame this vulgar youthfulness in the wines and often end up struggling to keep the distinctiveness of the grapes with which they started.

Enter Hannes Schuster, who has managed to capture the spirited flavor of full fruit and young tannins in a polished, intensely enjoyable 12.5% alcohol wine.  It takes a minute to warm up to the idea of all these ripe wild cherries in your glass.  We are just not used to the straightforward naturalness of it all, but the experience is addictive – and as soon as we finished the bottle we were sad we didn’t have another.  The wine is unfiltered and unfined, and you will notice a lot of glycerine and lees on the sides of your glass, as well as other sediment towards the end of the bottle.  It sees 8 months of mellowing out time in large wood casks (but not oak barriques.)  Even though the St. Laurent varietal is a cousin of Pinot Noir, we would have been more likely to have guessed Cabernet Franc if we were tasting this one blind.  It retails for around $19.   Seek it out.