Knoll

Emmerich Knoll Senior’s wines have long served as a Wachau benchmark. A superb set of vineyard holdings is certainly a key to quality here, but patient and intuitive viticulture and cellar work are as well. Knoll was still maturing most of his Smaragds in large casks through the summer at a time when scarcely any of Austria’s practitioners of Grüner Veltliner or Riesling were any longer doing so. (One could claim that Knoll was a major force behind the welcome recent return among so many growers to bottling more leisurely and letting their traditionally latest-vintage-fixated countrymen howl.) Emmerich Knoll Junior has taken the leading role here in the course of the past decade, during which there were a number of collections that I found excellent. DAVID SCHILDKNECHT