I used to like blaufränkisch. A little rough around the edges, it had a vague Central European charm. Then I spent a week with the wine, tasting and discussing its talents and peculiarities at a conference in the Austrian Alps, later visiting its growers and their vineyards along the country’s Hungarian border. My interest turned to fascination and then a reality check. How could I have been tasting these wines for forty years without noticing the depth and subtleties of their site expression?
As it turns out, most of the growers did not understand the vine and its potential until recently, all of them still learning to farm it. They don’t completely know what was lost during a century of war and closed borders. But we are now tasting the peace dividend, a moment in a changing climate—political, agricultural and atmospheric—raising blaufränkisch to new levels of finesse.