2016 Moric Serious Wine From A Gorgeous Place

Moric

Austria / Burgenland / Moric

The defiant label almost says it all - spells it out in black and white, in fact. A little disagreement between Moric maverick Roland Velich and Austrian wine officialdom over typicity at play here. What the label doesn't quite say is that the wine is as gorgeous as it is serious. Perhaps it was the fact you could close your eyes and picture yourself in Chablis, sampling its most treasured fruits, that put the lawmakers offside. This is the wine labelled in previous years as Sankt Georgen, grown on a limestone parcel near the village of Eisenstadt in the southern portion of the Leitha Mountains. The nose has incredible precision and clarity: yellow flowers, lemon, grapefruit and intense limestone minerality. The palate continues in the same vein with thrilling tension, energy and length, as well as lip-smacking limey extract. Delicious. - Ed Merrison, CellarHand

April, 2019

Mike Bennie

The Wine Front

95 points

Love this perfume. Whiffs of seaspray, fino sherry, light honey, green apple, flint. Yum. Palate is pleasingly nutty-savoury, dominated by saline and savouriness, lifted with green apple, long and fine, lightly chalky in texture. Beautiful flow across palate, precise and fine. Such a delicious, delicious wine.

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About Moric

For more than a decade, winemaker Roland Velich made an intense study of the world's greatest wines of terroir with the explicit goal of finding “that thing”, as he puts it, that a wine must possess in order to achieve greatness. When he felt he'd learned enough, he set out to make an Austrian red wine that belonged in the same pantheon as the great Grand Cru Burgundies, the Northern Rhône and the legendary vineyards of Barolo. So began the Moric project. Its medium is Blaufränkisch, expressed through ancient vines in a challenging growing region, meticulous biodynamic viticulture, obsessive sorting and fairly primitive winemaking techniques. The Burgenland Blaufränkisch is a brilliant starting point, while this beguiling variety reaches its zenith in the old-vine wines from Lutzmannsburg and Neckenmarkt.

About

Roland Velich comes from a Burgenland winemaking family but initially he worked as a croupier. It was 2001 when he kicked off the Moric project, working with seriously old vines that perhaps no one believed in quite as much as him. His zeal for this terroir and the Blaufränkisch grape has mercifully been matched by vision and skill. "Roland Velich makes the best Blaufränkisch on the planet. Full stop," says Jancis Robinson Purple Pages contributor, Alder Yarrow. Meanwhile this is also the favourite Blaufränkisch producer of Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine correspondent. "Moric, is a star in this world," he proclaims. And indeed he is.