2024 Prager Riesling Steinriegl Federspiel Wachau 6pk 6x750ml

The Prager family has been on this hillside since 1715, which puts their winemaking somewhere ahead of most countries' entire wine industries. Then 2023 happened. Hail stripped Ried Steinriegl before harvest, the late-picked Smaragd bottling never got made, and every surviving grape landed in this one wine.

Franz Prager co-founded the Vinea Wachau, the growers' association that still sets the region's rules, and Toni Bodenstein married into the family and spent the next three decades obsessing over old terraces and biodiversity. Steinriegl is his only site west of the village — brutally steep, facing southwest, cooled by the forest that runs right up against it. The soil is kalksilikatmarmor, a limestone silicate marble you won't find much of anywhere else in the Wachau.

Hand-picked in October, straight to the press, wild-fermented in stainless for 34 days and left alone for seven months. No oak touches it, and none should. What comes out is 2 grams of sugar, 7.3 grams of acid and 22 grams of dry extract — which in plain English means bone dry, high-tension, and built like a coiled spring.

This is Riesling for people who want their whites with a spine. I'd drink it over the next five years and pour it colder than you think.