We look forward to welcoming Roland Velich at the Top 100 Symposium in New York City. He’ll be pouring his Moric wines on January 14, 2020 at Union Park Events. Here is Tara Q. Thomas’ profile of the winery printed in our 2020 Buying Guide:
Roland Velich’s masterful blaufränkisch bottlings prove that there’s more to Austrian wine than grüner veltliner.
Before Roland Velich launched his winery in 2001, he’d spent time visiting some of the world’s great wine regions, noting that places like Piedmont and Burgundy shaped their winemaking heritage around native grapes. So when he quit his family winery in Apelton, on Lake Neusiedl, where he and his brother had been making oak-aged chardonnay, he chose to focus on blaufränkisch. That red grape has thrived in the cool, forested heights of Burgenland since long before political divisions fractured the region, driving a border between Austria and Hungary. He named his project Moric, a Maygar name pronounced “Moritz,” and took a minimalist approach to making wine, vinifying old-vine parcels with ambient yeasts in open-top fermenters and aging in large barrels. He’s since redefined blaufränkisch for the world, producing reds that combine concentration with nuances that speak to their heritage.
2016 Burgenland Blaufränkisch (94 points)
This is a pitch-perfect rendition of a basic blaufränkisch. Culled from parcels of various ages growing in a range of soils in Neckenmarkt and Lutzmannsburg, it gives a sense of the region’s relative warmth in its ripe blackberry flavors, with hints of the region’s forested hills in its fir-tree details. It’s firm yet filigreed, with a breezy acidity that emanates energy.
Taste this and more of the top-scoring wines of 2019 at the Top 100 Symposium in NYC.
This story was featured in W&S Winter 2019.
This story appears in the print issue of Winter 2019.
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