2015 Weingut Wieninger Select Pinot Noir Wien Austria 750 ml

A 94-point wine for under $25 is remarkable enough. But when it’s a rare Viennese Pinot Noir that hardly ever gets exported from Austria? Well, that’s cause for celebration. Wine Enthusiast, in their glowing 94-point review of the 2015 Wieninger Select Pinot Noir, clearly agreed. They loved its “interplay of earthiness and red-berry fruit,” dubbing it an “elegant, poised wine [that] will blossom over the coming years.” We simply call it stunning, especially at the best price in the nation, and more than 35% off the average you’ll find online.

Pinot Noir from Vienna is incredibly rare on these shores; sommeliers in the know often refer to it as the greatest wine that most people have never heard of. Austria’s capital city, after all, is home to approximately 1,730 acres of vineyards—amazingly, it has been for thousands of years—but around 85% of them are planted to white grape varieties. Precious little Pinot Noir sinks its roots into the Viennese soil, and the wines that do come from that magnificent imperial city are rarely exported: The producers keep the good stuff for themselves and their local customers.

So when the opportunity presented itself for us to acquire an allocation from one of Austria’s Pinot Masters, we jumped at it.

Fritz Wieninger has, over the years, built his family winery into one of the country’s leading producers of world-class red wine and a top proponent of biodynamic farming, which means that the wines that bear his name are both environmentally respectful and deeply expressive of the land they come from.

His 2015 Select Pinot Noir embodies this brilliantly. The fruit was grown in two distinct vineyard sites: Bisamberg and Nussberg, where well-drained limestone allows the grapes to develop serious concentration and vivid acidity. After being fermented with native yeasts, the Pinot was aged in barriques from Burgundy, 25% of which were new—perfect for lending a hint of baking spice as well as a silky texture that belies the wine’s age-worthiness. After a year and a half of resting in that Burgundian wood, the wines were bottled without being fined or filtered, which preserved the true expression of the land without stripping anything away.

This Pinot Noir has so much to offer that you’ll fully understand why more of these Viennese gems aren’t available in the United States. With so little wine to sell, and at this high a caliber, the producers can’t be blamed for keeping it for themselves!