Wolfgang Amadeus composed to a genre, like every author in his era. A sonata consisted of three separate pieces, the first telling the story of tonal conflict between two contrasting themes: one lively, one lyrical. At the end of the movement, the conflict was resolved by playing both themes in the same key. The same went for symphonies and quartets, while divertimenti, masses and operas followed their similarly standardised scenarios. Genre determined the audience’s expectations: people sat down to a sonata knowing what was going to happen. This, in turn, informed what and how Mozart wrote. You could be creative and free, but within strictly defined limits. When Beethoven, who was born 14 years after Mozart, started to depart from those established templates, he was often met with confusion. “I can’t play this,” a leading violinist famously told him after looking at one of the late quartets.

I tasted 525 Austrian wines over a few days recently and it reminded me of listening to Mozart’s complete works from CD. There was a consistent style, lots of exciting melodies, and the occasional repetitiveness.

Tasting through the wines, it occurred to me that Kamptal Grüner Veltliner was essentially similar to a Mozart symphony. Grape variety and region of origin — what we collectively call the “wine style” — were the musical genre. Individual wines were iterations of that genre, each following the socially accepted set of gestures to fill a common template. Were someone crazy enough to make Veltliner taste like Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc (no-one was, in fact), they’d probably hear a familiar Beethovenesque “I can’t drink this.”

But there was also another similarity between Mozart and wine: all the recordings on that Deutsche Grammophon 60-disc set I once played back from beginning to end had a similar gloss. The strings sounded bright and sweet, the brass shiny, percussion deeply resonant, and the piano had a round, ripe tone, magnified by finely gauged reverberation. (Audiophiles even coined the term “Deutsche Grammophon sound.”) There was never a false note or a scratch on the surface. It was perfection of a kind—and you only noticed “of a kind” when it made all the music sound a bit samey.

You can see what I’m getting at about Austrian wine. Those samples of young Erste Lagen Riesling and Grüner Veltliner were impressive in their direct expression of grape variety and vineyard site. They just articulated those expressions using a fairly similar set of grammatical phrases. Acid was limey, apple was crunchy, “Urgestein” gneiss tasted spicy and taut while wines from loess were plump and textured. They were surely not boring or banal, but yes, they were predictable. I missed a little scratch here, a false note there; a moment of hesitation, a finger slipping onto the wrong key, making you feel you’re at a live performance of a flesh and blood artist rather than within the matrix of a sterile recording where sound, hence emotion, is edited or “remastered.”

Of course, not all Austrian wine is samey. The country has a dynamic “natural” scene, with Burgenland Blaufränkisch spontaneously fermenting into cloudy pét-nats and Styrian Sauvignon bottled in earthenware. But that’s not the point. I was looking for a live concert by Vladimir Horowitz, not a jam session in a garage. I still wanted to feel the smooth mineral expression of Heiligenstein, not the bretty vagaries of wild yeast or the acetic blurp of zero sulphur. A degree of spontaneity and fantasy within a polished performance of a recognisable work, not an improvisation.

Technical consistency is surely one of Austrian wine’s top advantages. It is impossible to find a bad wine here, and you always know what you are going to get. This, I reckon, originates from a mixture of Germanic rigour, a strong sense of community, a respect for shared standards, and the looming legacy of the 1985 glycol scandal that spurred a deep reform of the industry. The majority of these wines — especially whites — are made in a very straightforward way: stainless steel-fermented and early-bottled. This comes at a price. What is the story if everyone builds stories from identical prefabricated blocks? When does repetitiveness become obtrusive, cannibalising the drinker’s perception? Is employing a narrow set of winemaking techniques ultimately making them more obvious in the finished product?

Some years after spending a week binge-listening to Mozart’s complete works on Deutsche Grammophon, I went to a party and the most glorious music was seeping out of the loudspeakers. Juicy strings wrapped around a portentous piano, audible underneath a layer of subtle cracks. On the host’s gramophone lay a venerable black LP: the original release of Friedrich Gulda’s recording of Mozart’s piano concertos. It was exactly the same performance I had endured, increasingly alienated, from CD. But here, without the digital remastering, with the warm depth of a good old 33’ long play, but also with the imperfections of analog sound: cracks, sparks and hiss, the music suddenly sounded more alive and human. What it lost in polish, it gained in content: hiss became dimension. In what some would term aural illusion and others, human experience, the clinical purity of Deutsche Grammophon CDs became a symbol of artificiality, while the wear and tear of an old LP carried emotional authenticity.

So, how imperfect needs a wine be to be emotional?

Photo by Andreas ***** on Unsplash