Jim Barry The Lodge Dry Riesling, Australia 2022 (£15.99, or £11.99 in a mixed case, Majestic) For a large part of the wine-drinking population, the sight of a tall, slim fluted wine bottle is still enough to bring a shudder of horror at the prospect of the acidic sugar water they assume is contained within these undeniably elegant vessels. The flute, after all, is the bottle of Blue Nun, Liebfraumilch and other throwbacks to the bad old days of mass-market German wine – to the years before Australia and the rest of the so-called New World gave wine a much-needed sun-filled reset. But younger wine drinkers than me, I’ve noticed, have a more positive response to the flute. It isn’t a signal of quality so much as a signifier of a certain style of white wine: lighter, energetic, floral-aromatic and lipsmackingly racy. The sort of wines, in fact, that I begin to crave in spring; wines such as the style of lime zesty and juicy, bone-dry riesling that producers like Jim Barry make in Australia’s Clare Valley.
Birgit Eichinger Grüner Veltliner Strass, Austria 2022 (£14.21, Justerini & Brooks)As ever with wine, the emergence of the flute owed as much to economics and the practicalities of trade as it did to aesthetics. Since wines in Germany, Austria and Alsace were less likely to reach their markets by sea, merchants developed an elegant, less robust form that stacked neatly in the river barges that were their main means of transport. Today it’s possible to find many German and Austrian wines in squatter, fatter, less delicate Burgundy- or Bordeaux-style bottles (although not in Alsace, whose appellation rules proscribe any other bottle shape). But the flute still endures in this part of the wine world – the vessel of choice for such classic styles as Mosel riesling (such as the remarkably good- value tangfastic citrus and fleshy peach of Tesco Finest Steep Slopes Mosel 2022; £7.25) and Austrian grüner veltliner (the pristine celery-salted mouthful of ripe apple and pears of Birgit Eichinger Grüner Veltliner).
Mar de Frades Albariño, Rías Baixas, Spain 2023 (£17, Tesco) The flute’s association with wines from the Germanic world – or wines made with Teutonic grape varieties such as riesling, grüner veltliner and gewürztraminer – has made it a visual shorthand for producers in other parts of the world looking to convey something about the wines they’re making. Rías Baixas in Galicia in northwest Spain is a case in point. The main grape variety here is albariño, which makes breezily salty aromatic wines with fleshy fruitiness (white peach, juicy pear, quince) and subtle floral tones. But within that framework, there’s plenty of stylistic variety – and that comes out in the bottle shapes. The bottle used for the alluring mix of chamomile, leafy herbs, fresh stone fruits and savoury salty-mineral freshness of Pazo de Señorans Albariño 2022 (£21.25, highburyvintners.co.uk), for example, invites comparisons with the best sauvignon blanc and semillon based the white wines of Bordeaux; and the blue flute used for the scintillating mix of exotic fruit and fine, salty-steely acidity in Mar de Frades is surely meant to draw attention to albariño’s affinities with dry riesling.
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