Christopher Sealy is a sommelier, wine educator and occasional wine writer, based in Toronto. He was the recipient of the first ever Toronto Michelin Guide Sommelier Award in 2022, as wine director for Alo Food Group restaurants. In between frequent wine travel and wine service, Christopher can be found at the Saturday morning farmers’ market, spinning vinyl at a local wine bar, sipping fresh low-intervention wines, or in a coffee shop planning his next wine collaboration.
I first met Grüner Veltliner perhaps a decade ago, or more. I had scheduled a tasting with an agent who was touring my home town of Toronto with an Austrian wine producer – it was an unexpected encounter with the Grüner Veltliner grape: I was shy and caught off-guard. The Grüner shimmered with an emerald hue, was charming, nuanced, vibrantly fresh and complex at the same time.
I was intrigued. I became enamoured. I wanted to get to know Grüner wines in all their forms and fashions. To this day our relationship can be described as one big love affair.
My first visit to see Grüner Veltliner on its home soil was in the company of the wine-grower Fred Loimer, who is located in the Kamptal wine region in the Danube area of Lower Austria, Niederösterreich. The Kamp is one of the many tributaries that carve channels across the land, making way for the warm easterly breeze of the Pannonian Basin to enter and clash with the cool winds of the Atlantic
