From somewhere out near wine’s lunatic fringe (and Austria) comes today’s offbeat but really, really delicious offering.  Manfred Felsner is one of those guys who- despite its commercialization and globalization- still exist in the wine business.  He farms as he’s always farmed and makes wine as he’s always done with little care about anything else- like how his wines might be perceived in a world any further away than the Kremstal hills where he works.  He carves a sort of living from an ancient cellar dug deep into a hillside of pure löess.  The cellar looks like it always has; damp, covered in multicolored flor and lined with really, really old casks and barrels, one dating back, in fact, to the nineteenth century, though most were constructed right inside the cellar back in the 1960s.  Manfred is a throwback character from another age. Even though his vines sit adjacent to the likes of Schloss-Gobelsburg, he has no appetite for fancy packaging, submitting his wines to the press for reviews or even, particularly, bottling and releasing his wines in any sort of organized fashion.  An agent of non-change, he even voted against the Kremstal’s new Premier Cru designation even though he farms vineyards like the Thalland that would qualify. That’s where his amazing 2017 Sankt Laurent comes in.  Coming from several old barrels that have been sitting unheeded in a corner of the cellar for the past six years, it’s one of the great finds in delicious red wine we’ve seen this year!  Sankt Laurent is an Austrian mutation of the Pinot Noir grape that has been in the ground here for over 400 years.  The wines made from it tend to be a bit darker, a bit snappier and a have a bit more rustic tannin than the Pinot Noir we’re used to but, nonetheless, has many of our favorite Pinot Noir attributes, like those prized floral, the cinnamon and the deeply-pitched cherry aromatics, light-on-its-feet texture and amazing earthy persistence. Coming from vines in Thalland aged over 50 years, Felsner’s seven-year-old Sank Laurent has depth and character to burn.  One might equate it with one of those Old School late 1980s Willamette Valley Pinots from Eyrie or Adelsheim.  The color is gorgeous and the nose is a veritable grandma’s cupboard of baking spices, dried and fresh black cherry, mulberry and even fig.  While lightly chilling and enjoying a bottle in the backyard over the rest of this summer is definitely on my agenda, there’s something rather ‘pumpkin spicy’ autumnal about the wine.  Maybe save some for Thanksgiving!  This is, though, a real find and lovers of flavorful reds of all ilks will find a lot to love here for $20!