Hallstein Prestine Still Artesian Water

Obertraun, twelve years down.

We open every service with Hallstein because it is the water that teaches a palate what nothing tastes like. It falls as snow on the Dachstein, then spends twelve years working down through alpine limestone — two hundred and fourteen metres of it — before rising on its own artesian pressure. Never pumped. Never treated. What reaches the glass has had a decade in the dark and nothing done to it since.

Eighty-four milligrams of dissolved minerals per litre: among the lowest of any water the house pours, and the reason it reads the way it does — almost silent on the nose, silk across the palate, gone without a trace. It is the reference against which every other water on the wall is measured, and the first pour of every Water Reading for exactly that reason.

What you taste first is what is missing.

We do not score. We read. The Reading is how the house locates this bottle — four axes, written on the four petals of the mark.

The Reading™

NOSE    silent

ARC    silk

WEIGHT    weightless

STAY    traceless

One to four petals, quiet to pronounced. A Reading is a location, not a grade.

Read in — the Stem Zero Masterglass. The bowl gathers what little there is and lifts it to the nose before the first sip.

Serve — cool, not cold — around 55°F. Ice would erase it.