THE WINERY
Organic, elaborate, alive, terroir-driven.
Our wines are crafted by hand in a small, artisanal winery. For us they are nourishing works of nature, expressions of thought: palatable interpretations of the way we perceive the world.
TERROIR
Milky Way, Planet Earth, Old World, Mörbisch am See, Anthropocene, here and now.
With our tools in hand, we step into the vastest of contexts, doing our part, and seeking, within the cycles of becoming and fading, the inhale and exhale of all nonhuman nature, to leave traces that are not mere trampled footprints, but can become threads in a finely spun narrative. Receiving, shaping, passing on, and sustaining what can be experienced within a lifetime – and what dissolves again, returning (earth to earth).
The planet’s organs of perception. Stillness of humans. What we make is a means of expression for the world in which we want to be – and to let one another be. With the active assertion of character, we create meaning in the idiosyncrasy of the lines between which we live and work. If the animals do not fear us when we, the human animal, perform the work of hand and mind that each season demands, we are on the right path.
When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
If the lake is the eye of the landscape, then we too are objects of reflection. One factor in an interplay of factors. Like slate and limestone, like the Pannonian shell of the land formed by the Leithagebirge and the hills of Rust. Where spring arrives earlier, summer burns hotter, and autumn lingers in mildness. Like the fog. Like the clear image in the water’s naturally clouded mirror, holding and tempering the warmth. Like the steppe, the dryness. Like our contemplation of wine. Like the light of 2,000 hours of sun. Like the forest that keeps our heads cool amidst it all. Like the wind.
VINEYARD
What slate-driven Weißburgunder can be for us, we discover with Kräften (old vines) “with great power”. Experience must be made; it is rarely given. In this spirit, we planted PIWI varieties in 2021, on slate and Rust gravel, in the Haderwald vineyard, alongside Traminer: Donauriesling and Pinot Nova, whose character potential we have been exploring ever since. In Ried Wieser, first documented in 1383 as “vineyard in the meadow (Wiese)”, one of the finest vineyard sites in Leithaberg DAC, our deep-rooted Blaufränkisch vines have grown since 1995 and 2012, on partly calcareous, partly sandy loam over slate.
“One only understands the things one tames.” The second most famous line from Saint-Exupéry’s well-known little book about a traveler between worlds describes the movement between nature and culture. This is how we understand natural wine.
Taming “is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties.” For us, every gesture in the garden begins here. Form emerges from the interweaving of vital interests in the attempt to find balance among all aspects. And so, on around one hectare, we establish ties in the life between root tips and new shoots.In this light, wine is nature writing. How we understand it depends on the way we read it. Throughout the entire wine year, with every single decision for each individual vine, from pruning to canopy work and careful crop thinning, and into the harvest. Radically selective manual work, even then. The guiding principle for all helping hands: not a single berry one would not gladly place in one’s own mouth finds its way into the picking crates. An ancient cultural practice: people coming together from all directions, working hand in hand toward a shared task.
WINERY
Grapes. Nothing else goes into our wine. What the wine becomes is determined by circumstances, of which we ourselves are one. How much may happen, how much must be done, for grapes to become wine without any additions, not merely free of faults, but of the kind of character that allows all these circumstances to be reflected in the glass. This is what we set out to discover anew, year after year. The cellarmaster is nature, with us cooperating, shaping circumstances. All you need is less.
Wine and time. Naturally, it is a risk to let nature take its course. We take, and give our wines, the time they need to complete their natural processes themselves. This is how they become stable and remain alive. Nothing needs to be suppressed, stopped, filtered, or fined. Time alone brings clarity. In unfired clay and seasoned barrique. Earth. Wood. A human lifetime and geological time. Amphorae are gentle clocks that protect wine from the timetable of human impatience.
Every workshop raises questions of meaning, in the languages of ethics and aesthetics. One of our most personal answers stands here. Alongside words like sustainability, beauty, future, village culture. With 9m ceiling height and a depth of time reaching back to 1890. Here we are, and here our wine comes into being. Sometimes something of this radiates outward; then we open the door to the Stadl, find ourselves in the middle of the village, and the workshop transforms itself with us into a place for hosts and guests. A wine tavern, Buschenschank, the archetype of the pop-up.
