The Mont Blanc (der Weiße Berg) is in Neusiedl. At least if Jörg Bretz has his way. A few years ago, he decided to give his cuvée of Grüner Veltliner and Pinot Blanc the name Weißer Berg, although we still don't know why he did so (we suspect it's because of the colour of the soil, but we'll find...
"We can make even more from Pinot Blanc than from Chardonnay," says Jörg Bretz. In order to achieve more, Jörg Bretz follows a few principles that no other winegrower we know of in Austria pursues with the same rigour.
In short, they can be summarised as follows: a lot of manual work, meticulous...
Many years ago, the Schillerberg rosé was the first Austrian rosé that gave me the feeling that this style of wine could also produce more than just banal summer wines in Central Europe. In the meantime, a few more rosés have been added, but Jörg Bretz's Schillerberg continues to reside firmly in...
Grüner Veltliner is not a monopoly variety of Lower Austria. In fact, it never has been. There are dozens of proofs to the contrary and Georg Schmelzer's interpretation of the grape variety is one of them.
Unlike what we are used to, it does not grow on primary rock and not even on limestone, bu...
Data sheet
Grape variety: Chardonnay, Neuburger, Grüner Veltliner, Welschriesling, Frühroter Veltliner
Vineyard: Old vineyard in which the different grape varieties grow side by side
Harvest: By hand
Fermentation: spontaneous | wild yeasts
Vinification:
Filtration: no
SO₂: < 50mg/l
Alcohol c...
Hungarian can even be simple. Rosza just means pink. No sz at the beginning and no three ö and four accents above the letters.
Neszider is not really difficult either. It means Neusiedl am See, the home of Alexander and Maria Koppitsch. Neusiedl belonged to Hungary until 1921, and in honour of th...
Data sheet
Vineyard: Seefeld
Grape varieties: Grüner Veltliner 40%, Pinot Blanc 40%, Sauvignon Blanc 20%
Plant protection: only sulphur, copper and plant- or animal-based preparations, not certified
Harvest: by hand
Fermentation: spontaneous | wild yeasts
Ageing: in steel tanks and used wooden ...
Schmelzer: Frühroter Veltliner "Schlicht und Ergreifend" 2020
Wein
€26,80
Frühroter Veltliner is, despite its supposedly melodious name, somewhere between Goldburger and Sämling in the hit parade of Austrian grape varieties - in other words, pretty far down the list. The area planted with it fell by almost 50% between 1999 and 2015 and, if you look around, there are fe...
Isabelle Legeron, the enterprising organiser of Raw, the largest trade fair for natural wines, has made exactly two Blaufränkisch recommendations with the unbiased palate of a Frenchwoman in the last chapter of her book Natural Wine, which is absolutely worth reading.
One of the two winemakers ...
HP Harrer: Ton, Steine, Reben - Blaufränkisch 2017
Wein
€29,90
HP Harrer's small winery in Neusiedl and Silvio Messana's Azienda Montesecondo in San Casciano may be a good 1000 kilometres of motorway and a national border apart, but otherwise there are a lot of parallels. Both have been cultivating their vineyards biodynamically for many years and both have ...
Vintages are always a big topic in the wine world. We agree that they are not entirely unimportant, but we do not share the hype about them and are rather sceptical about the views on what is really great and what is rather lousy. Firstly because we can remember massive errors in judgement since ...
The Rét originates from Alexander Koppitsch's Easy-Drinking-Series, which Koppitsch aficionados still remember under the name "authentic wines". Rét is Hungarian and means grassland, which in turn is a reference to the fact that cattle used to graze where Zweigelt and St. Laurent grow today.
The...