November 2022 Wine Club
Rural and Urban Winemaking in Austria
Welcome back, everyone! As we come into the cooler, darker months of the year, our bodies respond to shorter days by surfacing needs that at first seem opposed: one, to reduce our activity and direct our attention within, preparing to meet our individual survival needs as food and warmth become scarce over winter; and two, to draw lines between our selves in community so that we can meet our needs for connection. Different cultures balance these needs differently, but we recognize the act of balancing in festivals and rituals of harvest, gathering, and celebration. Wine, naturally, plays a significant role in these festivals, and we want to examine this role as a way of illustrating some emergent approaches to community. Here in America, there are significant differences in practices of composition of community between urban and suburban-rural environments. These are the differences I intend to bridge in this article.
Accordingly, we have two Austrian wines for you this month. The first is from the urban winery Zahel in Vienna, with grapes drawn from all 5 of Vienna’s winegrowing districts. It’s a traditional field blend, or gemischter satz. The second wine, by contrast, is from a 2000 year old Roman estate, now managed by the winery Nikolaihof, and is purely Gruner Veltliner. Both are made in steel; both are Demeter certified biodynamic; both are wild fermented slowly with extended lees contact. They both have excellent expression of place, or terroir! But the terroir they are expressing is wildly different. Let’s get into it.
Weingut Zahel, Ortswein Mauer Wiener Gemischter Satz
Zahel is a family owned biodynamic winery operating in the Mauer district of Vienna. They were the first winemaker to market Gemischter Satz, and they operate biodynamic vineyards throughout the city. They also operate a heuriger.
What’s a heuriger?
A heuriger is a traditional wine tavern that sells their own wine and small plates for several weeks out of the year during the harvest season. They are often very small and are a place where people come to experience gemutlichkeit, which is a hard word to translate. Loosely you could say gemutlichkeit means “happiness-together”; alternate translations “friendliness”, “cosiness”, or “a sense of belonging and well-being springing from social acceptance” (if you want to be pretentious). While wine plays a central role, live music and home-cooked food are also essential.
Urban Wine?
Why, with Grandiflora’s focus on health and sustainability, would we choose to serve wine from a city? Aren’t cities dirty and unsustainable? Not necessarily! You may have noticed that Grandiflora is located in a city — in an industrial district even. Vienna is one of the few major cities that still grows wine (Paris, notably, does as well). In an age of sprawl, it can be hard to define a city, but I will propose a definition for you: a place composed by alterity, or spontaneous encounters with otherness. Such a place becomes defined by the way it incorporates these encounters.
Vienna, situated in a strategic position on the Danube, has historically been a crossroads of trade routes and empires. Borrowing culture from German, Italian, Czech, Slavic, and Ottoman influences, it, like other alpine cities, is understandable primarily by the unique way it has mixed these influences. Initially a Celtic settlement, it became a Roman fortress against Germanic tribes. After the fall of that empire, it remained occupied and the fortifications were used for housing. Continually situated on borders, it became a center of trade through the early middle ages. In the 12th century, Richard the Lionheart tried to sneak through, was captured by Duke Leopold, and paid a large enough ransom to refortify the city. In the 16th century, the city becomes the seat of the Habsburg dynasty and an emerging empire, coming into direct conflict with the Ottomans, from whom a lot of coffee and coffee culture was stolen.
In a city, conflict is constitutive. The constant renegotiation and redefinition of relationships gives character to the place over time. Modern Vienna is a global city, hosting a wealth of international organizations from the UN to OPEC. Like many cities, the primary modern conflict plays out in land use, balancing the needs of global or international concerns with local quality of life. Vienna is significant in that its international relationships support local culture and ecology, leading to one of the highest standards of living on the planet. 50% of Vienna’s total area is dedicated to parks and green space.
Vienna is home to 138 wineries, with 575 ha under vine, or 1.3% of the city’s total area. Half of this is dedicated to Gemischter Satz.
Gemischter Satz
Even in Austria, the birthplace of organic and biodynamic agriculture, Gemischter Satz stands out as emblematic. Field blends are harder to maintain because you have many different kinds of grapes budding and ripening at different rates, responding to weather differently, and requiring different kinds of maintenance. You have to slow down and understand the individual vines and their unique relationships. This variety, however, is what makes these fields so expressive and resilient — changes that challenge one varietal may benefit another, and pests that favor certain varietals have a hard time gathering momentum when the growth pattern of the grapes varies from plant to plant. This gives the field greater expression of vintage, and it means that each field blend is going to express each vintage differently. Just as we find in other complex systems, like cities, diversity has unexpected benefits — if you understand how to work with it.
What we love about this Ortwein
Zahel’s Gemischter Satz is a blend of Grüner Veltliner, Riesling, Grauburgunder, Weissburgunder, Traminer, and Chardonnay. Strangely enough, it presents a lot like Chenin Blanc! With heady terpenes, medium acid and medium body, casual structure, and delightfully round residual sweetness, this wine has, true to form, something for everyone.
Nikolaihof, Wachau Grüner Veltliner ‘Hefeabzug’ (2020)
If urban places are defined by mixture and encounter, I would say rural places are defined by repetition. The accumulation of repeated cycles of growth and decay, neglect and repair, form the unique character of a place where encounter with the other is infrequent and where these encounters are understood by their incorporation into the established character of the place. To examine this, let’s shift our focus to one of the oldest winery sites in Europe, in Wachau — what is now called Nikolaihof.
Producer Focus: Nikolaihof
When we talk about accumulation of repetitions, it’s hard to beat this 2000 year old estate. For most of its history, the estate was tended by monks. It contains the first vineyard site named in Europe in 470 AD, “Im Weingeberge.” In the late 1800s it was bought by the Saahs family, who carried on the monks’ traditions of integrated polyculture and continue it to this day. Nikolaihof incorporated biodynamic techniques starting in 1971, making them one of the first biodynamic winemakers. Chemical agriculture has never been practiced on the estate.
Appellation: Wachau
Nikolaihof is situated near the village of Mautern in the Wachau region. This region is, like Vienna, a transition zone, but on a different scale. The climatic interplay between Western Atlantic oceanic and Pannonian Basin continental systems creates large diurnal temperature variations great for growing intense, expressive wine. The soils of the Wachau region are the result of the Danube river eroding metamorphic gneisses and amphibolites, creating a steep river valley, and the deposition of wind-blown mineral deposits during the glacial period, establishing loess type topsoil, in which Nikolaihof’s Grüner Veltliner is grown.
Biodynamic Farming
Like Zahel, Nikolaihof uses biodynamic methods, creating their own compost and fertilizers and establishing a plant and animal polyculture to bring balance to the local ecology. Although biodynamics will be the main focus of next month’s wine club, it’s worth pointing out that the key focus of biodynamic farming is establishing balance within and among the varying natural cycles that farms find themselves in. These elemental cycles — annual and diurnal temperature variations, changes in rainfall, animal population cycles, and soil deposition and erosion — are the foundation of a rural landscape’s character. The distinction of place given to wine regions emerges from the choice humans make about how to relate to these natural cycles.
What we love about the Hefeabzug
Despite the weight of its history, Nikolaihof’s Grüner Veltliner floats on the palate; it has a grace and lightness to it in which intense yet delicate aromatics dance, suspended by bright, bursting acidity. A lingering, mildly electric minerality is sharpened by elevage in stainless steel. Drink bitterly cold and savor it.
I hope you find these perspectives, and the wine, stimulating! If you did, meet us at the bar for further discussion.
Also keep an eye out for some important announcements next month. Until then, cheers!
Jason
