Red the Future: Terroirists
As the new red wine revolution gained momentum, Austrian climate, soils, and culture dictated the choice of variety and development of regional identities.
What was once a great wine culture lay devastated by phylloxera, oidium, and peronospera at the beginning of the 1900's. The first efforts to revive the country's vineyards were frustrated by two world wars. As Austrian wine finally began to reawaken in the 1950's, the industry looked to Germany as its role model and drew up wine quality laws based on the Germanic sugar pyramid and like its neighbor to the north, planted mostly white grape varieties.
As young vintners returned from abroad, they realized just how drastically Austria’s climate, soils, and traditional red wine varieties differed from their neighbor’s to the north. Several pockets in Lower Austria (Niederösterreich) have ideally suited microclimates for black grape cultivation as vintner Willi Bründlmayr has demonstrated so well. In the southern reaches of Lower Austria, one even finds the world's largest contingent acreage of St. Laurent vineyards in the Thermenregion wine district. In Carnuntum, like Thermenregion, the climate is markedly influenced by the warm Pannonian steppe and young winemakers like Gerhard Markowitsch are causing quite a stir with their big, generous, fruit-driven reds.
Moving even further south out of Lower Austria into the four wine districts of Burgenland, one increasingly finds terroir predestined for black grape varieties. Drink the deep, dark, juicy red wines with exotic spice coming from wineries like Prieler, Heinrich, Wellanschitz, or Bayer from the gentle rolling vineyards beyond Lake Neusiedl and suddenly it becomes quite clear that this indeed is red wine country.
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The powerful red wines of Josef Leberl and his son Gerald seem to say, "Austria has proven what it can do with its white wines; just wait until the world sees what we can do with our reds!"
Judith Beck represent just one of the nine excellent wineries in the Pannobile group. Foto: steve.haider.com
