

I used to like blaufränkisch. A little rough around the edges, it had a vague Central European charm. Then I Spent a week with the wine, tasting and discussing its talents and peculiarities at a conference in the Austrian Alps, later visiting its growers and their vineyards along the country’s Hungarian border. My interest turned to fascination and then a reality check. How could I have been tasting these wines for forty years without noticing the depth and subtleties of their site expression?
As it turns out, most of the growers did not understand the vine and its potential until recently, all of them still learning to farm it. They don’t completely know what was lost during a century of war and closed borders. But we are now tasting the peace dividend, a moment in a changing climate—political, agricultural and atmospheric—raising blaufränkisch to new levels of finesse.
Here is a journal from a week in Austria, from the Alpine restaurants of Lech to the vineyards of Burgenland, on the last low hills of the Alps.


A COLD DECEMBER MORNING on top of Szapary. This is the Eisenberg, in Südburgenland, hard by the Hungarian border. The vines are 1,200 feet up above the Pannonian plain, what was once a sea that filled the flatlands to the east. The vines race down the hill in stockkultur, each clinging to its own thin, pale-white acacia stake, punctuated by the trunk of the occasional acacia tree. The vines look toward Deutsch-Schützen to the southeast and, from the other side of this wide amphitheater, southwest toward Austria’s Vulkanland. In fact, this hill is the remnants of a volcano, which once rose above the sea, high enough for the schist rock to be exposed rather than buried under sediments of the lower slopes and the plain.
Uwe Schiefer grew up on that plain, and now works in a pragmatic white cube just west of here in Welgersdorf, within a small settlement in the agricultural flatlands. Back in 1992, he had joined a small group of producers working “to give blaufränkisch from Eisenberg a new face.” At the time, he says, the vineyards in Südburgenland were 60 percent white grapes—welschriesling and grüner veltliner. “We don’t have a history with high-quality red wine,” so, as a sommelier at Steirereck, one of the top restaurants in Vienna, he found himself faced with ripe blends of local red grapes enriched by aging in new barriques—variations on a theme of Bordeaux. “When I started my own project, in 1995, it was to make a special quality wine with character, here in Eisenberg.”
Locals first mined the “iron mountain” thousands of years ago for the ore to fashion tools. Now the iron, oxidizing in the soils of this ancient volcano, feeds the vines of Szapary. Their fruit tastes bloody, but in Schiefer’s hands, those black grapes make an elegant wine, transformed from their iron-rich soils and cold sun into a textural pleasure.
Down at his winery, Schiefer pours his 2020 Szapary and its freshness is confounding. How could a red wine be so pure in its ripe fruit and still so fiercely fresh?
“We have cool nights in our area,” Schiefer explains. “You can wait until the grapes are perfect.” For Schiefer, the biggest difference between the wines grown here decades ago and now is in the farming. “They never opened the soil, they used glyphosate, or had very high yields. Those were the things we first tried to change, to bring more leaves, reduce the yields and work without chemicals.” As a first generation wine producer, Schiefer started by working with growers, but he has since assembled his own estate. “We don’t have a system,” he says of his farming. “We live this from day to day.” He cites changes in the climate that have brought warmer winters, earlier flowering and, often, earlier harvests, but from his Eisenberg perspective, attentively farmed blaufränkisch is unperturbed by shifts in the dates on the calendar. He believes the 2022 from Szapary is the best wine he has ever made.


CHRISTOPH WACHTER AND HIS SISTER, JULIA, arranged lunch at their family’s home in Deutsch-Schützen, south of the Eisenberg vineyards and still hard against the border. Their father is mayor of the town, and their grandfathers grace the label of the estate’s most accessible blaufränkisch, Béla [Wachter] Jóska [Wiesler].
Their office and tasting room is warmed by a masonry stove built into a tiled wall. After we tasted through Christoph’s wines, Julia brought out a large tureen of bean soup and an overflowing platter of pork, belly meat chopped into small cubes and fried to crisp, crackling edges, glistening in a rosy pink.
The Wachters had been pig farmers, Julia told me, and they still buy at least one pig each year to slaughter for the Buschenschank, the local version of a Heurige, the way most of Südburgenland’s growers would welcome guests to sell their new vintage.
Over lunch, Christoph recalled working a harvest in Douro—Portugal’s schist canyon—having been introduced to Dirk Niepoort through Dorli Muhr (Niepoort was her partner, at the time, in her own blaufränkisch project in Carnuntum, just north of Burgenland). Christoph remembers heading into Niepoort’s vineyards to sample grapes. “When we worked in the vines, it was very hot—forty degrees [C.]—and then, in the barrels, there was so much freshness. I thought, here in Burgenland, we are colder, but we miss freshness.” More than just a stylistic change, the shift to freshness came to define a generational shift—a rejection of a hyper-ripe international style that required a lot of cellar work. Blaufränkisch grapes have plenty of tannins; if farmed so the skin tannins mature and the stem tannins lignify in line with the sugar levels rising, there is no pressure to adjust acidities or to supplement tannins with new oak.
“We had to pick earlier and use stems,” Christoph decided, after working in Niepoort’s orbit and tasting the results. “I got on a phone call to my dad,” he recalls. “‘Please use whole clusters for Weinberg,’ the vineyard right here below the house. It was fermented in stainless steel back then, and they put in twenty-percent whole clusters. It was still too late-harvested, but it was already a big step.”


In 2010, when Christoph took charge of his family’s estate, he set out to gain organic certification for all their vines. His 2019 Weinberg, from the heaviest soil he works, is as smooth as silk. “Deutsch-Schützen will be important in the future,” he believes. “These richer soils are safer than the steep slopes in climate change,” given their ability to retain moisture through dry summers. Still, for now, the steep slopes of the Eisenberg make his most fascinating wines, the green schist of Saybritz growing a bright and succulent blaufränkisch with a cool, electric charge that races through it. It may be one of the most challenging wines I’ve tasted from Burgenland, in the best sense. It’s a wine I can’t get out of my head.


FROM THE EISENBERG, the border runs northwest toward Mittelburgenland, then sharply east, toward Lutzmannsburg. My question for Ralph Velich, when I meet him at the vineyard map and lookout above town, is the difference between a berg and a burg. His English is somewhat better than my German, enough for him to explain that a berg is a hill, while a burg is a fortress. The fortress is in the town, below. The vineyards, detailed on the large map at the lookout, are on top of the hill—a plateau ahead of us, covered in vines, sloping gently to the east, all shades of gray in the bleak December sun.
Velich drives us to his parcels, small blocks scattered across the plateau. He stops at the oldest vines, a block planted in 1902, then another from 1930. Kneeling in his heavy overalls, a woolen beanie his only protection from the cold, he tries to explain how they prune the vines.
It’s okay that we can’t speak easily, I had told his father, Roland Velich, earlier in the week. I want to see the Moric vineyards. Roland and I were sharing lunch at the Almshof Schneider, a hotel tucked into the snow-covered slopes of Lech. He was dressed for skiing, while his oldest son, Matias, was wearing a suit vest, the formal garb of service, as he works at the restaurant. Matias took our orders and kept us moving through the range of Moric wines, his father’s project, focused on Lutzmannsburg, with single-site blaufränkisch wines that have seduced collectors around the world—elegant wines that make no effort to adopt an international style, leaning, instead, into the purity of expression of old vines in limestone.
“There were rumors and stories about Lutzmannsburg’s fame,” Roland recalled, describing the legend surrounding the red-wine village of Mittelburgenland, wines, he said, that were once known for their specific character and ageability. “German West Hungary was the center of a major wine trade,” he told me over lunch, “but when we were split apart and became part of Austria in 1921, we lost access to our distribution.” Velich grew up in Eisenstadt, spending weekends in Apelton, on the east side of Lake Neusiedl, where his family had inherited 7.5 acres of vines. “We were forced to work the weekends in the vineyard, and I hated it,” Velich recalls.
Later, at 25, he was studying philosophy and political science in Vienna when he decided to leave school. “I had an idea that I wanted to work with the land—I really love the land, the whole setting of Burgenland: East is the flat land, the beginning of the plains of Eastern Europe. Then west, you can see the last mountains with snow. It’s an emotional connection.”
Having traveled to winegrowing areas in the 1980s, Velich said, “I was interested to see the complexity of a certain piece of land, to have the chance of working on a piece of land that was once great and to bring it back.”


He began to explore, and described what he found as “a small town, on this little hill, an old volcano covered in different layers of soil.” There were less than 500 acres of vines, 80 percent of them blaufränkisch. “It had been covered by the Pannonian sea, so the soils are limestone and chalk, with limestone rock underneath. On top, there’s yellow loam, sand and clay. It’s partly sediments from the sea, with some ash from a neighboring volcano.” Deciding to make some wine on his own, he found three growers with old vines and convinced them “to do proper canopy management, green harvest and selection.”
Velich’s explorations took him further afield to Neckenmarkt, making blaufränkisch grown in schist. But his focus remained in Lutzmannsburg, where he began to buy vineyards in 2008 and then property for a winery in 2014.
It was visits with colleagues in Piedmont that led him to start adding whole bunches to his fermentations. “If it works for nebbiolo, a variety with a lot of tannin and acidity, why not for blaufränkisch, too?” he thought. “Blaufränkisch has a lot of tannins and a lot of acidity; it’s late-ripening and you have to get the stems mature. We started with experiments in 2009, with twenty percent, then fifty percent, and put those into the blends. The trick is to have phenolic ripeness; when the stems are ripe enough, we’re using whole clusters as a seasoning. Even though blaufränkisch is a very delicate variety, if it’s overcropped and you use too much whole-cluster, I find rusticity in the wines. When the phenolics are ripe, whole clusters bring complexity, a bit more herbaceousness, a bit more structure. Mainly, it’s about more complexity in the aromas.”
In 2020, one year after releasing his first set of single-vineyard wines, Velich found that the cool autumn allowed his vines at Kirschberg to ripen the phenolics in the grape bunches, and he believes he harvested them when they were perfectly matured. The vineyard is above the church, a west-facing slope, on the steep side of the hill with a high chalk content in the soil. He has four parcels there, the vines ranging in age from 40 to 100 years old. The tannins in the 2020, in fact, are brilliant, with a textural finesse that echoes the dark berry complexities of the flavor. That texture, focusing all the other elements of the wine, is one reason Velich is considered the philosopher king of blaufränkisch.


AT THE NORTHERN END OF BURGENLAND, the shallow waters of Lake Neusiedl have encouraged more settlement, both in terms of people and dense swaths of vines. The small city of Rust, on the west side, is famed for its sweet wines, which you can find in the deep, sand-walled cellars of the Triebaumer family—though you will also find a long history with blaufränkisch. Herbert and Gerhard make their family’s wines, including three single-vineyard blaufränkisch bottlings first released by their father, Ernst, in 1985. They credit the success of these wines to the work their grandfather did, selecting cuttings to plant their vineyards. “My grandfather concentrated completely in blaufränkisch,” Gerhard says, describing the fruit as sour cherry when grown in the area around Rust. “Mittelburgenland is more blackberry,” he finds. “Gols more baroque, red currant.”
His Rusterberg 2020 is fresh and refreshing, but the standout is the single-vineyard wine from Oberer Wald. “This is from vines planted in 1947—this is the old material,” pointing up the family’s commitment to adaptive selections rather than the monocultures of modern clones. They manage the vines at Oberer Wald to make a wine that is not about fruit, not about acidity. Instead, it captures the duality inherent in great blaufränkisch, a bold intensity of earth-driven tannins and a firm restraint. Their 2020 completely fills the head with flavor, but it’s the soulfulness of the wine that makes a lasting impression.
WHITE GRAPES FOR BOTRYTIS-DRIVEN SWEET WINES have also been given pride of place on the east side of the lake. But some growers, like Hans Nittnaus in Gols, placed an early bet on blaufränkisch. “In 1987, I planted blaufränkisch on Ungeberg,” Nittnaus tells me. “The neighbors asked, ‘Why do you plant blaufränkisch in this place? It’s our best exposition.’ I said, ‘It’s because it’s our best exposition.’ You can make full-bodied blaufränkisch in any place,” he believes. “We need blaufränkisch with finesse and minerality. The slate has a big advantage, as do the pure limestones.” Now, he believes his best exposition in Neusiedl is at Lange Ohn, directly above the north shore of the lake, a warm, early-ripening site with heavy clay soils and limestone. Like all of his single-vineyard blaufränkisch, it rests in neutral barrels for two years on the full lees, before racking, then bottling, unfiltered. His 2016 Lange Ohn is broad and rich, even as the racy acidity keeps it youthfully tight.
Nittnaus is one of the 12 founding members of respekt-Biodyn; eight of the others are from Burgenland: Claus Preisinger, Paul Achs, Judith Beck, Kurt Feiler, Andreas Gsellmann, Genot and Heike Heinrich, Gerhard and Brigitte Pittnauer, and Franz Weninger. It’s a wine-focused biodynamic certification, initiated with the help of Dr. Andrew Lorand and specific to this Central European neighborhood (Austria,Germany, Hungary, Italy and Slovenia). Growers like Claus Preisinger, who take a radical approach to site expression, have bypassed the judgment of the DAC (Districtus Austriae Controllatus) committee and present, instead, the quality assessment from the group.


Others, like Hannes Schuster, have made their own radical shifts outside the group. Over dinner at his home in Sankt Margarethen, Schuster tells me how his mother, Rosi, had studied viticulture at Eisenstadt and worked at her parents’ winery here, a small town southwest of the lake, on the border with Hungary. His father, Franz, taught oenology at Eisenstadt and brought his own 7.5 acres of vines in Zagersdorf to the family business. They worked together, but agreed that the final decisions would be Rosi’s—as it was her name on the label. Hannes began helping Rosi with the 2005 vintage when his father became ill. When his father died in 2007, Rosi decided to stop making wine and just sell her grapes. “Or, she told me, the other option would be for me to take over. We were famous for CMB—C for cabernet, M for merlot, B for blaufränkisch. We sold ninety percent of our wine in Austria, the other ten percent mostly in Germany. I said that would be interesting for me, but not in the same way—no cabernet, merlot, syrah or chardonnay. My mother said, ‘It’s your choice.’
“So, we got smaller and smaller, making a new style with spontaneous fermentations and no oak,” he says. “In 2008, I was really happy with the wine. Some people said, ‘You are not serious.’ Others sent it back.” Schuster lost most all of his buyers in Austria, Germany and Switzerland; then Roland Velich helped him regroup. “Roland said, ‘Don’t listen to the market,’” Schuster recalls. What the market in Vienna wanted—and he believes many wine drinkers there still do—are ripe red blends enriched by aging in oak. “He took my wines to a tasting. Some said, ‘It’s not the right time.’ Others said, ‘Super—let’s start immediately.’ When you are in the right circles, it works.”
Schuster insists, “You cannot make blaufränkisch in a cheap entry level. If you have high yields, there is bad acidity and strong or strange tannins.” He says that the vines speed to sugar ripeness under “conventional” farming, while the acidity and tannins remain green. “With organic farming, sugar ripeness and tannin ripeness align at a good ripening date. This was a huge difference we saw in the first two years working organics. We found this in all our grapes, but the best results with blaufränkisch, because it’s the most tricky to get ripe.” He blends his Dorfkultur, or “village culture,” from his family’s 32 bearing acres spread over 40 parcels in six villages. This wine grows in the pure white chalk of Mullendorf, the schist and limestone of Donnerkirchen, the limestone of Rust’s Oberer Wald, the gneiss, limestone and sand of Sankt Margarethen, and the loam and clay topsoil over limestone and sand in Zagersdorf.
“It’s super exciting to vinify these vineyards separately, but the quantities are so small that we decided to make a blend with all these aromatic characters,” he says. Schuster’s higher-level wines are “village crus” rather than single-vineyard wines. His 2017 Sankt Margarethen was one of the top wines in our tastings for this issue, a wine that held its freshness for a week after the panel met, lasting with floral complexities in the tannins and with an internal life force.
We are drinking his 2020 Sankt Margarethen with the dinner Rosi had prepared, and Hannes recalls a childhood memory, when the town was at the center of the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989. It was a time of a refugee crisis in Hungary, with encampments of East Germans raising concerns on both sides of the barbed-wire border that they would likely freeze to death in the coming winter. Otto von Hapsburg, an Austrian descendant of the imperial family, approached the prime minister of Hungary and they began to discuss a solution—a way to take the temperature of Moscow and Gorbachev’s government. “It was not normal that you could cross the border,” Schuster explains in his understated way (if you did, you were either arrested or shot). “The East German people heard there was this Pan-European Picnic, and they all came to the border from Budapest and Sopron. There was the Austrian foreign minister and the Hungarian premier—they had a ceremony, and they opened this old wooden door. Normally, there were a lot of soldiers and, normally, the soldiers would have to shoot. They said to the soldiers, ‘Go to the back and look to another direction.’ More than 600 people crossed the border into Austria.”
Hannes was seven years old when he watched the first tear in the curtain that separated his town from the world to the east. Later that year, the Berlin Wall would fall. Austria would go on to join the EU in 1995, and the horizon of growers in Burgenland began to open up.
The changing political and economic climate came at a moment of accelerating climate change—before, perhaps, it was widely accepted as a human-driven shift, but at a time when plants were already sensing a new reality. Perhaps, if you had not known of the remarkably expressive terroirs of Burgenland, it was due, in part, to half a century at the edge of what we call the free world. And, perhaps, the reason blaufränkisch does not come to mind in the same thought bubble as pinot noir in Burgundy, nebbiolo in Barolo or syrah in Cornas is the vine’s recent alignment of shifts in farming, philosophy and, to some degree, climate. Is the contemporary moment just the start of this new ascendance?


THERE WERE ONLY TWO MODERN WINERIES I visited along the eastern border of Austria—both pragmatic cinderblock rectangles. One had been built by Claus Preisinger in Gols, where he works in amphoras and tulip-shaped cement vats. The other was recently constructed by Dorli Muhr, at the base of the Spitzerberg, just below her vineyards in Carnuntum. This hill rises above the Pannonian plain, where the Carpathian mountains once formed the northern shore of the sea. This remnant starts directly east of Vienna, just to the north of Lake Neusiedl and the hills of Burgenland.
I met Muhr in Lech, in the Austrian Alps, where her Vienna-based agency, Wein & Partners, had organized a Blaufränkisch summit in early December, before the ski season took off. Though I’ve known Muhr for decades, she had never shared the memories of her childhood, when her family would head to the “mountains,” in Prellenkirchen, where her grandmother had a small vineyard.
As we taste through her wines in the Alps, she admits that the Spitzerberg in Carnuntum is no more than a low hill. And she describes how her project there, based on her grandmother’s vines, has evolved since she first planted a host of red varieties in the 1990s to explore what would grow best. She narrowed the field to blaufränkisch and, for a time, worked in partnership with Dirk Niepoort (both during and after their marriage). Now, working on her own, she has hired a young oenologist, Lukas Brandstätter, who has spent a lot of time in the Douro with Dirk.
Muhr has assembled an estate along the south-facing slope of the Spitzerberg, from the base, where her grandmother’s vines grow, up to the top, where a nature preserve runs along the ridge. The limestone sediments run deep at the base of the volcanic hill, she explains, and the meeting of this fragment of the Carpathian Mountains with Burgenland’s low reach of the Alps creates a wind tunnel, directing the flow from the plains up through a narrow break between the two ranges.
The altitude of Spitzerberg is half that of Eisenberg, and the warm exposition combines with the winds to create its own distinct set of challenges—and opportunities. I imagine Muhr could create muscular, extracted wines from her vineyards, but, instead, she focuses on textural nuance, which precludes any overt extraction. She is fascinated by the texture of fabrics, she explains, and how blaufränkisch can express all these different sensations in how it feels.


As Muhr has explored the hillside, she has found the soil is different from east to west. “In the east, you can make a ball of the soil after the rain; the grain is smaller,” she explains. “In the west, the water runs through it—like at the beach, it’s just going away. That bigger grain makes the finest wine.”
She attained organic certification for her vineyards in 2018, with the goal of extending the life of the vines. “For me, the most important thing is that the vines can become old,” she says. “The old vines give silk. The young vines give you a rounder, baby-faced style. Silk is very light-footed, very refreshing,” but it is also remarkably strong. “Parachutes are made from silk,” she tells me. “You could not do this with cotton.” She wove a powerful laciness into her Ried Spitzerberg 1ÖTW in 2018, a blend of her oldest parcels (one at Ried Spitzer, planted in 1955, one at Ried Roterd, and one at Panhölzern, both planted in 1985). The wine held its textural delicacy and grandeur after traveling to New York for our panel tasting.
To capture those dimensions in her blaufränkisch, she and Brandstätter have adopted several of the traditions of the Douro, including foot-treading whole clusters (about 30 percent of the lots) for a gentle extraction. They avoid any pumping and age the wine in large old casks, most of oak, some of acacia, encouraging the structural elegance of the wines to show their variations in texture.
AFTER A WEEK EXPLORING THE CONNECTION between wines like Muhr’s and the vineyards where they grow, I came away with a sense that there is a window open on the terroirs of Burgenland and Carnuntum, providing a view that was not available before. How long that view will be as beautiful as it is, right at this moment, is anybody’s guess. If you are fascinated by delicious, site-expressive wines, you’d be well served to check out blaufränkisch now. Best not to wait for the rest of the wine community to notice.
Joshua Greene is the editor and publisher of Wine & Spirits magazine.
This story appears in the print issue of Spring 2023.
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