Andreas, with the gorgeous bug labels had specific ideas, is up for all sorts of things like burying a barrel of sauvignon blanc to have the earth's influences. He loves old terraces and rebuilds them, not afraid of a little back breaking work. Making some wine without sulfur. In fact he was testing me.
He made me work for my tastes.Thank goodness I ID-ed the unsulfured sauvignon (easy to do; sulfured wine was closed down, unsulfured had some butterscotch) and spotted the muskateller otherwise he'd kick me out of his porch where we were tasting his salamanders, beetles and dragon flies.
Personally, I'm not loving the chardonnay from this area, but the sauvignon is distinctive, piercing but not cloying, with high toned bits of wild carrots. One of the wines I loved the most was the 2005 Beetle; whole cluster sauvignon, three weeks on skins, pressed off, into barrels.
A blue-eyed thinker, I thought for sure he was a virgo, turns out he's a Pisces. Fooled me! But his last sentence before we moved on revealed his true self; " I want to transport my feelings about the vineyards into the wines."
Then his wife asked us if we wanted cake. I said no. She said, But this is Austria! I realized saying no to cake was heresy. I took cake. Espresso. Was not sorry.
Andreas is quite convinced he wants his group to go over to no-sulfur winemaking. And so they are all making experiments, as evidenced over at Muster in Leutschach.
I kept on thinking I'd never seen more beautiful vineyards and then this comes along;
And yet another amphora wine! And another man who reduces the amount of sulfur by using whey in his copper mix. He too buried barrels, buried clay Georgian kveri, and likes the anfora as a way to "collect the earth's energy.' And here too white wines with 8-12 months on the skins...etcetc.
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Have I met an anfora wine in Austria that I liked? Yes! ---
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