Reviews

Hand made wines
«Gastronom» №9 (92) September 2009

Austrian wines never competed on volume.

Instead, they gained recognition thanks to their unique individual styles. Now winemakers of Austria are taking another step towards success — they are converting to organic winegrowing, an agricultural practice that is finding more support among consumers.

Without safety nets

It is now common to see sections for organic products and even specialized bio-supermarkets. Next to apples and milk one increasingly finds shelves with wines.

The idea of organic products is to be tastier and healthier than those grown with artificial support. To call his fruit or vegetables organic, a farmer cannot use man-made soil fertilizers or treat plants with synthetically made chemicals. The same approach is generally applied to organic wine, but there is an important difference. Wine needs an additional production stage that turns grapes into a final beverage. There is no such a thing as organic vinification, so we can only talk about wine made with organically grown grapes. It’s just that winemakers who support biological approach focus on the quality of raw materials rather than on manipulations in the winery when some defects can be masked.

Organic vineyards can be found in every Austrian wine region. At least 400 of the country’s estates follow biological methods. It means that one out of thirty hectares yields organic grapes. The figure isn’t small, is it?

At a glance, organic winegrowing appears easy. There is no need to buy chemicals, make preparations, “press” vineyards with tractors, spray vines. Yet a vineyard doesn’t become automatically healthy when synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are abandoned. On the contrary, bad insects and plants feel much more at ease without chemical defense. Growers who switched to organic farming have to put more efforts to grow a good crop. It is often hard manual labour and extra hours spent on the vineyards. Organic viticulture is a trapeze act without a safety net which requires detailed know-how and an extraordinary sense of delicacy. This is how they describe it in Geyerhof where vineyards have been organically treated for the last 15 years.

To feel the nature

Despite hard work, Austrian winegrowers who chose an organic path, do not like to complain. “It is great because eventually you become much more conscious of the nature and the things that a man can’t always influence”, says Eduard Tscheppe from Gut Oggau in Burgenland.

As a minimum, winegrower starts tending vines to ensure that they grow strong and enduring. Healthy vineyards yield healthy grapes, and not just for one season. Organic cultivation helps vines develop good immunity and fight some diseases which conventionally grown vineyards cannot resist.

Since vines don’t receive artificial nutrition anymore, they have to grow longer roots. Feeding on more mineral elements, vines give grapes which in turn produce wines with individual character. Leading Austrian estates strive to make wines with a sense of place, and organic growing is of great help. Also Roland Velich in his famed Moric project uses natural approach. His aim is to make wines which clearly speak of their place of origin.

Some winegrowers go a step up from organic to biodynamic farming. Biodynamic approach means that vineyards are viewed as a part of a large eco-system, and they are tended in accordance with natural rhythms of the Earth and other planets. Instead of plowing soils, biodynamic growers usually plant herbs. Eduard Tscheppe recalls a funny episode. Last year he rented a vineyard and, as usual, left grass between rows. Once the phone rang — it was an unhappy owner who was saying that the plot was in a mess. The winemaker had to explain that “the mess” was made on purpose and, in fact, was under control.

The code of wine honour

OK, organic grapes are grown, but how to make healthy wine? Even excellent harvest can be easily turned into a lifeless beverage. For many Austrian winemakers, especially in small family estates where functions of grower and winemaker are combined, it makes no sense to produce bad wines. They put a lot of effort in the vineyard and don’t want to see their grapes wasted in the winery.

Nikolaus Saahs from Nikolaihof states that organic and biodynamic winegrowing gives big benefits for the vinification process. “We no longer need to add artificial yeasts or enzymes to start fermentation because we are not destroying natural yeasts with chemical treatments in the vineyards”, he says.

In Wachau where vineyards grow on steep hilly terraces, majority of the estates are members of the voluntary association Vinea Wachau. They follow strict production rules known as the “Codex of pure wines”. In essence it means the nature and nothing else. Winemakers are banned from artificial wine techniques. They cannot concentrate must or break it down into fractions, add sugar or concentrated must, change wine aromas or structure with wood chips or powdered tannin.

While it is impossible to completely abandon chemical interventions during vinification, winemakers in organic estates use them in the minimal doses. It is especially so with sulphur — traditional disinfecting aid that also protects wine from oxidation. Wines are often bottled unfiltered to keep all aromas in the wine.

Tastier or not?

We as consumers are especially interested in this question. Does organic winemaking improve the taste of Austrian wines? As organic wines have minimal amount of artificial preservatives, they are easy to enjoy as soon as the bottle is open. When the wine is made with a large input of chemicals, be it in the vineyard or the winery, aromas and flavours notably suffer. All the rest depends how serious the estates are in pursuing high quality.

“Nikolaihof Wachau has worked biodynamically since 1971, but we are successful above all because the quality of the wines is high”, comments Nikolaus Saahs. He notes that wines without artificial additives beautifully evolve in bottles, they can be kept for years. “You can make a test. Open a bottle of Nikolaihof wine and taste the wine every day for one week. You will see that the wine is not losing anything! You do not even have to keep it in the fridge”.

“It is easy to see the difference. Our wines now have more depth, more length and more structure”, adds Eduard Tscheppe. Specialists tend to agree –organic and biodynamic wines win more often than their conventional counterparts in complexity and depth.

Without advertising

In the end let’s open a secret. There are many organic or biodynamic wines in Austria, yet not all estates want to advertise it. They want consumers to judge wine by its quality.

The labels of Gut Oggau wines, which recently won the main prize on design in Cannes, have no mention of biodynamic winemaking. Neither would Eduard Tscheppe speak about it unless you ask him directly. Instead, he prefers to talk about quality and individuality of his wines which is the reason why they are now listed in such renowned restaurants as Arzak in Bilbao, Noma in Copenhagen or Gordon Ramsay in London.

“There will always be more wines produced conventionally, but the number of people willing to pay for exciting wine stories will be increasing, as not many wines have something original to tell”. Organic estates can provide such stories indeed.

Austrian wines in Russia are still rare, but even with a limited choice one can find several organic names. Nittnaus and Moric, Weininger and Malat are among them. And since many producers never write prefix “bio” on the labels, it is always worth asking whether a wine is organic. There is a good chance that the answer will be yes.