The latest trends for wine connoisseurs

Young, wild and courageous: Our vintners from Lower Austria. While some are traditional, on the other side there are those with an intrepid zeitgeist who want to revolutionise the world with their sweeping wine innovations.

The spirits depart, when it comes to orange wines, far away from any uniformity, very natural wines or even stone wine barrels. To find out what the inventors among Lower Austria's vintners do with their juicy grapes and what winning ideas emerge behind the walls of the cellar, read here.

Orange wines - the fourth wine colour

Trends come, go, and come back again. This is what happened with the new trend colour in the vintner's sky, the colour orange. The talk is about so-called 'orange wines'. These white grapes undergo mash fermentation. Because fermentation still takes place with berry peel - as is otherwise only usual with red wines - the specific orange colour develops. Many wine growers don’t use sulphur during the vinification process. The Gindl winery in Hohenruppersdorf (Weinviertel) swears by this fourth wine colour.

Sparkling outsiders - Pet Nat or whatever it is called

Originally from France, this is the original method of sparkling wine production. Around the year 1540, monks from Limoux were already intentionally filling bottles of fermented wine in bottles and closing with oak corks. By spring, the wine fermented further and et voilá: sparkling wine was born! ‘Pet Nat' - pétillant naturelle - i.e. sparkling wines without major technical intervention. The vintner friends Jurtschitsch and Arndorfer from Langenlois have just founded their own, shared vineyard called Fuchs & Hase, just for Pet Nat. If you are aiming high then you need a peak - a lime peak. Christoph Hoch, Wine grower from Hollenburg (Krems Valley) has also risen to the challenge of Pet Nat.

Of bees, flowers and 'wildwux'thoughts 

Earthworms, birds, bees and co in and around the Geyerhof organic wine estate in Furth-Palt are especially awakened and attentive listeners can recognise the happy humming and buzzing. At Geyerhof, it is not just about a passion for wine, but also, more especially, an attachment to nature in everyday life. Since 1988, Geyerhof has been managing its vineyards organically and biologically and as such, it belongs to the organic pioneers in the area. Together with vintner Birgit Braunstein from Burgenland, both parties founded the 'wildwux' project in 2012. And no, this is not about wild vineyards, as the name suggests. It is more the specific measures taken to maintain the habitat of endangered animals and plants. It pleases the gopher, tree frog and praying mantis!

The most natural thing in the world

More than 5 million years ago, it was created underground by the solidification of magma and it reached the surface through the movement of the earth's crust. We are talking about granite.

The raw material for a new generation of wine barrels: the stone barrel! Featuring special properties (granite stores the temperature over the long term and prevents the formation of unsightly tartar), it differs in many ways from the traditional wooden barrel. Created from one cast - or rather from one block - with a lot of skill and “stone hard hand craft”, one 50 litre barrel weighs about 320 kilos. By the way, stone barrels are also used at the Waldschütz winery (Kamp Valley) and the Obenaus winery from Glaubendorf (Weinviertel).

The truth lies at the bottom of the bottle

As Franz Türk (Türk wine estate, Kremstal) laughed when he presented his 'world first' innovation, "It is absolutely refined, yet quite simple". His labels on the bottom with a sophisticated colour code. Riesling radiates an apricot-coloured sun, Green Veltliner on the other hand is bedrock, a sun in stone grey. Franz came across the idea when he was by a fellow vintner in the Wachau, as he stood in front of a temperature-controlled wine cellar and had no idea what the wines are actually were. After all, he only saw the bottle base. That was the initial impulse.

Great wines: There is something new in the cellar

The wines of the largest wine-growing state in Austria are exclusive, unconventional and above all, individual. Moreover, whether it is the trend towards the 'naked' (a light-hearted term for natural wines) or a niche within the niche, without our vintners, the federal state for connoisseurs would taste only half as good!