When a Winery Has Nearly Two Hundred Growers Behind It: Some Thoughts on a Next Generation Wine Cooperative
דויד אמזלג
8 minutes ago
10 min read
On the white wines of Austria’s Wachau Valley, and on one winery with an unusually distinctive identity: Domäne Wachau, a cooperative of nearly two hundred growers and, in a sense, a living archive of the valley. A next-generation wine cooperative that has become a laboratory for Terroir
We started this holiday long before we actually left. The idea was a cycling trip from Linz to Vienna; a little over 200 kilometers, in weather and road conditions that were supposed to be very comfortable. The excellent Austrian company we rented the bikes from helped us plan the routes and distances, work out the trains, and choose good hotels that also knew how to accommodate those of us who do not eat gluten. Six people. One family. Four days on bicycles along the Danube. Six people who have long since stopped living the same lives.
Each has a job, commitments, schedules, other people who depend on them, and very good reasons why spending an entire week together is not particularly easy to organize. And precisely because of that, the fact that we actually set out together, and on a cycling trip, of all things, was almost as interesting as the route itself.
Bicycles do not really allow you to escape the road, but neither do they force everyone to stay together all the time. Each person rides at their own pace. One moves ahead, another falls behind, two stop to take photographs while the others keep going. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we are silent. Sometimes we wait. Sometimes we grumble about whoever did not wait, and quite often we laugh together at me (a.k.a Dad). And then we meet again. The Danube is there all the time. On the first day, from Linz to Grein, it is still mostly a river. Broad, immense and almost indifferent to us. On the second day, on the way to Melk, something begins to change. The river becomes less of a backdrop and more of an axis around which the landscape is organized. The towns become smaller, the slopes closer, and there is a growing sense that we are entering a place with a character of its own.
And then comes the third day. The Wachau. The Danube runs there between slopes, vineyards, forests, villages and stone walls built over generations. The terraces are not decoration. They are evidence of work. Each step in the landscape is essentially a long negotiation between people and the slope: how to hold the soil, how to bring water, how to plant, how to harvest, how to continue working in a place where nature has not exactly gone out of its way to make things easy. When we read about the Wachau, we can talk about Gföhl Gneiss, the influence of the Danube, the air currents, and the differences between the warmer parts of the region and the cooler valleys of the narrow gorge, such as the Spitzer Graben. These things matter. But there are things you cannot really understand until you cycle there. Because on a bicycle, geography stops being information and becomes effort. You climb a slope and understand it through your body. You pass a stone wall and realize that it is not part of the scenery but one of the reasons it is possible to grow vines there at all. You emerge from the forest into the light, feel the temperature change, and suddenly understand that climate is not merely a figure in a table. It is something that passes across your skin.
And it seems to me that the uniqueness of the Wachau is not simply that it produces excellent Riesling. There are quite a few places that do that. Nor is it the exclusive home of Grüner Veltliner. Austria as a whole knows how to produce it, and in regions such as Kremstal, Kamptal, Wagram and Weinviertel it takes forms that can be every bit as impressive. The uniqueness of the Wachau lies in what happens when all the circumstances and conditions are brought together. A river that creates a climate. Ancient geology that creates differences in soil. Extreme slopes that make manual farming necessary. Stone terraces that are simultaneously agricultural infrastructure, habitat and architectural object. Two grape varieties capable of translating all of this with remarkable precision. A local tradition of defining itself on its own terms. A classification system developed by the region’s producers before the area formally entered Austria’s DAC system, the Districtus Austriae Controllatus appellation framework. And finally, a culture in which the name of the place has become almost as important as the name of the winery.
That same day we also cycled among the single vineyards, the Ried of Kirnberg, belonging to Domäne Wachau. In retrospect, I think it was one of the most beautiful moments of the trip, even though it did not feel that way at the time. We were simply on bicycles. Perhaps already a little tired. Perhaps more concerned with where we were going to stop fora late lunch than with the geology beneath our wheels. But something about the way the vineyards unfolded around us made me look differently. Kirnberg is not merely a name on a bottle. It is a place. We are so accustomed to tasting wine when the place it came from is absent. The bottle arrives, sometimes thousands of kilometers from where the grapes were grown, and we try to infer something about soil, climate, elevation and sun exposure. We taste the place through the memories of others. Here, we did the opposite.
We arrived at the place first. We cycled through it. We saw it. We felt it. And then, that evening, we drank the wine. You might be surprised how much that changes things.
In 1984, the three terms that have since become almost a second language of the Wachau were established: Federspiel, Steinfeder and Smaragd. The Wachau did not settle for telling winemakers what they were allowed to do. It created a language that also allows consumers to understand what is in the bottle. Steinfeder wines are intended to be fresh, light (up to 11.5% alcohol), lively and fruit-driven, with less concentration and depth than the other two categories. Not necessarily simple wines, but wines oriented more toward freshness and drinkability than power and longevity. Federspiel is meant to combine freshness and vitality with more character and concentration than Steinfeder. This is already quite a serious wine, generally in the 11.5–12.5% alcohol range, but usually without the weight and power of Smaragd, the most concentrated and ambitious of the three. The grapes for Smaragd are generally harvested at greater ripeness, producing wines of at least 12.5% alcohol. The wines are expected to be concentrated, powerful, complex and capable of significant aging. The idea behind Smaragd is to bring to the bottle the concentration and ripeness that a vineyard can achieve, while retaining the dryness, acidity and tension that characterize the Wachau. And perhaps that is one of the reasons the great wines of the Wachau are so interesting. They are not simply wines of power. Quite the opposite. Their power is interesting precisely because it is required to remain balanced. Grüner Veltliner can be broad, deep, spicy and concentrated, and still remain alive. Riesling can be ripe and rich, and yet retain within it a sharp line of acidity and freshness.
The best wines of the valley have never given me the feeling that they were made by people trying desperately to make a great wine. They have always felt more like an attempt to understand a great place. I have been drinking them for years and throughout this trip, especially in the evenings, I drank them again. This time with Sarit, my wife, too. F.X. Pichler, with its power and precision. Franz Hirtzberger, with the quiet, almost aristocratic elegance that has become one of his signatures. Emmerich Knoll, whose wines ask for time and patience rather than immediate attention. At Alzinger there is something taut and precise, as though the acidity and minerality are holding the wine together from within. Prager is a reminder of just how great Grüner Veltliner can be, in the fullest sense of the word. Rudi Pichler brings together power and precision. And at F.J. Gritsch, it is fascinating to see how a local tradition can continue to evolve without becoming a museum. They are all wonderful, both the Rieslings and the Grüner Veltliners. They are so enjoyable because they manage to bring together several qualities that are usually at odds with one another, and which are anything but easy to achieve in winemaking: Fruit richness without heaviness. Acidity without the sensation of sharpness. Minerality without hardness or jagged edges. And moderate alcohol that gives the wines freshness and lightness. But strangely enough, it is the wines of Domäne Wachau, the wines I have been drinking more and more at home in recent months, that became more interesting to me after the cycling trip. Parhaps because this winery tells a different story about wine. A very different one.
We tend to imagine a large winery as a single entity. One name. One person. One philosophy. Decisions taken in one place. Domäne Wachau is almost the opposite. Behind the winery stand many growers and many families, small plots scattered throughout the region, and people who work their vineyards as part of lives that are not necessarily devoted exclusively to wine. Almost 200 growers cultivate more than 2,000 tiny parcels spread across the valley. Each knows their own piece of land, its slope, its good years and bad years. And the challenge at the winery is not to erase those two thousand differences, but to understand them and preserve them in the wine. It is a clear and wonderful identity for a winery. Each grower farms, on average, less than two hectares, and in some cases the holdings are half a hectare or even smaller. Hans Weiss, for example, works only around half a hectare in Kirnberg, the source of the Grüner Veltliner Smaragd Ried Kirnberg. And that completely changes the way we can think about a cooperative. Why? Because cooperative is usually an economic word. It makes us think about efficiency, economies of scale and shared infrastructure. But Domäne Wachau allows us to think about a cooperative also as a form of memory. It contains not only grapes, but a map of people. Instead of seeing it simply as an economic mechanism that collects grapes and turns them into wine, we can see Domäne Wachau as something like a living archive of the Wachau. A collection of parcels, people and agricultural memories that eventually pass through the same winemaking system. Every parcel is both a piece of geography and a fragment of biography. Who planted it. Who harvested it. Who inherited it. Who continued working it when prices were low. Who cared for the vineyard for decades. The wine is the result of all of this, even if none of the story necessarily appears on the label. And I think this is what makes tasting these wines so special. It can become a kind of journey within a journey. Kirnberg, Achleiten, Kellerberg, Loibenberg, and all the other parcels and names that begin to acquire meaning once you understand that the valley is not one place. And perhaps that is why there is something almost paradoxical about the name Domäne Wachau. On the one hand, it is a large organization capable of producing and marketing wines on a scale that no small producer could match. On the other, one of its most interesting qualities is precisely its ability to preserve the resolution of place. Not to eliminate the differences between parcels in the name of consistency, but to make those differences part of the story. In this sense, Domäne Wachau is almost a laboratory for terroir. A laboratory in the sense that it allows variables to be isolated and questions to be asked. The same region. The same river. The same winemaking tradition. And within all of that, different places. It allows us to look at the valley not as a single picture, but as a continuum of subtle differences. And the more one tastes, the less abstract the map becomes. Each name begins to become a place. And each place begins to become a character.
This visionary transformation of a cooperative of hundreds of growers and thousands of parcels into a new kind of wine producer, a Next Generation Wine Cooperative, capable of competing with Austria’s largest and most famous wineries without losing the advantage from which it began, and without collapsing under the complexity and difference of its operating model, has been developing since 2005. The entrepreneurs behind it are Roman Horvath MW and Heinz Frischengruber. Roman brings the vision, strategy and systems thinking. How do you rebuild a cooperative? How do you define standards? How do you establish a quality policy? Where do you invest? And how do you position Domäne Wachau as a premium wine producer? Heinz brings the local knowledge and the practical agronomic and winemaking expertise. How do you work with the growers? How do you farm the individual parcels? How do you keep them separate? And how do you ultimately make quality visible in the wine?
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