Gut Oggau

Gut Oggau was founded in 2007 by Eduard Tscheppe and Stephanie Tscheppe-Eselböck. They bought a seventeenth-century estate in Oggau, near Rust on the Neusiedlersee in Burgenland - a building that had stood abandoned for two decades. The abandonment turned out to be a gift; the long fallow period meant that whatever industrial chemistry had once gone into the land had long since leached out, and the soil was effectively clean by the time they started.

Eduard is Styrian, from a winegrowing family. Stephanie is Burgenland; her father is Walter Eselböck, the two-Michelin-starred chef of Taubenkobel. Their backgrounds sit on either side of the Austrian fine wine world - cellar and table - and Gut Oggau is what you get when the two are put in the same hands.

The estate is now around twenty to twenty-five hectares, biodynamic from the start and now fully Demeter-certified, grazed by sheep and chickens, cover-cropped, partly worked by horse. Limestone and slate soils with gravel and sand. Plantings are Burgenland classics: Blaufränkisch, Zweigelt, Roesler for reds; Grüner Veltliner, Welschriesling, Weissburgunder, Gewürztraminer for whites. In the cellar: spontaneous fermentation, no fining or filtration, no added sulphur (or trace at bottling only in difficult vintages), long élevage in large old oak.

Gut Oggau's signature idea is that each cuvée is not a wine but a member of a family. Every bottle carries an illustrated portrait of its fictional character, drawn by Jung von Matt (Vienna), with a personality and a biography. Each vintage the face is redrawn as the character ages. The family has three generations:

• Grandparents - the deepest, oldest-vine wines. Mechthild (Grüner Veltliner, old vines; sometimes bottled as a GV-led field blend) and Bertholdi (Blaufränkisch, old vines).
• Parents - riper, more structured. Timotheus (Grüner Veltliner and Weissburgunder), Emmeram (Gewürztraminer), Josephine (Blaufränkisch and Roesler), Joschuari (Blaufränkisch), Cecilia (rosé, field blend).
• Children/Youth - fresh, nervous, energetic. Atanasius (Zweigelt and Blaufränkisch), Theodora (Grüner Veltliner and Welschriesling), Winifred (rosé, Blaufränkisch and Zweigelt).

Two parallel lines extend the concept:

• Maskerade - wines from newly acquired vineyards still converting to biodynamics, typically bottled in litre format.
• Family Reunion - the 2016 frost-and-hail blends, where all fruit was combined into three cuvées (Weiss, Rosé, Rot) with labels collaging every family member's face.
• Eugenie - a separate PIWI field blend from young, high-density, horse-worked plantings.

The wines are serious about both the farming and the shelf: a natural-wine project that took the label design as seriously as the cellar, and stuck with both. In Central Europe it is one of the addresses people return to when they want to see what this kind of work looks like when it keeps going for twenty years.