Loimer

Fred Loimer took over his family's Langenlois winery in 1997 and spent the next decade converting the vineyards to biodynamics. The story is a familiar Austrian mid-career arc: inherited cellars, decision to convert the vineyards, then the modern winery - a matte-black cube designed by Andreas Burghardt, completed in 2000 - built on top of the hand-dug 19th-century cellars. The architecture gets the attention; the vines are the work.

The estate farms around sixty-five hectares in Kamptal plus the partnered Schellmann holdings in Gumpoldskirchen (Thermenregion), bringing the total to roughly eighty-five hectares - all biodynamic, certified since 2006, under Respekt-BIODYN (of which Loimer is a founding member). The key Kamptal single-vineyard sites (Rieden) span the full Kamptal geological range:

• Ried Loiserberg - loess over paragneiss and mica schist, Grüner and Riesling matched to soil zones
• Ried Spiegel - deep loess terraces, elegant Grüner
• Ried Käferberg - amphibolite, gneiss, mica schist - the estate's flagship Grüner Veltliner site
• Ried Steinmassl - steep primary-rock Riesling site (paragneiss, mica schist, granite gneiss)

The entry-level regional blend is called Lois, a Grüner Veltliner made from contracted fruit that works above its pay grade. Above that, village-level bottlings and the single-vineyard Rieden.

Grüner Veltliner and Riesling are the pillars, but Loimer also runs one of Austria's more serious traditional-method sparkling programmes, launched around 2013 - a Sekt Austria collection including Blanc de Blancs Langenlois, Blanc de Noirs Gumpoldskirchen, and Grosse Reserve bottlings with up to five years on lees. The extended-skin-contact range is small but present (the Achtung Gemischter Satz spends four weeks on skins). In the cellar: native yeasts, temperature-controlled slow fermentations, a mix of stainless steel and large neutral oak, no bâtonnage for the dry wines.

The house style is precise and mineral - Kamptal's answer to Wachau density, built around loess-driven aromatic lift and cool-climate tension rather than weight.