Description
Austria! Home of Rudolph Steiner, the father of biodynamics (okay, pedants may note that he was born in what’s now Croatia, but who wants to party with pedants?), and blessed with over two thousand years of winemaking history... you'd think it'd be a haven for natural wines, but no! Sigh - what happened, Austria? Somehow the culture that birthed Mahler and Schiele and Actionism and Thomas Bernhard has turned, well, kinda conservative at heart.
BUT: within the borders of this diminished empire there are radical, boundary-breaking heroes; and like diamonds forged under pressure, we think the small bunch of Austrian rebels (Tscheppe, Gindl, et al.) are genuinely some of the most exciting winemakers anywhere in the world right now. And right at the front of the group? Why there stands Sepp Muster, a man who's been farming biodynamically since he started over two decades ago (on land that had never seen chemical intervention). Sepp laboriously hand-tends his steeply sloped vineyards, sited atop a mix of rocky, clay and silt soils with some limestone strewn in, and the wines that emerge are wizard-elixirs: compelling, confounding and complex.
His skin-macerated 'Sauvignon Graf' is a mind-bender of an SB: herbs, tangy gooseberries, lemon-lime zest from another planet, hints of smoke and an electric acidity all combine to make for a kind of magic. Get it while we've got it!