Langenlois announces itself with vines rather than a sign. The road from Brno crosses the flat Weinviertel for two hours, drops into the Kamp valley north of the Danube, and the hills on both sides are suddenly striped to the top. This is the Kamptal, Austria, and Langenlois, at 219 metres and with about 7,500 people, is usually described as the country’s largest wine-growing town. The Bründlmayer family has been making wine here since 1581.
I arrived on Wednesday 8 October 2025 at 09:30, 11 °C, fog still in the valley bottom and the top of the Heiligenstein already in sun. The Riesling harvest was under way; crates stood at the ends of the rows.
Four and a half centuries in one town#
Willi Bründlmayer has led the estate since 1980, together with his wife Edwige. In that time it has grown to 90 hectares, about 70 per cent of them white: roughly a third Grüner Veltliner, a quarter Riesling, then Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, with Grauburgunder, St. Laurent and Zweigelt in smaller parcels. It is one of the estates that define classic Kamptal, and since 2019 all of it has been certified organic.
I knew the wines before I knew the town. The Kamptaler Terrassen Grüner Veltliner was the bottle I reached for in Brno restaurants when a table wanted one white for a whole dinner: white pepper, green apple, a little lentil on the finish, enough weight for a Schnitzel. I drove down to see where it came from, stayed for the Riesling, and have brought groups every autumn since.
The Heiligenstein: a desert 270 million years old#
We started with the rock. The Zöbinger Heiligenstein, above the neighbouring village of Zöbing, is not like the rest of the Kamptal. Where the valley’s other slopes are loess, gravel and gneiss, the Heiligenstein is Permian sandstone and conglomerate, laid down as desert 250 to 270 million years ago. Willi picked up a rust-red piece and turned it over: coarse, gritty, already warm in the hand at ten in the morning.
The name means holy stone; older documents, I was told, point to heat rather than saints. Either way the slope faces south, the Kamptal is warmer and more open than the Wachau to the west, and Riesling ripens here with the acidity the estate builds its wines around. The estate says these Rieslings want twenty years; having drunk one with fifteen on it, I do not argue.
The other great site is the Kammerner Lamm, at the foot of the Heiligenstein in Kammern, on deep loess. Loess is wind-blown silt: it holds water through a dry summer and gives Grüner Veltliner the creamy, spicy weight the Lamm is known for. Both sites carry the Erste Lage classification of the Österreichische Traditionsweingüter, the growers’ association the estate belongs to.
The Lyra trellis: canopy before cellar#
Then Willi walked me into the rows that make the estate unusual to look at. About 17 hectares, including roughly 30 per cent of the Heiligenstein holdings, are trained on the Lyra trellis, a divided canopy he helped develop. Instead of one wall of leaves, each vine is split in two, the shoots opening outward in a V so that the row, seen from the end, looks like the strings of a lyre.
The point is light and air. Twice the leaf surface faces the sun, the fruit hangs in a shaded corridor between the two curtains, and wind passes through where a conventional hedge would trap damp. On a warm sandstone slope it lets him pick ripe grapes with acidity intact and dries the canopy after rain, which matters once you farm without synthetic sprays.
“Most of what matters in a Riesling is decided out here, before the grapes see a press,” Willi said. “Light, air, and patience with the pruning shears. The cellar can only lose what the vineyard has made.”
The cellar backs him up by doing little. Whites ferment in steel and large wood, and the philosophy the estate has stated for years is canopy work over cellar tricks: the same vineyards, the same varieties, a vintage’s differences left legible in the glass. This is a classic estate, organic in the vineyard and precise in the cellar, and I put it before my guests as one clear pole of the argument I lay out in what I pour, natural and conventional.
Three years on the lees#
Back at the house, Willi’s son Vincent opened the Sekt. Bründlmayer’s sparkling wines are made by the traditional method, second fermentation in the bottle, and spend three years on the lees before disgorging. This is one of the houses that made Austria take Sekt seriously: a fine bead, a little brioche held in check by Kamptal acidity, dry rather than soft. We drank it at 11:15 standing up, which is how Sekt is best drunk.
One glass of Riesling#
We tasted in the order I always ask for: Kamptaler Terrassen first, then the Lamm, then the Heiligenstein Rieslings, old vines last. This is the glass I wrote down.
Schnitzel in a Renaissance courtyard#
Lunch was at the Heurigenhof Bründlmayer, the family’s restaurant in the old town of Langenlois, a 16th-century Renaissance house built around a courtyard. It runs a full kitchen, not the cold buffet of a country Buschenschank, and pours the estate’s range by the glass.
We did what the whole country does: Wiener Schnitzel with warm potato salad and the Kamptaler Terrassen Grüner Veltliner, the pepper of the wine against the clarified butter. Then Tafelspitz, boiled beef with apple horseradish and chive sauce, beside a Heiligenstein Riesling a few years old, a pairing I would defend to anyone. Apricot dumplings and a last glass of the Sekt closed it. Edwige stopped at the table to ask how the Riesling had shown. I said it had shown like the rock.
Bründlmayer on tour, and how to visit#
On my Austria tour through the Wachau, Kamptal and Burgenland, Langenlois is the hinge between the Danube and the lake. We come from the Wachau, where Nikolaihof has shown the group what biodynamic Wachau tastes like, walk the Heiligenstein in the morning, taste here at midday, and eat at the Heurigenhof before the drive south-east towards the Neusiedlersee and Gut Oggau. I place the classic estate between two biodynamic ones on purpose: guests taste the Heiligenstein Riesling with yesterday’s wines still in their memory, and the dinner conversation writes itself.
Langenlois is one hour from Vienna, 15 minutes from Krems and about 2 h 15 from my door in Brno. Group tastings at the estate are by appointment; the Heurigenhof keeps seasonal opening days, so check before you go. For the valley’s loess and sandstone, read my Kamptal and Kremstal guide; for the rest of the country, the Austria guide.
I left at 14:30 with the fog long gone and pickers still moving across the Heiligenstein, two curtains of leaves on either side of them and the rust-red ground showing between the rows. Four and a half centuries in one town, and the most modern thing about the estate is the shape of its vines.
