Oggau am Neusiedler See is two and a half hours from Brno if the ring road around Vienna behaves, and the last twenty minutes are the ones I look forward to. The road comes down off the Leitha hills, the reeds of the Neusiedlersee rise on the left like a green wall, and the villages of the west shore of Burgenland line up with their long yards turned away from the street. This is the warm, flat, sun-heavy corner of Austria, and it is where Eduard Tscheppe and Stephanie Tscheppe-Eselböck have run Gut Oggau since 2007.
It was the last week of April. The storks were back on the chimneys in Rust, ten minutes down the road, the car said 18 °C at 11:00, and the gate on the Hauptstraße stood open.
A 17th-century yard and the two people who bought it#
Gut Oggau is an old farm estate with buildings from the 17th century, set around a courtyard in the lake-village way: house at the front, working rooms behind, a gate wide enough for a cart. Inside stands an old wooden beam press that the couple kept where they found it. Eduard grew up in a conventional wine family in Styria. Stephanie grew up in the Eselböck family, whose Taubenkobel restaurant and hotel in Schützen am Gebirge is a few kilometres away; Eveline Eselböck of that family is often described as a pioneer of natural wine in Austria. A cellar upbringing and a dining-room upbringing, in one yard.
They bought the estate in 2007 with about nine hectares of vines and farmed biodynamically from the first vintage. Today it is around fifteen hectares, Demeter certified, on the limestone and schist of the Leithaberg at about 130 metres, with Blaufränkisch, Zweigelt, Grüner Veltliner, Welschriesling and Weißburgunder as the core of the plantings.
I met the wines before I met the place: a bottle of Theodora on a table in Brno years ago, a drawn face on the label, and a cook beside me asking who she was.
A family in three generations#
The idea that made Gut Oggau known is simple enough to tell across a dinner table. Instead of a range named after vineyards and grape varieties, the wines are a family. The grandparents, Mechthild and Bertholdi, come from the oldest vines and carry the most weight. The parents, Joschuari, Emmeram, Timotheus and Josephine, are the middle generation. The children, Atanasius, Theodora and Winifred, come from the youngest vines and are the lightest. Each has a face drawn on the label, and you find yourself talking about the wines as people before you have decided to.
I was sceptical the first time, because I have poured enough marketing to be wary of it. But nobody at my table remembers “Grüner Veltliner and Welschriesling from young vines on limestone”, while everybody remembers Theodora, and by the third glass they can tell you why she tastes younger than Timotheus. It is a way of talking about vine age and site without the vocabulary, and the vocabulary is usually what stops people asking.
Stephanie put it more plainly.
“We are not naming bottles,” she said. “We are introducing you to someone. Once you know a person, you notice how they change from one year to the next.”
Horses, grass and Leithaberg limestone#
We drove out to the vines in Eduard’s pickup. The rows run between the village and the slope of the Leithaberg, and this shore is drier and warmer than most of Central Europe: Pannonian, with around 2,000 hours of sunshine a year and a lake barely a metre deep that throws its mists over the vines in autumn. The soils are limestone with bands of schist, which gives Leithaberg reds their salty, upright shape.
The vineyards carry permanent grass cover, and in some of them a horse still does the work between the rows. One was working when we arrived, a heavy chestnut walking a line with a plough behind it, and Eduard stopped talking until the row was finished. Biodynamics here is not a certificate on the wall. It is the whole farm treated as one organism, from the compost heap to the horse’s hooves.
A cellar that adds nothing#
Back in the yard the cellar is dim and quiet, a room of old wooden casks. The grapes are picked by hand and ferment on whatever yeast the vineyard brought in with them, then sit in the casks until they are ready. Nothing is fined, nothing is filtered, and no sulfur is added at any point; the wines are sold as free of added sulfites.
I pour both kinds of wine and I owe guests a straight account of what this choice costs. Wines made this way are fragile: they want a cool shelf, a short trip from the cellar and a little patience in the glass, and they can differ from bottle to bottle. In return you get a directness that is hard to fake, and wines that move over a dinner rather than sitting still. I go into what sulfur does and does not do in my piece on sulfites. Eduard and Stephanie made their choice with their eyes open, and the wines back it up.
One glass: Theodora 2022#
We tasted at a plank table in the courtyard, in the shade of the house wall.
Atanasius followed, Zweigelt and Blaufränkisch poured cold: sour cherry, crushed pepper, a light tannin that scrubs the tongue. Then Eduard drew a glass of Bertholdi from cask, the old-vine Blaufränkisch. Dark, iron and blood orange, a tannin like fine sandpaper, and the length that only old roots give.
Liptauer, bread and a Zander from the lake#
Hospitality is part of this estate, not an afterthought, and on the days they open the Heuriger the yard fills with long tables. Ours was a plain lunch: rye bread, Liptauer bright with paprika, Grammelschmalz, pickled cucumbers, a plate of Blunzn. Then a Zander from the lake, pan-fried, with a paprika sauce and boiled potatoes, and Winifred, the Blaufränkisch and Zweigelt rosé, cold and dry beside it. Rosé with pike-perch works on this shore for a reason: the fish is delicate, the sauce is not, and the wine sits between them.
Gut Oggau on tour#
On my Wachau, Kamptal and Burgenland tour the lake gets a day of its own, and the west shore gets the middle of it. From Vienna it is an hour; from Rust and its storks, ten minutes. A morning here means a walk in the rows, four or five wines at the courtyard table, and then the drive around the top of the lake to Gols, where Claus Preisinger’s cellar gives a different natural answer to the same water.
The estate opens its yard for walk-in tastings from April to September on set weekdays, and the Heuriger runs on scheduled dates. I confirm every visit with Eduard and Stephanie before I promise it, and I keep a second cellar in reserve for harvest weeks. Bring a hat: there is not much shade on the Leithaberg in June.
I left with a case in the boot, Theodora and Atanasius, and drove north with the lake in the mirror. At dinner in Brno that night a friend asked who the girl on the label was. I told her the whole family. It took most of the bottle.
