Leutschach is the last village before Slovenia, and the road up to the Schlossberg above it is the kind that makes the driver stop talking. It leaves the Südsteirische Weinstraße, the wine road that has followed these ridges since 1956, and climbs between vines planted so steeply that the rows seem to lean on one another. This is Styria, the humid green south-east of Austria, four hours and a quarter from my door in Brno and forty-five minutes from Graz airport, and it is where Sepp and Maria Muster farm ten hectares of Opok.
It was the first week of October. The Klapotetz were still up, wooden hammers knocking on their boards in every second vineyard, and the car said 14 °C at 10:00 with rain due after lunch.
A farm on the Schlossberg since 1727#
The Muster farm is documented back to 1727. Sepp’s father bought it in 1978, and in 2000 Sepp took it over together with Maria. They began farming biodynamically that same year, were certified by Demeter in 2003, and in 2005 made their first white wines fermented on the skins. Read in a row, those dates are a short history of natural wine in Austria.
I met the wines before the place, and badly. A colleague in Vienna poured me a glass of Gräfin blind: amber, dry, salty, with a tannin I did not expect from a white. I said Friuli. Then I said Georgia. Sauvignon Blanc from the Slovenian border was my third guess. Some years later I was standing in the yard, and Sepp was leading us up into the vines.
Opok, the soil that looks like slate#
Opok is the word you learn here before any grape. It is a calcareous silty marl, grey-green and soft when wet; dried in the sun it splits into flat plates that look like slate, until you press one and it crumbles. It underlies Leutschach, Glanz and the Schlossberg. Sepp picked a plate of it from between two rows, snapped it in half and handed me the pieces. Chalk on my fingers, and a smell like a wet cellar wall.
The ten hectares are planted mainly to Sauvignon Blanc and Morillon, the Styrian name for Chardonnay, with Welschriesling, Gelber Muskateller and Grauburgunder beside them. The climate is called Illyrian: warm and damp, 900 to 1,000 millimetres of rain a year, then cold autumn nights that hold the acidity while the aromatics build. Everything is done by hand, because on slopes this steep there is no other way. Biodynamics here means the farm as a whole, compost, cover crops, the preparations, and Sepp spoke of it plainly, as work rather than belief.
Two years in old wood#
The cellar is a working room, not a showroom: large old wooden casks along the walls, a handful of clay amphorae, the smell of fresh must. The grapes arrive by hand, the must goes to cask without being settled or racked first, and fermentation starts on its own. Then the wine waits. Twenty to twenty-four months in cask is the rule, so the grapes we were watching would not see a bottle until the autumn after next. Nothing is fined. Filtration is rough or absent. Sulfur is added sparingly or not at all.
I pour both natural and classic wines, and I owe guests a straight account of what this costs and what it buys. It costs two vintages sitting in wood at any one time and bottles that ask for a cool shelf and a little patience. What it buys is a transparency I find hard to argue with: the Opok comes through in every wine on the table, from the lightest to the darkest.
“Two years is not patience,” Sepp said, when I asked about the ageing. “It is just how long the wine takes to settle down. We wait with it.”
The ladder from vom Opok to Erde#
The range reads like a ladder up the hill. At the bottom, Sauvignon vom Opok and Morillon vom Opok: pressed off the skins, aged in cask, the clearest introduction to the soil. Then Opok itself, a blend. Then the Graf wines, Graf Sauvignon and Graf Morillon, from older vines with longer ageing, and Gräfin, which spends three weeks on its skins and comes out textured and saline. At the top stands Erde, “earth”: a full year on the skins in amphora, deep amber, tannic, a white wine that behaves like a red. If skin-fermented whites are new to you, start with orange wine explained.
We tasted at a plain wooden table in the cellar, from vom Opok upwards, with the door open to the rain that had arrived on schedule. Graf Sauvignon surprised the guests who came expecting grass and gooseberry: nettle, white pepper, grapefruit pith, a chalky grip and no fruit salad. Then the top rung.
Schmecke das Leben: five farms on one border#
The Musters did not do this alone. With four neighbouring farms they founded Schmecke das Leben, “taste life”: Ewald Tscheppe of Werlitsch in Glanz, whose Ex Vero I, II and III come from the bottom, middle and top of one Opok slope; Andreas Tscheppe, also in Glanz, white grapes only and a dragonfly or a salamander on the label; Alice and Roland Tauss, also on the Schlossberg, Demeter since 2006; and Christine and Franz Strohmeier in West Styria, who give Blauer Wildbacher the same light hand.
What I like about the group is that the wines do not taste alike. Five families farm the same way, and you can still tell their bottles apart blind. The hill is the common ground; the hands are different.
Brettljause and Sturm#
Lunch was down in Leutschach at a Buschenschank, the farmhouse tavern that Joseph II’s decree of 1784 made legal: a grower may sell his own wine and cold food at home. The board came with Verhackert, minced smoked bacon spread thick on rye bread, Presswurst, hard cheese, pickles, and Käferbohnensalat, scarlet runner beans with onion in Kürbiskernöl, the dark green pumpkin-seed oil that goes on everything in Styria. A jug of Welschriesling, and a glass of Sturm, the still-fermenting must, cloudy and sweet and fizzing, sold at every roadside in October beside roast chestnuts.
Nobody hurried us. The rain kept on, the Klapotetz kept knocking, and the second jug arrived without anyone asking.
The Musters on tour#
Styria is not on my scheduled Wachau, Kamptal and Burgenland tour; the drive south is too long for that week. I come here on private tours, two or three days from Graz, and the Schlossberg gets an afternoon: the rows, the ladder from vom Opok to Erde at the cellar table, a Buschenschank before or after. Some groups carry on south through Slovenia to the qvevri cellars of Oslavia, about two and a half hours away.
Tastings at the farm are by appointment and the team is small, so I book weeks ahead and keep the group to eight or fewer. Farm gates in Styria are often cash only, so carry some. Bring shoes that can take mud.
I drove back to Graz with a case of Graf Sauvignon and one bottle of Erde that I have not yet found the right evening for. It is on the cool shelf, waiting. It has had practice.
