Gols is where the flat begins. Coming from Vienna the land is done with hills by the time you pass Parndorf, and at Gols, on the north-east shore of the Neusiedlersee, the horizon is a line of reeds and sky. This is Burgenland, the warm, dry, Pannonian corner of Austria: about 2,000 hours of sun a year and a steppe lake 36 km long that averages a metre deep. I had spent the two days before at Karakterre in Eisenstadt, the fair of organic, biodynamic and natural growers, and Gols is about forty minutes around the top of the lake. On 15 May 2026 the car thermometer read 21 °C at 10:00 and the wind was already up, the way it usually is here.
You see Claus Preisinger’s winery before you see the village properly. It stands on the Goldberg, a low hill above Gols, a long concrete-and-glass building with grass growing on its roof, finished in 2009. I first saw it years ago from the road on the way to a tasting in Rust and took it for a gallery. In a sense I was right.
From three hectares in Gols to sixty-four parcels#
Claus took over the family’s vines around 2000, about three hectares of them. He farms something like nineteen hectares today, spread across some sixty-four parcels between the village and the lake, on limestone and gravel, Kalk und Kiesel in his own phrase, which is also the name of two of his wines. Blaufränkisch, Zweigelt and St. Laurent are the reds that matter here; there is Pinot Noir too, and Grüner Veltliner and Weißburgunder among the whites.
He has been a member of Pannobile, the association of nine Gols estates, since 2004, and biodynamic since 2006; he farms under respekt-BIODYN, the Austrian group that grew up as an alternative to Demeter. Twenty years of biodynamics is no longer a phase. It is how the farm runs.
I knew the wines before I knew the man: a bottle of Puszta Libre! opened cold at a friend’s kitchen table in Brno, a light red that behaved like a white. The estate does not advertise visits, so I wrote, and was given a morning on the strength of a polite email and a plausible reason. That is how it works here: by appointment, and only if the calendar allows.
Limestone, gravel and biodynamics on the Goldberg#
We walked a parcel of Blaufränkisch behind the building first. The shoots were a hand’s length past the first wire, the flower clusters still closed, and between the rows a cover of grasses and clover had been mown in alternate rows. The wind bent everything the same way. Under my boots the soil was pale and full of rounded stones, the gravel half of the name.
Biodynamics here, as Claus describes it, is mostly farming: compost, cover crops, the preparations, timing the work with the plant rather than the calendar. He does not sermonise about it, and I do not ask him to. My own view of what the horn and the moon do and do not do is in my piece on biodynamics without the mysticism. What I can see with my eyes is a vineyard with living soil, and an owner who knows all sixty-four of his parcels without looking at a map.
“Sixty-four parcels is sixty-four picking dates,” Claus said, “and the fun is that none of them ask my permission.”
Amphorae, casks and a cellar that keeps moving#
The cellar is under the grass roof, cool and plain in the way good concrete is plain. The grapes come in by hand and ferment on their own yeasts, some whole bunches among them. Then the vessels take over: large wooden casks, some concrete, and a row of clay amphorae, which Claus has used since 2009, among the first in Austria to do so. Sulfur is kept to a minimum; fining and filtration barely happen.
The clay is not decoration. It breathes a little, rounds tannin, and gives nothing of its own in the way a new barrel would. I have stood in enough Georgian marani to recognise the logic.
We tasted from the range standing at a concrete counter. Kalkundkiesel white, the estate’s white grapes on their skins, was hazy gold, orange peel and chamomile, a grip like strong tea. Then Blaufränkisch from Ried Bühl and Ried Edelgraben side by side: the Bühl lifted, sour cherry and white pepper; the Edelgraben darker, more iron, its tannin still folded in. There was a pét-nat called Ancestral, and a label called Erdeluftgrasundreben, earth air grass and vines written as one word, which tells you how he thinks about labels.
I pour both classic and natural wines, and I will say where the trade-offs sit. These bottles leave the cellar with little protection, so they want a cool shelf and a short chain from cellar to glass; some are cloudy, and they change in the glass over an hour. What you get back is a Blaufränkisch that tastes of Gols in a particular year rather than of a cellar recipe. Claus’s public line is “wines for thinking people”, and I read the phrase as an invitation, not a test.
One glass: Puszta Libre! 2023#
Lunch was in the village, at a Gasthaus on the main street, and the first bottle came straight out of the fridge.
Paprika fish soup and zander in Gols#
We ate what the lake gives: a paprika fish soup first, red and hot, then zander, the pike-perch of the Neusiedlersee, fried in butter with parsley potatoes. The Puszta Libre! went with the soup better than I expected, cold fruit against the paprika. The Kalkundkiesel white, ordered again because I wanted to see it with food, met the zander with its skin grip and won.
A slice of Schweinsbraten with caraway followed, because it was on the board, and with it the last of the Bühl. Blaufränkisch and roast pork is Burgenland’s default, and defaults exist for reasons.
Preisinger on tour#
Gols is 50 minutes from Vienna and about 2 h 15 from Brno via Bratislava, which makes it the natural last chapter of the Wachau, Kamptal and Burgenland tour. After the terraces of the Danube and the loess of Langenlois, the flat Pannonian light here feels like a different country, and the wines agree. A morning of this kind is the pattern: one parcel on the Goldberg, the amphora room, five or six wines, then a table in the village, and in the afternoon Rust and its storks on the west shore.
Visits are by appointment only and not always possible, so I confirm each one before I promise it and keep a second Gols cellar in reserve. Bring a hat: there is no shade on the Parndorf plateau, and the wind does not count as shade.
I drove back north with a case in the boot. The building on the hill was the last thing I saw of Gols: a gallery, then, with sixty-four exhibits, all of them still ripening.
