Weingut Wieninger – quality-driven Gemischter Satz from Vienna

Weingut Wieninger – a winery that is part of Star Wine List’s global partner Premium Estates of Austria – has been producing wine for around 100 years. Since the late 1980s, the company has been a major force in highlighting both the uniqueness of the traditional Gemischter Satz as well as Vienna as a wine region. Today, the popularity is bigger than ever.

(Partner story with Premium Estates of Austria)

”When I started I was the young crazy guy with a vision. Today everybody produces Gemischter Satz, and everyone in Vienna is really proud of the wine from the region,” says Fritz Wieninger who runs the domain.

Gemischter Satz is basically a field blend where you grow and vinify several grape varieties together, and it is a traditional growing method in Austria. But, in earlier years, the quality could sometimes be discussable. Fritz Wieninger recalls his parents running a classic ”heurigen” – like a wine tavern – when he was a kid.

”This was a place where people came to eat and have fun, dance on the tables and drink a lot of wine. And in those days, the quality of the wine was not that important since focus was more on the restaurant business rather than the wine. ’You need a lot of soda to make them drinkable’ was the general view,” he says.

But Fritz himself grew up loving wine, and he wasn’t satisfied with that view. So when he took over the family business in 1987 he changed focus.

”I wanted to make high-end wine. I wanted to sell to the finest tables in the country, and I wanted to make wine on an international level. I had tasted great wine from other parts of the world, like Burgundy, and I wanted to create a wine to compete on that level.”

Today, Fritz has a total of around 60 hectares within Weingut Wieninger, and another 15 in Hajszan Neumann, ”my boutique playground”, as Fritz calls it. All the vineyards are biodynamically grown, and even though he also produces varietal wines, Gemischter Satz is the most important thing.

When asked to describe the essence of his wines, Fritz says:

”I’m always looking for character and multi-layered taste profiles. You can ferment grape juice with dry yeast and end up with a very aromatic and shiny wine, but that doesn’t satisfy me. I’m always subjective, the goal is to produce wines that feed my vision of a good wine. I try to make myself happy, and luckily there are enough people out there that like what I do.”

People didn’t know that Vienna could produce this level of quality, but today we have a wonderful reputation

In 2005, Fritz and a few other producers met and formed the group WienWein, to show the quality within the Vienna region, and to change the reputation and image of the area. Today the group includes six people and eight wineries, and over the years they have held seminars and showed the wines at tastings and fairs.

”It has been important to be a group, and we have had a lot of success. People didn’t know that Vienna could produce this level of quality, but today we have a wonderful reputation. There is quality in this city! Everyone has their own style, but the overall quality is great,” says Fritz.

”It was maybe easier to change the image and perception of Vienna in, say, Sweden or the US. But today that has changed. People truly respect wine from Vienna, and everyone around is very proud of the wine from the region.”

So what about the future? What lies ahead for Vienna, and Gemischter Satz? Fritz Wieninger is confident that the development lately will continue.

”In the short and medium term, I think we will go toward even higher quality, with more single vineyard wines from the region, both Gemischter Satz and varietal wines. In the longer term, I think that we might have only Gemischter Satz. In some areas with a dominance of Riesling, in other with a dominance of Grüner Veltliner according to the terroir and carrying the name of the vineyard but with no varieties on the label anymore.”

Read more about Premium Estates of Austria and Weingut Wieninger here.