Manincor

The Free Bacchus Story

The cellar is 3,000 square metres and it is buried. Dug into the hill below the existing estate buildings in 2004 so that fruit moves down through it under gravity rather than being pumped, with the surrounding rock holding the temperature steady and almost no mechanical cooling required. The building is the equipment.

The house above it dates from 1608, put up by Hieronymus Manincor, whom the Emperor ennobled for services to Austria and endowed with land on the shore of Lake Kaltern. His granddaughter married an ancestor of the Counts Enzenberg in 1662, the estate passed to that family in 1978, and Michael Goëss-Enzenberg moved in during 1991 and released his first six wines in 1996.

Kaltern sits in the German-speaking north of Italy, high enough that the whites hold a line of acidity most Italian whites lose. Sophie — Chardonnay, Sauvignon and Viognier — is the bottle most people meet first, at around forty dollars.

Every wine in the range has been certified biodynamic since 2009, and the estate appears on respekt-BIODYN’s own published register of members.

Certifying everything closes the carve-out. A producer can farm its showcase parcel immaculately and the rest conventionally, and still describe itself in language a buyer will read as covering the whole estate — which is the most common way a certification claim turns out to mean less than it looks.