Weingut Gernot & Heike Heinrich

The Free Bacchus Story

In 2006 Gernot and Heike Heinrich stopped doing it the way they had been doing it. The whole estate went biodynamic at once, not a trial block and not a parcel to see how it went, and the cellar changed along with the vineyard.

Gols sits on the eastern shore of the Neusiedlersee, a lake so wide and so shallow that it works like a radiator, holding the day's heat and giving it back after dark. That is why this corner of Burgenland ripens red grapes that most of Austria cannot. Blaufränkisch is the one that matters here, and if you have never had it, it sits somewhere near Syrah for pepper and near Pinot Noir for weight, with acidity that keeps it upright and a dark sour-cherry fruit that never turns jammy. The estate also works the cool limestone of the Leithaberg across the water, which gives a tighter and stonier version of the same grape.

Freyheit is the range where the intervention very nearly stops: vinified without additives, some of it raised in clay amphorae rather than wood, so there is little between the fruit and the glass except time.

The organic side is registry-verified in the EU's own TRACES system, and the biodynamic side is respekt-BIODYN, whose member register carries Gernot and Heike Heinrich by name. Twenty years on, the interesting thing is no longer that they converted. It is that the wines got lighter and more precise as they went, which is the opposite of what most people assume biodynamics does to a red.