Weingut Nikolaihof

The Free Bacchus Story

The Nikolaihof estate contains a Roman cellar and a medieval monastery, and the terraces around it have been farmed since Roman soldiers were stationed on the Danube. It is among the oldest continuously cultivated land in Austria.

When Christine and Nikolaus Saahs took Demeter biodynamic certification in 1998 they became the first winery in Austria to do so — but they have never described it as a departure. In their account it was a return: the farming that these terraces had known for most of their history, resumed after a comparatively brief chemical interruption.

The certifier itself was the obstacle at first: followers of anthroposophy tended to regard alcohol as something to avoid, so Demeter had to be persuaded that wine belonged in the scheme at all.

The Steiner Hund, the flagship Grüner Veltliner from a south-facing gneiss terrace above Mautern, has drawn a perfect 100 points from Wine Advocate. That is worth sitting with: a perfect score, from the most conventional and numbers-driven voice in wine criticism, for a wine farmed by the lunar calendar. The Vom Stein Riesling and the single-vineyard Grüners below it carry the same farming.

One habit worth unlearning here: white wine is not automatically a young wine, and it should not be served as cold as a fridge makes it. Bottles like these are held back on purpose and keep going for decades, gathering a texture that has nothing to do with sweetness — stone fruit and dried herbs, and a weight across the tongue that only time puts there. Ten or twelve degrees, not straight from the door. Too cold and that texture simply vanishes, which is the thing you came for in the first place.

The estate also releases late: wines held in barrel and bottle for periods that European wine culture once considered ordinary and that the modern trade finds remarkable. Very little here has changed in a long time, which appears to be the point.