(Manfred Klimek)
I’ve been travelling around Burgenland for three days. I’m visiting winemakers, sitting in tasting rooms, driving through vineyards, tasting with concentration, attentiveness and, for the most part, euphoria. And with almost the same intensity, something else is being poured into my glass – not by the winemakers I’m visiting, mind you: rumours. Half-sentences. Hints. Disparaging remarks about precisely those estates I am currently visiting or am yet to visit. Not openly stated, not verifiable, rarely specific – but with the unspoken addition: ‘You should take a look at that.’
I must make one thing clear straight away, otherwise exactly what we’re trying to prevent here will happen: not a single one of the winegrowers I have visited so far has spread even one of these rumours. On the contrary. The insinuations come from outside. And yet, in the minds of some, the absurd notion apparently takes hold that journalists here are supposed to act as conveyors of petty barbs – as bearers of provincial score-settling.
What I have actually experienced over the past few days is something completely different: world-class viticulture. Precision, depth, a sense of naturalness. Wines that need no justification whatsoever. Wines that do not seek to explain, but simply are. Anyone who still seriously talks of an ‘Austrian exceptionalism’ or ‘regional relevance’ here has long since lost touch. Burgenland is no longer a testing ground, no longer a hope, no longer ‘on its way’. It has arrived.
That is precisely why all this backroom clamour seems so disheartening. For it is not only petty – it is foolish. At a time when viticulture is under pressure across Europe, when markets are collapsing, consumer habits are shifting and morally charged temperance movements are sweeping through urban arts and culture pages, this mutual attacks are arguably the most counterproductive of all behavioural patterns.
Anyone who now believes that one must strengthen one’s own position by weakening others has understood nothing. Neither of the market nor of the moment. The reality is brutally simple: if wine is to have a future, it will not be through navel-gazing, not through intrigue, not through the eternal hope for the subsidy logic of past decades. But through expansion. Through new markets. Through serious, collective thinking about directions such as India or Latin America – places where curiosity, upward mobility and enjoyment do not yet give rise to a guilty conscience.
It would be all the more disconcerting if institutions, associations or marketing organisations were to even come close to these destructive dynamics. Their role cannot be to amplify prevailing sentiments or to moderate infighting. Their role should be to do the opposite: to provide a broader perspective, to foster self-confidence and to open up new horizons.
Burgenland has long since ceased to be a province. But experience shows that provincialism flourishes precisely when economic worries collide with a lack of sovereignty. Neither silence nor looking the other way will help here. There is only one thing that helps: intellectual discipline. And the realisation that solidarity is not a moral buzzword, but an economic necessity.
Anything else is self-sabotage. At a time when nobody can afford that.