(Manfred Klimek)
I have been travelling through Burgenland for three days. I visit winemakers, sit in tasting rooms, drive through vineyards, and drink with concentration and attention, usually euphorically. And almost as intently, something else is poured for me – not by the winemakers I visit, I should stress: rumours. Half-sentences. Hints. Disparaging remarks about precisely those estates where I am currently visiting or will be visiting. Not openly, not verifiable, rarely concrete – but with the unspoken addendum: “You should take a look at that.”
I must make one thing clear straight away, because otherwise precisely what should be prevented here will come to pass: not one of the winemakers I have visited so far has spread even a single one of these rumours. Quite the opposite. The insinuations come from outside. And yet, some people apparently harbour the absurd notion that journalists are supposed to act here as messengers of little poisoned darts – carriers of provincial score-settling.
What I have actually experienced in these days is something entirely different: winegrowing of world-class quality. Precision, depth, self-evidence. Wines that need no proof whatsoever. Wines that do not seek to explain, but simply exist. Anyone who still seriously talks here of an “Austrian special path” or “regional relevance” has long since been left behind. Burgenland is no longer an experimental space, no longer a hope, no longer “on its way”. It has arrived.
That is precisely why this backroom murmuring seems so dismal. For it is not merely petty – it is stupid. At a time when winegrowing is under pressure throughout Europe, when sales markets are collapsing, consumption habits are shifting and morally charged abstinence movements are sweeping through urban cultural circles, turning on one another is probably the most counterproductive pattern of behaviour imaginable.
Anyone who now believes that they must strengthen their own position by weakening others has understood nothing. Neither about the market nor about the moment. The reality is brutally simple: if wine is to have a future, it will not be through self-absorption, intrigue or endless hopes of subsidy structures from past decades. But through expansion. Through new markets. Through serious, collective thinking in directions such as India or Latin America – places where curiosity, rising prosperity and enjoyment do not yet induce a guilty conscience.
All the more troubling would it be if institutions, associations or marketing organisations were to come anywhere near these destructive dynamics. Their task cannot be to intensify moods or mediate trench warfare. Their task should be to do the opposite: create an overview, unite self-confidence and open up perspectives.
Burgenland has long ceased to be a province. But provincialism – as experience shows – grows precisely when economic worries meet a lack of self-assurance. Silence and looking the other way will not help. Only one thing will: intellectual discipline. And the realisation that solidarity is not a moral slogan, but an economic necessity.
Everything else is self-harm. At a time when no one can afford it.