(Manfred Klimek / WELT am SONNTAG / editorially revised / revised photos: Runwayml)
Reluctance to spend, price pressure, younger generations drinking less wine, winemakers expected to prepare for tougher times – these sentences have by now become part of the industry’s background noise. They are repeated, varied and intensified. And they are not wrong. But neither are they the whole truth. Anyone currently visiting wineries in Germany and Austria repeatedly encounters a reality that does not quite fit this narrative. Estates that are feeling little of the much-announced downturn. Some that are selling steadily. Others that are growing – even in the USA, despite tariffs. Not out of ignorance of the crisis, but because of an attitude older than any market debate: focusing on what is there. On the place. On the site. On what is possible.
Two such encounters can be usefully placed side by side because they come from different regions yet share the same principle: unconditional loyalty to terroir – and to the patient elaboration of what it yields.
In the Wachau, Federspiel is experiencing a quiet return. For a long time, it was the middle category between Steinfeder and Smaragd, readily overlooked and often underestimated. Today, it seems almost like the answer to an age seeking less alcohol and more inner tension. Johann Donabaum’s Grüner Veltliner Federspiel Peunt® 2024 is a textbook example. Not a demonstrative wine, nor an obtrusive one. Stone fruit is present, but restrained. Quince, a hint of smoke, and beneath it that salty minerality which carries and prolongs the sip. This is not a wine for instant impact, but one that lingers – precisely because it is light-footed without ever becoming inconsequential.
The fact that Donabaum nevertheless gives the Smaragds ample space is therefore no contradiction at all. Kirchweg, Spitzer Point, Setzberg: three wines, three different weightings of spice, fruit and mineral tension. The Kirchweg taut and classical, the Spitzer Point creamier and more yellow-fruited, the Setzberg cool and stony from the higher terraces. Alongside them, Neuburger and Chardonnay – minor varieties in the Wachau, almost anachronisms – show that it is not the grape variety alone that gives Donabaum’s wines their substance, but his precise handling of soil, yields and microclimate. Here, mastery arises not from diversity, but from control.
On the Moselle, in Brauneberg, Stefan Steinmetz is working towards another, almost more radical form of clarity. His 2024 collection of dry Rieslings feels like a cartography of slate – every site a thought of its own. I have been following Steinmetz for many years, and rarely has this breadth been so convincing. From the simple Brauneberger Riesling, with its pure, unadorned clarity, via the dry Juffer Kabinett, which at 9.5 per cent alcohol shows how serious lightness can be, through to the great Hofberger wines, which do not play power and elegance off against each other but intertwine them.
The reserves, finally – Hofberger and Grosser Hengelberg – are not demonstrations of power. They are projects in patience. Wines that do not insist on being drunk immediately or in the two years that follow, but demand time and thus promise to shine brilliantly in a few years’ time. That they can last for decades is not a marketing argument here, but almost a side effect of their inner order.
What Donabaum and Steinmetz have in common is less a style than an attitude to winemaking – pardon: a self-conception. Neither responds to trends; they ignore them. Both work on their sites, not on the market. And both show that quality does not necessarily have to shout to prevail. Perhaps that is precisely one key for these times: not to reinvent everything, but to read what already exists so closely that it can sustain oneself and viticulture – even when the narratives surrounding wine grow darker.