(Editorial team / Claude Auguste / Manfred Klimek / Photo: Lenzmark, Runwaylm)
This project could also have gone wrong. It would not have been the first project with great ambitions to fail in the wine world – for whatever reason. Two winemakers, almost three decades apart in age, two very different biographies, and on top of that an ambition that wants nothing less than to lead an entire grape variety out of its regional comfort zone. And then there is Grüner Veltliner – a variety that is respected internationally, but rarely genuinely coveted outside Austria and Germany. Too much provenance, too little mythology for international marketing, too little acreage, too little history beyond the Alps. Yet that is precisely where New Chapter comes in. And that is precisely why this project is more than just another “premium Veltliner”.
Markus Huber and Lenz Maria Moser represent two poles of Austrian winemaking: on the one hand, the meticulous site worker from the Traisental, a winemaker who has made precision, reduction and cool elegance his signature; on the other, the global wine entrepreneur, shaped by generations of family tradition, but long since possessing a horizon that extends far beyond Europe. What unites them is not style, but ambition. And the will to free Grüner Veltliner from national self-satisfaction.
New Chapter is a proposition: this wine does not want to be “typical”, but competitive. Internationally legible. Not as an exotic, but as a serious white wine on an equal footing with the great benchmarks. The fact that James Suckling awards it 95 points is less a marketing story than a symptom. The jury finds no provenance bonus here, but consistency of craftsmanship: fruit without noise, oak without dominance, structure without hardness. The wine is built, perhaps even constructed. But it has broad appeal, a Veltliner that packages the global taste in wine in much the same way that Antinori’s Tignanello does.
The crucial point lies deeper. Grüner Veltliner is not a variety with abundant vineyard acreage. It is not Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Grigio. It is limited – geographically, climatically and culturally. Anyone thinking of it internationally has to take a different approach. Not through sheer volume, but through precision. Not through regional folklore, but through defining a style. This is precisely where the idea behind Lenzmarkcomes in: a wine assembled anew each year according to the principle of great blends, exclusively from the best parcels, with the ambition of shaping a clearly recognisable style – independent of vintage variations.
The fact that this style has found its strongest market in Dubai of all places is no coincidence, but an irony of the present day. In a Muslim country where alcohol is strictly regulated, New Chapter it appears on the lists of the best restaurants. In places where wines are ordered not out of tradition, but out of curiosity. Where provenance matters less than texture, balance and gastronomic suitability. Grüner Veltliner as a global food companion – that is perhaps the most astute reading of this variety of all.
A not insignificant part of this story is Lenz Maria Moser’s work in China. His involvement with the Changyu group, where he established his own winery under his name, confronted him with a market that reads wine in a completely different way from Europe: less historically, less sentimentally, but all the more analytically. What works in the glass? What lingers in the memory? What goes with the cuisine? These questions flow into New Chapter it – not as a compromise, but as a sharpening. The wine thinks internationally without denying its provenance.
And Markus Huber? He provides the foundation. Limestone, coolness, directness. The ridiculously small Traisental versus huge vineyard areas à la Burgundy, Tuscany or Bordeaux. Huber’s sites give the wine that stony calm which protects it from blandness. The maturation – partly in stainless steel, partly in large oak – is not a stylistic device, but a tool. Oak as seasoning, never as a statement.
New Chapter is a very confidently presented project that can place around 50,000 bottles a year on an international market and increase that figure slightly further. It does not need an Austrian label to work – and some people in “Ösiland” take that somewhat amiss – there is sometimes talk of an arrogant manner; bullshit. For that is precisely where its strength lies. Perhaps this is the project’s true moment of innovation: thinking of Grüner Veltliner not as a question of national identity, but as an international possibility.
Two winemakers, a bridge between generations, a wine that works where one would least have expected it. If that is not a new chapter, then we do not know what one should look like.