(Manfred Klimek / WELT am SONNTAG / animated pic: rumwayml)
I spoke on the phone with Lenz Moser V (five). The number stands for the fifth Lenz Moser of this Austrian wine dynasty, which is known in the international wine business because Moser’s grandfather, Lenz Moser the Third, revolutionised the “training” of vines in the vineyard in the 1950s. Most of the vineyards that we walk through today or cross by bicycle in Germany and Austria – and also in many French and Italian wine regions – are planted according to Moser’s “high culture” system. This means that instead of 10,000 vines per hectare, as was customary in the past, only around 3,000 vines are rooted in the soil, and that the vines, following a post-and-wire installation, climb approximately 120 to 140 cm towards the sky. This replaced individual-vine and pergola cultivation (overhead covering) in viticulture and massively simplified the work of winegrowers in the vineyard. Before that, everyone working in the vineyards suffered from what we today call a “back” – endless back pain.
Moser told me about his new wine, which will be coming onto the market shortly, will cost around 40 euros and is an expansion of his Grüner Veltliner project New Chapter: the New Chapter “Elevated”. What is special about this organic wine, which Moser makes together with Traisental winemaker Markus Huber, is the blending, because under Austria’s very strict wine law Moser may add up to 15% of another grape variety without the wine having to be labelled as a cuvée. Some wine-criticism fundamentalists see this method as diluting the variety that carries the wine, while others, myself included, recognise the possibilities offered by this individual approach to winemaking. Moser and Huber have refined their Grüner Veltliner with a few barrels of Riesling – truly not an easy cuvée. Yet Moser says that the predominantly limestone soils in the Traisental, which are rather rare on the other bank of the Danube, in the Wachau, Kremstal, Kamptal and Wagram regions, give the grape varieties a finer, more elegant basis for blending them.
And then Hungary!
We spoke on the phone for almost an hour about Hungary, specifically Tokaj, where Lenz Moser has worked and continues to work on several projects. That Tokaj which Hungary’s ousted prime minister Victor Orban had also “taken a great fancy to”. This old Viennese expression means that Orban was infatuated with Tokaj. And that had consequences.
Between 2010 and 2024, I went to Tokaj four times with Lenz Moser and visited almost all the important and progressive wineries with him. And I saw how much new infrastructure the Orban system had built in Tokaj – far more than in other parts of the country. But I also experienced the worldly managing director of the Grand Tokaj state winery, which had been completely renovated with an incredible amount of investment, being dismissed and replaced overnight together with his board during our visit – the next morning, at our next appointment, he was simply gone, had disappeared, and no longer answered his phone. And the people who were now to take over the helm, an employee told me, enjoyed greater favour with the government in Budapest. Fair enough: a state winery belongs to the state. But it was obvious that party and government interests beyond viticulture also played a role in the background here. There are state wineries in Germany and Austria too – and they generally do a very good job. Yet state wineries in Germany are not free from political interventions either. Such a drastic replacement of the management, however, is rather unusual here. And when it does happen, it is noticed and critically accompanied by the media. That was certainly not the case at Grand Tokaj.
Lenz Moser has also been involved in Tokaj since around 2014 – he knows the region well and in detail. And he is one of the few foreigners there who approaches the region with affection, but also with sobriety. He knows about its problems. And we may perhaps not unfairly compare these problems with those of German viticulture. The problem can be summed up in one question: was focusing exclusively on dry wines a mistake?
This question obviously cannot be answered simply and comprehensively. But I would like to attempt a summary based on my conversation with Moser and other winemakers in Tokaj – and also winemakers in Germany. First, the historical perspective: as recently as 1938, there were only three major wine nations in the international wine world – where there was money to be made and which consisted solely of the US East Coast and the United Kingdom. France (Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Loire). Germany (with the Mosel, Saar and Rheingau). And Hungary with Tokaj wine and, to a lesser extent, sweetish red wines from the wine region around the city of Eger (Bull’s Blood). Italy was a long way from taking part in the world wine market. Spain, Chile, Australia and the Napa Valley also supplied only their region and nation. That changed with the gap in the world wine market left by the murderous conflagration of National Socialism and the planned economy of devastating Eastern European communism. Germany’s off-dry wines, from Kabinett through to Trockenbeerenauslese, lost their markets. And the off-dry Hungarian Tokaj wines, made using a puttonyos system similar to that of German sweet wines, were geared towards quantity rather than quality and forced by the state into state wineries, where quality had no significance. The Soviet Union became the first export market, where the nomenklatura had traditionally indulged in Tokaj since the time of the tsars.
After the transition and the end of the planned economy, precisely the same change took place in Tokaj viticulture as also occurred in German viticulture following the 1985 wine scandal, when the prohibited preservative glycol was detected in fruity-sweet wines: in regions known for their off-dry wines, viticulture was focused on dry wines, also at the insistence of consumers who were young at the time. And both leading varieties, Riesling and Furmint, are ideally suited to this, as Germany’s dry Rieslings have demonstrated since around 1995. And dry Furmints have done likewise since approximately 2005. Only: international sales do not work as they should. And all the more so since the generation born around the turn of the millennium is increasingly turning away from wine.
Lenz Moser has an explanation for this in the case of Tokaj which also has a certain validity for the Mosel and the Rheingau: the regions, and the nations too, lack awareness of their former historical greatness. And pride in it too. In Hungary, Moser says, even more so than in Germany, where patriotism is unfortunately still ideologically and incorrectly caught in the pincers of nationalism. That is why Moser, at almost 70, wants to launch an initiative to give the export of both dry and sweet Tokaj wines a new voice. And I want to venture the claim in the final sentence that the younger generation, fashionably abbreviated as Generation Z, could be brought back into the world of wine with medium-dry wines, magnificent Kabinett wines and equally medium-dry Furmints. Because the intellectual project of purely dry wines in regions that were known for fruity-sweet wines – we can recognise this today – does not work in the way that winemakers and wine policymakers thought it would.