(Manfred Klimek / WELT am SONNTAG / animated image: rumwayml)
I spoke on the phone with Lenz Moser V (five). The number refers to the fifth Lenz Moser of this Austrian wine dynasty, which is renowned in the international wine trade because Moser’s grandfather – Lenz Moser the Third – revolutionised the ‘training’ of vines in the vineyard in the 1950s. Most of the vineyards we walk through or cycle through today – in Germany and Austria, as well as in many French and Italian wine regions – are planted according to Moser’s ‘high-density’ method. This means that, instead of 10,000 vines per hectare – as was previously the norm – only around 3,000 vines are rooted in the soil, and that the vines climb towards the sky, following a system of stakes and wires, to a height of approximately 120 to 140 cm. This has replaced single-vine and pergola cultivation (with a canopy) in viticulture and has made the winegrowers’ work in the vineyard vastly easier. Before that, everyone working in the vineyard suffered from what we now call ‘back problems’ – endless back pain.
Moser told me about his new wine, which is due to be launched shortly, will cost around 40 euros and is an extension of his Grüner Veltliner project ‘New Chapter’: the ‘New Chapter “Elevated”’. What makes this organic wine – which Moser produces in collaboration with Traisental-based winemaker Markus Huber – so special is the blending process, as, under Austria’s very strict wine legislation, Moser is permitted to blend in up to 15 per cent 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 forms the basis of the wine, whilst others – myself included – recognise the possibilities that this individual winemaking approach offers. Moser and Huber have refined their new Grüner Veltliner with a few barrels of Riesling – a cuvée that is certainly no simple affair. Yet Moser says that it is precisely the predominantly limestone soils in the Traisental – which are rather rare on the other bank of the Danube, namely in the Wachau, Kremstal, Kamptal and Wagram regions – that provide the grape varieties here with a finer, more elegant foundation for blending.
And then there’s Hungary!
We spent nearly an hour on the phone talking about Hungary, specifically about Tokaj, where Lenz Moser has been and continues to be involved in several projects. That very same Tokaj which the ousted Hungarian Prime Minister, Victor Orban, had ‘gone mad about’. This quintessentially Viennese expression means that Orban was utterly smitten with Tokaj. And that had consequences.
Between 2010 and 2024, I visited Tokaj four times with Lenz Moser and toured almost all the major and progressive wineries with him. And I witnessed just how much new infrastructure the Orbán regime had built in Tokaj – far more than in other parts of the country. However, I also witnessed how, during our visit, the sophisticated managing director of the Grand Tokaj state winery – which had been completely refurbished thanks to a huge amount of investment – was dismissed and replaced overnight, along with his board; the next morning, at our next appointment, he was simply gone, had vanished, and was no longer answering his phone. And the people who would now be taking the helm, as one member of staff told me, were more favoured by the government in Budapest. Fair enough: a state-owned winery belongs to the state. But it was obvious that party and government interests outside the wine-growing sector were also at play behind the scenes. There are state-owned wineries in Germany and Austria too – and they usually do a very good job. Yet even state-owned wineries in Germany are not immune to political intervention. Such a drastic reshuffle of the management team, however, is rather unusual in our part of the world. And when it does happen, it is noticed by the media and scrutinised critically. That was certainly not the case with Grand Tokaj.
Lenz Moser has also been involved in Tokaj since around 2014 – he knows the region well and in great detail. And he is one of the few foreigners there who approaches the region with love, but also with a sense of realism. He is aware of its problems. And these problems are perhaps not insignificant when compared with those facing German viticulture. The issue can be summarised in a single question: was the decision to focus exclusively on dry wines a mistake?
Needless to say, there is no simple or comprehensive answer to this question. But I would like to attempt a summary based on my conversations with Moser and other winemakers in Tokaj – as well as winemakers in Germany. First, a historical perspective: As late as 1938, there were only three major wine-producing nations in the international wine world – the part where money was to be made, comprising solely the US East Coast and the United Kingdom. France (Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Loire). Germany (with the Moselle, Saar and Rheingau). And Hungary, with its Tokaj wines and, to a lesser extent, some palatable reds from the wine-growing region around the town of Eger (Eger Stierblut). Italy was a long way from making its mark on the global wine market. Spain, Chile, Australia and the Napa Valley, too, supplied only their own regions and nations. That changed with the gap in the global wine market left by the arson attacks carried out by the Nazis and the planned economy of devastating Eastern European communism. Germany’s off-dry wines, ranging from Kabinett to Trockenbeerenauslese, lost their markets. And the sweet Hungarian Tokaj wines, with their barrel-ageing system similar to that of German sweet wines, were geared towards quantity rather than quality and forced by the state into state-run wineries, where quality was of no consequence. The Soviet Union became the primary export market, where the nomenklatura had traditionally indulged in Tokaj wine since the days of the Tsars.
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the planned economy, Tokaj viticulture underwent precisely the same transformation that had taken hold in German viticulture in the wake of the 1985 wine scandal, when the banned preservative glycol was detected in fruit-sweet wines: in regions known for their sweet wines, viticulture shifted its focus to dry wines, partly in response to demand from young consumers at the time. And both the main grape varieties, Riesling and Furmint, are superbly suited to this, as Germany’s dry Rieslings have demonstrated since around 1995. And the dry Furmints have done so since around 2005 as well. However, international sales are not performing as they should. This is all the more true now that the generation born at the turn of the millennium is increasingly turning away from wine.
Lenz Moser has an explanation for this situation in Tokaj, which also holds some validity for the Moselle and the Rheingau: the regions – and indeed the nations – lack an awareness of their former historical greatness. And the pride that goes with it. In Hungary, says Moser, this is even more pronounced than in Germany, where patriotism is, unfortunately, still ideologically misrepresented by nationalism. That is why Moser, now almost 70, wants to launch an initiative that gives a new voice to the export of both dry and sweet Tokaj wines. And in closing, I would venture to suggest that the younger generation – commonly referred to as Generation Z – could be drawn back into the world of wine with semi-dry wines, superb Kabinett wines and equally semi-dry Furmints. For we can now see that the intellectual project of producing purely dry wines in regions known for their fruit-sweet wines is not working out as winemakers and wine policy-makers had envisaged.