(Manfred Klimek / Photo Uwe Schiefer by Andreas Durst)
It begins with a number. 98. Black on white, beneath a wine such as Austria has never seen before: 98 Parker points for the Blaufränkisch “Ried Spitzerberg – Obere Spitzer”. The highest rating ever awarded to an Austrian Blaufränkisch. Anyone who reads the score merely as an accolade overlooks something decisive: it is a watershed. And it concerns the variety that knows two paths, two voices — Dorothea (Dorli) Muhr in the east and Uwe Schiefer in the south — in the present-day modern era. Naturally, there are other kings of Blaufränkisch: Velich (100 points from Suckling), Wachter-Wiesler, Kollwentz, Triebaumer and many more. Yet in 2025, Muhr and Schiefer, two utterly different individuals, have given this Central and Eastern European variety a standing comparable to that of great Pinots. And yet their paths could hardly be more different.
Muhr has never made wine for points and accolades. She worked for an idea: Blaufränkisch as a quiet, deeply mineral and highly elegant answer to a red-wine world that too often loses itself in fruit and fat. Generations of red-wine drinkers know this, but for a long time Blaufränkisch was a footnote, marginal site and marginal style among them. Dorli Muhr lives and works on the Spitzerberg, a terrain that is no myth: barren, windy, sobering in its yields, but precise in its expression. Here she found what many ignore: soils that give nothing away and therefore can hide nothing. She ferments spontaneously, treads the grapes with her feet and bottles late. Her wines never seem made, they happen. Blaufränkisch, Muhr says, needs no mask. And the Obere Spitzer is the proof: a wine that neither overwhelms nor conceals, but shows how high Blaufränkisch can rise when given everything it needs in terms of depth. And nothing that embellishes it.
And then there is Uwe Schiefer — a winemaker whose story likewise speaks of radical commitment to self, but in a completely different tone. Schiefer was once a waiter and sommelier at Vienna’s Steirereck, one of Europe’s leading gastronomic addresses, before deciding to go his own way. In 1990 he founded his estate in Southern Burgenland, in Welgersdorf on the famous Eisenberg, that red hill whose iron- and slate-rich soils demand more sound than comfort. Since then he has produced Blaufränkisch, but not Blaufränkisch in the conventional sense. He brought a credo to the Austrian red-wine world: “Less is more” — in the vineyard and the cellar. He banished barriques in favour of large oak casks, began using spontaneous fermentations early on and dispensed with filtration or fining. What remains is a radical openness to the grape, the site and the variety itself. These wines do not seek to please, they want to tell a story — and they do so with a purity that appears cool on the outside and is deeply interwoven within — writes one of his loyal merchants.
Schiefer’s Blaufränkisch wines are different from what one expects; they provoke without hiding themselves. Critics describe them as analytically precise, with piquant, fresh acidity and fine tannins, a style more reminiscent of high-class Pinot Noir than traditional Burgenland red wines. The Ried Reihburgsingle-vineyard wines and the Blaufränkisch Lutzmannsburg V.V. have achieved top international ratings — up to 96 points and more — and are regarded worldwide as a benchmark for Eisenberg Blaufränkisch.
When Muhr and Schiefer are placed side by side, a pattern becomes visible: two extremes meeting in the middle. Muhr tells us what Blaufränkisch can be, when everything superfluous is left out: depth, minerality, lightness despite complexity. Schiefer shows us what Blaufränkisch is allowed to be, when it is given room: structure, clarity, precision without disappearing. Both rely on the variety itself — not on fashion, not on technique, but on what the grape has learned over decades beneath their respective soils — and gives forth.
And yet they differ in one decisive respect: Muhr is now part of an international discourse concerned with the new in subtlety. Schiefer is part of a discourse that seeks the new in clarity . These two models mark a qualitative step in the evolution of Blaufränkisch: not merely to think bigger, but more precisely and more independently.
This development is not accidental. It is the result of a decade in which Austria has redefined its place in the red-wine universe — without bending itself out of shape, without repeating old dogmas, but by trusting the variety and perceiving it as such. Muhr and Schiefer are not merely names, but landmarks. They mark a moment in which Blaufränkisch — long judged as a second wine, marginal wine, second-rate — has genuinely achieved a relevance of its own in Europe: as a red wine that is precise, lively and taken seriously internationally.
Perhaps it is this dual ambition — the striving for depth and and clarity — that explains why two such different interpretations of Blaufränkisch stand at the highest level right now. It is no coincidence that Muhr’s 98-point wine and Schiefer’s classic Eisenberg benchmarks are mentioned in the same breath. They are not a compromise. They are an expression of a variety, whose winemakers have learned to show its full range — in a way that is unmistakable both stylistically and geographically.