(Manfred Klimek / Photo: Uwe Schiefer, courtesy of Andreas Durst)
It begins with a number. 98. In black and white, beneath a wine the likes of which 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 sees the score merely as an accolade overlooks something crucial: it marks a turning point. And it concerns a grape variety that embodies two paths, two voices — Dorothea (Dorli) Muhr in the east and Uwe Schiefer in the south — in the context of contemporary winemaking. Needless to say, there are other kings of Blaufränkisch: Velich (100 points from Suckling), Wachter-Wiesler, Kollwentz, Triebaumer and many more. Yet Muhr and Schiefer, two individuals who could not be more different, have, by 2025, elevated this Central and Eastern European variety to a status comparable to that of great Pinots. And yet their paths could not be more different.
Muhr has never vinified for the sake of points and awards. She worked towards an idea: Blaufränkisch as a subtle, deeply mineral and highly elegant response to a world of red wine that all too often loses itself in fruit and richness. Generations of red wine drinkers are familiar with this, but for a long time Blaufränkisch was, in their eyes, a footnote, a marginal appellation, a marginal style. Dorli Muhr lives and works on the Spitzerberg, a terroir that is no myth: barren, windy, sobering in terms of yield, yet precise in its expression. Here she found what many overlook: soils that give nothing away and can therefore conceal nothing. She ferments spontaneously, treads the grapes with her feet, and bottles late. Her wines never seem contrived; they simply happen. Blaufränkisch, says Muhr, needs no mask. And the Obere Spitzer is the proof: a wine that does not whitewash or conceal, but shows just how high Blaufränkisch can rise when given everything it needs in terms of depth – and nothing to sugar-coat it.
And then there is Uwe Schiefer — a winemaker whose story also speaks of radical self-commitment, but in a completely different key. Schiefer was once a waiter and sommelier at Vienna’s Steirereck, one of Europe’s leading gastronomic destinations, before he decided to go his own way. In 1990, he founded his winery in southern Burgenland, in Welgersdorf on the famous Eisenberg – that red hill whose iron- and slate-rich soils demand more character than ease. Since then, he has been producing Blaufränkisch, but not Blaufränkisch in the conventional sense. He introduced a credo to the Austrian red wine world: ‘Less is more’ — both in the vineyard and in the cellar. He banished barriques in favour of large oak casks, began using spontaneous fermentation early on, and avoids filtration or fining. What remains is a radical openness to the grape, to the vineyard site, to the variety itself. These wines do not seek to please; they seek to tell a story — and they do so with a purity that appears cool on the outside yet is deeply interwoven on the inside, writes one of his loyal merchants.
Schiefer’s Blaufränkisch wines are different from what one might expect; they provoke without hiding. Critics describe them as analytically precise, with a crisp, fresh acidity and fine tannins – a style more reminiscent of top-class Pinot Noir than of traditional Burgenland red wines. The Reihburg single-vineyard wines and the Blaufränkisch Lutzmannsburg V.V. have achieved top international ratings — up to 96 points and more — and are regarded as the benchmark for Eisenberg Blaufränkisch worldwide.
When you compare Muhr and Schiefer side by side, a pattern emerges: two extremes that meet in the middle. Muhr shows us what Blaufränkisch can be when all the superfluous elements are stripped away: depth, minerality, lightness despite its complexity. Schiefer shows us what Blaufränkisch can be when given space: structure, clarity, precision without fading into the background. Both rely on the grape variety itself — not on trends, not on technology, but on what the grape has learnt over decades from its respective soils – and what it yields.
And yet they differ in one crucial respect: Muhr is now part of an international discourse centred on innovation through subtlety. Schiefer is part of a discourse that seeks the new in clarity. These two models mark a qualitative step forward in the evolution of Blaufränkisch: not merely thinking on a larger scale, but with greater precision and independence.
This development is no accident. It is the result of a decade in which Austria has redefined its place in the world of red wine — not by compromising, nor by repeating old dogmas, but by trusting the variety and recognising it for what it is. Muhr and Schiefer are not merely names here, but milestones. They mark a moment in which Blaufränkisch — long regarded as a second wine, a marginal wine, a second-rate variety — has in fact attained its own European significance: as a red wine that is precise, lively and taken seriously on the international stage.
Perhaps it is this dual aspiration — the pursuit of depth and clarity — that explains why, right now, two such different interpretations of Blaufränkisch are performing at the very highest level. It is no coincidence that Muhr’s 98-point wine and Schiefer’s classic Eisenberg wines are mentioned in the same breath. They are not a compromise. They are an expression of a grape variety whose winemakers have learnt to showcase its full range — and to do so in a way that is unmistakable, both stylistically and geographically.