Maskerade Rot 2020 – This wine is fascinating. I always believe Gut Oggau makes some of the very best pinkish wines in Burgenland, and I am sure it’s the fruit purity that hooks me every time. Yet riding to the top we have red berry fruits with a soft but fresh mouthfeel, strawberry and raspberry, beguiling us. Maskerade Rosé 2020 – This is a year older and we are straight into a wine given a textured mineral core from gravelly soils. It starts out full of lifted aromatics, initially floral but complexity builds to something savoury and mineral. It is certainly macerated on skins to give the wine a good amber hue. This wine strikes me (I could be wrong and it’s not important to become a detective to check this) that there’s a good dollop of Grüner Veltliner here. Although it isn’t the desire of Gut Oggau to detail the grape varieties in what are often field blend cuvées, sometimes there are clues. Maskerade Weiss 2021 – This is by no means a simple wine. They are also usually available (including takeaway) at Antidote Wine Bar off Carnaby Street. The UK importer for Gut Oggau is Dynamic Vines. I should just apologise for how long this article has taken to appear, caused as I’ve mentioned before by moving house/country and then catching Covid, a lengthy bout as it has turned out. They are vineyards under biodynamic conversion, which have not yet revealed their full personalities. The Maskerade wines below are bottled in litres, and wear a mask. I shall presume that readers are aware of the “family” created for their wines, made up of three generations. With the dishes we got through ten wines (and could still stand afterwards) which I shall briefly describe. Everyone pitches in for service, and on what seemed like an incredibly busy Sunday evening everyone was very attentive. We had a spectacular meal of small plates, created from ingredients grown and tended by the team. We were invited to dine at Gut Oggau’s Inn and then to spend some time with Eduard touring the winery and visiting the horses. A holistic approach is both rigorously and intuitively followed. The regime is biodynamic and regenerative, from biodynamic tisanes to horses for ploughing etc. One needs to remember when drinking these wines, that although Stephanie and Eduard seem the happiest couple, always smiling, always having fun, they are deadly serious in wanting to have a positive impact, and a lasting one, on their land…and not just the soil. Today they are by no means standing alone in such aims, but back in 2007 such a way of thinking was, if not less widespread, certainly less publicised. That is both the heart and the beauty of the Gut Oggau project. They had inherited a vineyard and they wanted to discover its personality and soul for themselves, not to mould it into something it wasn’t. Stephanie and Eduard had a different aim. Many people come into wine with ideas about what they want, and they change whole landscapes and ecosystems in order to achieve that, whether their intentions are good or not. This is a producer whose number one aim, I would guess, is to ensure healthy soils and biodiversity on the land they farm. This was a good start for a couple who wanted to pursue a zero-tolerance of synthetic inputs in their viticulture and winemaking. Stephanie and Eduard Tscheppe-Eselböck purchased vines and winery in 2007, an estate which had been abandoned for a year. Rust has many attractions, and many good wine makers, but I was also long overdue a visit to one of my favourite producers who happen to be just a few minutes down the road in the village of Oggau. This town, on the western shore of the Neusiedlersee in Burgenland, is a great base for a holiday, whether wine-obsessed or not, and I’d not been there since 2015 and was well overdue a return visit. It also afforded an opportunity to spend a couple of nights in Rust. The route worked best to minimise overall travel, and to avoid Stansted. I might have mentioned previously that when we visited Moravia we flew into Vienna.
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