Arndorfer

Martin and Anna are the rarest of purists. They are iconoclasts – totally uncompromising in their methods- yet they eschew dogma in favor of open-mindedness and curiosity. Both Martin and Anna come from a long line of winemakers (Anna is from the Steininger family), and their travels before taking over Martin’s family winery were incredibly formative. This, paired with their already strong and creative personalities, caused them to break sharply with tradition when they came back home and forge their own path together.  In a short amount of time, Arndorfer has become one of the brightest stars in the natural wine world and an icon of the next generation of Austrian winemakers.

Martin and Anna believe that a profound wine must be a pleasure to drink and a pleasure to make, and it shows in the wines. You can tell that they’re having fun. Their aim is to carry the “message from the vineyard” in its fullest form, and the path is minimalism in the cellar – meaning nothing added and nothing taken away. More specifically, this means no sulfur at crushing, no fining of the must, no adding yeast or even a pied de cuve, no stopping malo, no cold stabilization, the very gentlest if any filtering, and no additions beyond miniscule levels of sulfur added at bottling.  Especially in Austria, a lot of producers consider this quite risky, but Martin & Anna aren’t concerned by this because they believe their wines develop their own microbial stability through a lack of manipulation.

As Anna and Martin eloquently put it “Because of our experience that nature is the strongest force, we love to work with her. Because the knowledge that the soil is the most intelligent thing we deal with, we‘ve decided to trust him. Because the beliefs that the plants nourish our soils, we let them grow. With these ideas and confidence, we don‘t interact in the cellar, which lets our wines transport the natural taste of the grape. These decisions we make by ourselves and let our personalities speak in our wines. We think that winemakers are artisans, or even artists. Their work requires creativity, sensitivity and an enormous amount of personality. Everything you would attribute to an artist….. We have made it our task to produce wines that unite origin and passion, wines that arouse curiosity in the wine world across the globe.”

All the wines from Arndorfer come from their estate vineyards in the Kamptal.  The labels may or may not say Kamptal however.  They’ve long since stopped caring if the wines are deemed “typical” enough to carry the appellation on the bottle.  The Kamptal is a cool climate region in the Northeast of Austria named after the Kamp river which flows through the area before emptying into the Danube.  Cold winds from the north highlands meet in the Kamptal with the hot weather of the Pannonian plain. Very high temperature changes from the night and day create thick skins on the berries which leads to stronger aromas and vibrant acidity. Microclimates change considerably from hillside to hillside and vineyard to vineyard. Altitudes range from 200 to nearly 500 meters. Small valleys between the hills work like channels where cold winds from the northern regions chill down the vineyards during the nights.  The winery and vineyards are located in and around the village of Strass im Strassertale.  Strass has a very special microclimate because it has the first south faced slopes near the flat of the Danube. It‘s a unique combination of the very old mother rock of the Bohemian Massive and the particular influence of the Pannonian climate.

Martin wanted to be a winemaker from the moment he could walk and talk. He remembers, as a kindergartener, always trying to find ways to be in the vineyard with his mother or on the tractor with his father rather than being in school. Martin’s older brother Dietmar was always more interested in carpentry and design (he now works as a set designer for Austrian television), so there was never any question for the family that Martin would be the one to take over the estate when the time came. He started winemaking school at Klosterneuburg at age 14 and worked his first harvest alongside his father in 1999 at the age of 16. Martin describes his father’s methods in the cellar as old school and low tech – in a good way. He always told Martin “the nature needs some time” and taught him to taste from the tanks and barrels early and often to keep in touch with the wines as they developed. His father worked with native fermentations almost exclusively, aside from a few Rieslings that always had some trouble finishing fermentation, and he was never into fining the must or the wine. His wines were dry, low alcohol (think 10.5-11.5) and very ageworthy.

After this first vintage with his father in 1999, Martin worked a summer in Friuli in 2000 with Ronco del Gnemiz, and the summers of 2001 & 2002 with Fabrizio Iuli in Piedmont while still going to wine school during the rest of the year. He said his experiences in Italy, because they were unpaid summer internships, were really valuable knowlede-wise. Because he wasn’t being paid, he was allowed more access to the parts of the process where the action was and could spend a lot more time picking the brains of the winemakers. In the Fall of 2002, at 19, Martin took over his family winery. He had just finished school at Klosterneuberg, and he said that he very “naively” thought he knew everything he needed to know about winemaking. He introduced some of the more “high tech” methods he learned in school – selected yeast, enzymes, fining with bentonite, etc. – and aimed for very straight, clean, and typical wines. Despite all of the changes that would come later, Martin now says that he is glad he went through this period of very mainstream, modern winemaking, because now he knows the difference from personal experience.

One or two years later, doubts started creeping in. He tasted often with his sommelier and importer friends, and the idea started forming in his head that there could be many different ways to make good wine. By 2007, he was sure there was much more for him to learn. He began searching and experimenting. He and Anna (who had met in 2000 when he was 17) decided to work a harvest together in Australia at The Lane in the Adelaide Hills. Martin described the philosophy at The Lane as “very French” and pretty old-school. They didn’t use any selected yeast (they started fermentations with pied de cuves or already fermenting juice from other tanks). They didn’t use any sulfur at crush/press, and they worked a lot with lees stirring following fermentation. This was also the first time Martin had worked with stainless steel barrels (225L). This harvest had a big impact on Martin & Anna.

Now to give some background for Anna.  Growing up, she was always more into gastronomy, although she did work with her father in the cellar a bit growing up. She is from the Steininger family – another really well-respected estate in the Kamptal.  Anna studied in Krems at the hospitality school there, and after meeting Martin in 2000, she became as interested in wine as she had always been in food. Not surprisingly given her passions, she is an excellent taster. She and Martin worked together making the red wines at Steininger from 2003-2011 – the family had some nice vineyard sites for reds but didn’t have a lot of passion for making red wines, so they let Anna and Martin do it instead. During that time she was also quite involved in the cellar and vineyard at Arndorfer, and this was also when they went to Australia together for a harvest.

When they returned home from Australia, they ordered some stainless steel barrels to experiment with and decided to gradually reduce their use of selected yeast and enzymes. They began tasting more wines from outside the mainstream – lots of Loire, Arbois, Savoie. Martin remembers tasting his two “lights on” wines during this time. In 2009 on a trip to Denmark, he tasted a 2010 Chardonnay from Overnoy and a Frederic Cossard (vintage unknown) that made him go “What?!”. He and Anna were so entranced by their liveliness, their juiciness, and the absence of what he calls “steely and metallic” that he often finds in more classically styled wines.  He continues to be very inspired to this day by natural wines from the Loire, Burgundy, Jura, and Savoie.

From 2007 to 2013, Martin and Anna ran side by side experiments with native yeast vs. selected yeast. They began these experiments in their smallest containers which were barriques, and gradually moved up to their big barrels, and eventually to tanks. Over these 6 years, they consistently found the native fermentations to be more elegant and complex with more length. They began forming the theory that additions don’t preserve and protect what’s there in the juice, but rather they reduce the original expression, which is usually much more complex and in balance.

Then the 2014 vintage came around – a nightmare vintage throughout most of Austria. There was so much rain and humidity in the lead-up to harvest that most winemakers were forced to pick relatively unripe grapes to avoid losing everything to rot and fungus. And even when they did go for earlier pick dates, the fungus was already so widespread that extreme sorting was necessary (at least for winemakers who cared to select it out). So, Martin and Anna ended up with fruit that was not as concentrated and developed as they normally work with. Martin’s response to this situation sums him up perfectly as a winemaker. The safe way out in such a rocky vintage would be to use sulfur at pressing, enzymes to drop out any fungus that snuck into the press, fine the must with bentonite, and then inoculate all the ferments with selected yeast. But Martin knew that making all these additions to already under-ripe and un-concentrated fruit would wipe out what little character from the vineyard had made it into the juice. So he and Anna decided to add nothing at all. No sulfur at pressing, no enzymes, no selected yeast, no chaptalizing. They didn’t sulfur the wines after primary fermentation, but rather let them all go through malo. So 2014, one of the toughest vintages in the last 20 years in Austria, was their first vintage 100% under their new “no additions” regime. The wines were great, by the way! From 2014 until now they have kept to this new philosophy and are now pushing their own creative limits by experimenting with maceration and skins. They are onto a theory that this could be a way to bring even more character and life into the wines.

Martin and Anna’s philosophy gets them into a bit of trouble with the establishment here in Austria, but they are so gracious and non-confrontational that it’s not dramatic in any way.  There are no big fights with the authorities about what goes on the label, etc. They have long ago accepted that their style may not be adopted by the mainstream in the near future (or ever), and if that means they can’t put the appellation on the label in certain cases, so be it.  It is much more important to them to remain “free, creative, and independent” and to follow their ideas. Martin says, “For economics, it seems crazy and stupid. But so far the world has been big enough to find people interested in other styles.”

"Nature is the strongest force, we love to work with her. Because the knowledge that the soil is the most intelligent thing we deal with, we‘ve decided to trust him. Because the beliefs that the plants nourish our soils, we let them grow." - Anna and Martin Arndorfer