Von Der Vogelwaide

Let’s get out of the way immediately all of the more obvious reasons why you, an informed wine drinker or buyer, might be interested in the wines of Daniel Vogelwaid and Michael Donabaum, the duo behind the very exciting Von der Vogelwaide in the Wachau.

We’ll start with the last name Donabaum: probably a three thousand year-old surname in the Wachau river valley; indeed, Michael is a son of this storied and aristocratic appellation. His family has been making wine and tending vines here for generations—Michael grew up in the family winery and attended viticulture school in Krems. (He’s also studied design and has a great eye for aesthetics.)

Then we’ll note that Daniel Vogelwaid, Michael’s partner and a young German fellow from around Stuttgart, has an insane resume. Daniel studied viticulture and enology in Geisenheim, Bordeaux, and Vienna; and then look at this list of wineries at which he worked (and actually worked, not staged for a few weeks): Domaine de l’Horizon in the Roussillon, Comte Lafon in Burgundy, Château Palmer in Bordeaux, and Jean-Louis Chave in the Rhône. For a winemaker as young as he is, this is a broad and impressive list of places to learn one’s trade, and it amounts to around a decade of experience before starting one’s own winery.

The final and most important reason you might be interested in the wines of Von der Vogelwaide, however, isn’t much to do with pedigree or resume. They’re not quite a winery yet, certainly not a domaine, and as they put it, to call the duo a château would be “over-egging the pudding.” In spite of that—what do we call these young vignerons, working by hand on a mere 2.5ha across dozens of tiny, steep parcels?—what’s really noteworthy is that the wines don’t taste like what currently we know of the Wachau at all.

Do Daniel and Michael make Grüner and Riesling? Sure. Are they anything like the Smaragd monsters that made waves in the U.S. some fifteen years ago? Not at all. Daniel’s hand is fully evident here: these are wines of terraced valleys, rocky soils, old vines, biodynamic farming, hand labor for everything… But then in harvesting and in the cellar, the treatment is gentle, precise, technical but not unfeeling. Frankly, these wines taste French (in the good way), but on the gneiss and slate soils that could make the Wachau immensely compelling, if only anyone were to handle it all with delicacy, with grace. The Vogelwaide wines are this: way more graceful and accomplished than they should be, just three or so vintages in, and it’s the devotion of this young couple to do things their own way—without imitating anything else in the region at all—and needless to say, it puts them a bit at odds with the rest of the somewhat conservative region.

These are the kind of wines we’ll be blinding our customers and friends on for the next several months. If you can taste the totally unique top wines, the old-vines, single-vineyard ‘Tandaradai’ bottlings, and tell us what they are and from where, we’ll buy you a bottle. We’ll only also whisper a few names whose work the Vogelwaide wines have brought to mind for us recently: Enric Soler in the Penedès, Wasenhaus in Baden. We think they’ll be added to this short list soon.

Those are our reasons for you to give these handmade, labor-intensive, precocious wines a shot: the future is quite bright for this pair at Vogelwaide, who listen to intuition and experience, who are finding their own elegant, thoughtful way.

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