Weingut Schmelzer

George and Elisabeth Schmelzer are truly unique people. Through biodynamic winemaking their mission is to communicate the uniqueness of each vintage, the Burgenland region around beautiful Neusiedlersee, as well as the sincere gratitude and respect towards nature deeply rooted in both of them.

We met them at the VieVinum 2016 in Vienna. By the first look we knew this needed to be special: A guy wearing a long monk-like robe with dirt under his nails presented, with rather limited English skills, his beautiful wines to us. He had something very powerful in his eyes; sort of a strong willpower combined with a sense that he had found a deeper truth. This guy was George. Next to him was Elisabeth – a woman with such a soothing and welcoming , happy charisma, acting as the perfect pendant to the rustic George, filling in the language gaps and relieving some of the deep seriousness one immediately sense from George, thus creating balance.

George and Elisabeth are people who embrace the changes mother nature brings down their path. As George put it himself: “We want to represent the magic of the region around Neusiedlersee in our wines: inspired, artful, but unsophisticated. Each vintage has its charms – therefore we consider each individual bottle as unique, we pay attention to it, but also our gratitude.”

Their wines are like them: With a deep seriousness to them, yet pleasurable to drink, rustique, yet balanced and sincere to their origin.

In the vineyard

• Organically grown grapes – no herbicides, no pesticides, natural compost and other organic fertilizer only.
• Native grasses planted between the rows to add to a self-sufficient ecosystem and inhibit erosion. With sheep to grass between the rows.
• De-budding and de-shooting by hand to ensure that each vine is focusing all of its energy on the selected shoots and grape bunches, limiting the number of bunches produced by each vine.
• Leaf-thinning by hand of each vine to allow each bunch greater exposure to sunlight and keeping the bunches ventilated thereby reducing disease.
• Bunch-thinning by hand where necessary to eliminate any bunches affected by sour rot or bunches ripening unevenly.
• Hand-picked grapes.
• low yields.
• Biodynamic certified since 2007
• No Bordeaux mixture in the vineyard only herbal extracts and teas made by themselves.
• No Sulphur used in the vineyards.
• Soft winter pruning of the wines - To reduce big wounds and stress for the vines.

In the cellar

• Use of naturally occurring yeasts only
• Barrel-fermentation and aging
• Stirring the lees in the barrels several times each month by hand to encourage natural aromas and protect the juice from oxidation.
• No fining or cold-treatment of the wine.
• Sulfites are never added to the wines.
• Minimal use of new oak barrels to avoid the classic “wood” tastes found so often in white wine which mask the true flavors and aromas of the grapes.
• "The most important thing for us is to give the wine time to age and ripe. We want to stress the wine as little as possible. So it can get stable and harmonic." - Georg Schmelzer