Melvyn Minnaar tells how small and serious sell in Austria

When you first meet him, Hans Nittnaus’s face suggests that he’s a very serious guy. A few hours later and the smile, which always seems to be near anyway, takes on a knowing aspect as we,  a clutch of overseas journos, taste his outstanding wines in his no-nonsense, hands-on winery behind a small door on the main road of the village of Gols in Austria’s Neusiedlersee region.

Nittnaus is a very serious guy. When it comes to wine-making, he takes no flippant prisoners – that much is clear from the individual wines we taste from bottle and barrel. (Wood, sparingly and judiciously used in his cellar, comes in the shape of fermentation tanks and 500-l barrels of French and local wood.)

Nittnaus’s eyes light up when it comes to talking up this region, just off the famous shallow lake of Neusiedl, and the possibilities of small parcels of zweigelt, blaufränkisch, St laurent, even pinot noir reds, as well as whites like neuburger, grauburgunder, weißburgunder and, yes, chardonnay and sauvignon blanc. He is a prophet and a poet.

The challenge of wine-making here – where family holdings are traditionally small, with some plantings going back generations, some varieties hundreds of years – inspired him to start a small group project which is gaining more and more attention.

Pannobile wines are at the top of all connoisseur lists in this small country which joyfully praises and consumes most of its own. But word of it is getting out into the wider world. (And learning about how and what ‘Pannobile’ entails, a South African winelover’s thoughts wonder off to the ideals and machinations of the Cape Winemakers’ Guild.)

On a quick, orientating drive around the vineyards, Nittnaus explains the poetic origins of the powerful quality/identity label/logo signified by ‘Pannobile’: from the region here known as Pannonian plain, the words ‘pan’ and ‘nobile’, and their associations. The terms suggests origin and identity from the best single vineyards of the town of Gols (Ungerberg, Altenberg, Gabarinza, Salzberg, Spiegel) on the southwardly-oriented slopes of the Parndorf plate or Wagram.

It was in 1994 that Nittnaus came up with the idea and invited six of his friendly neighbours to come together to produce, each year, a red and white of the highest, expressive quality of indigenous varieties that will, if all the partners agree, be named as Pannobile wine – and get to use the special logo. Since then, two more partners came into the ever-to-be-small group.

They are mostly young and, over a long dinner at the glorious Langgasthaus am Nyikospark in Gols, a restaurant that prides itself on modern versions of ‘Panninische Koststücke’, and many unique bottles of Pannobile wines, we visitors get an impression of passion and mutual respect and collaboration.

On show
Three days later, when we meet up again in the hustle and bustle of the VieVinum wine fair in Vienna’s most impressive, imperial Hofburg palace, the sharp focus of the Pannobile group shines in another bright manner in the extensive, hard-going tasting field of the show.

The latter is no understatement for a tasting visitor, despite the remarkable social jolliness of the three-day event (the paying public arrive in hords, dressed up) in what must be one of the world’s finest wine show venues - with those painted ceiling and baroque whatnots.

Austria’s wine marketing strategy the past eight years or so has been to simply show and accentuate the diversity of its winelands where family-owned vineyards are sometimes ridiculously tiny.

A somewhat broader geographical reality of the classic Burgundian terroir concept, the Austrian Wine Marketing Board simply took up the idea of individual expression, creativity and quality and took it to the international market. They have no volumes for (supermarket) consumers, they have no ‘brands’ to build or advertise. (They obviously don’t have to invent biodiversity as a marketing tool!) They drink and appreciate most of their wine themselves – providing a kind of ‘ownership’ of the entire industry. No wonder the AWMB rings up so much success with the slogan ‘A taste of culture’.

Standing next to one of Hans Nittnaus’ small tanks which holds the entire volume of a specific vineyard of one of the indigenous, odd-sounding varieties (not a syrah in sight!) to be bottled individually, one cannot but wonder, somewhat cynically, about those anonymous hundreds of proprietary hectares spreading over southern African dales….