The Wohlmuth family has been making wine in Kitzeck im Sausal in southern Styria, the highest wine-growing village in Austria, since 1803. Not much has changed in their work in the vineyard since then: The massive slate stones of the soil surface still have to be beaten into small pieces with hammers, and each individual vine has to be labouriously worked into the barren soil. The quality of the wines is based on painstaking manual work - from pruning and the entire foliage work to selective hand-picking. The use of natural resources is characterised by respect, which means that herbicides and insecticides are not used. There is no irrigation here, and the steepest individual vineyards are still mown with a scythe.
The vineyards lie at an altitude of 400 to 600 metres above sea level and are among the steepest vineyards in Europe with a gradient of up to 90 percent. Up to 1,200 hours of work go into each hectare of these extreme sites every year until the finished wine is in the barrels. The distinctive slate minerality can be found in all of the estate's wines and shows how firmly the vines are rooted in the predominant soil in the Kitzeck-Sausal appellation.
For generations, the Wohlmuth family has owned some of the earliest-mentioned single vineyards in Austria, such as Ried Edelschuh, which was first mentioned in a document in 1322. These historically significant individual vineyards are maintained and preserved at great expense and in some cases painstakingly recultivated. These vineyards are ultimately the foundation of a unique quality. They give rise to wines of provenance that are characterised by the tension between warmth (Illyrian climate, ripe grapes) and coolness (alpine influence, barren slate soil, high altitude).
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