Gut Oggau is a project in the small town of Oggau in Burgenland, Austria which was started by Eduard and Stephanie Tscheppe back in 2007. Stephanie, from a family of restauranteurs, learned photography, studied hospitality management in Lausanne & travelled the world. Eduard, from a conventional winemaking family in Styria, learned the wine-making ropes from a young age before studying business administration.
Their Dream
Their common dream was and still is to create something lasting, to change the world, to be inspired and to inspire. They bought Gut Oggau in 2007, with a lot of enthusiasm, a pinch of naivety, vision and an exciting, rocky, steep road ahead of them. They painstakingly restored the 17th century winery that had been abandoned for 20 years including its 200-year-old screw press. The vines’ 20-year period of neglect was fortunate, as this allowed for all pesticide and chemical treatments to be washed away.
This let them begin working immediately on vines organically & biodynamically, where they are now fully Demeter certified. The plunge into the cold water of biodynamic cultivation was done out of conviction, in order to close cycles and to maintain and increase the vitality of the vineyards. They immediately saw natural wine as an opportunity to express their unique soils and origins.
The Bottles
Each bottle from Gut Oggau is an invitation, a ticket to walk a part of the way with them into the beauty of nature with all its energy, into balance, into harmony and into the enchanting unknown. It is not about expectations. It is not about taste alone. It is about feeling and intuition. It’s about grasping the whole instinctively, openly and with all the senses. Lively as their wines are, full of character and rich in personality, they have felt and described them like personalities since the beginning. Described like dear people who have grown close to their hearts. The faces on the labels are fictitious, they refer purely to the personal impression that each wine makes on them.
Three generations, because the vineyards in their region bring such different characters. Young, carefree soil characters as the young generation. Life-experienced, serene as the parents’ generation. Wise and good-natured as the grandparents’ generation. The wines are treated all the same – with the same love, passion and care, only nature alone makes the difference. In order to make this difference perceptible, each wine is also treated equally in the winemaking process, they do not discriminate against any colour, they do not divide any style. The result is a highly individual, authentic expression of their soils, climate and vintage, delicately enlivened by their intervention, calmly accompanied until bottle maturity.
Their Goal
Eduard & Stephanie did not set out to be different or to provoke, the uniqueness of their wines and approach was natural & it’s also their pride, now that 16 years later their wine personalities move people all over the world. Nevertheless, their ambition has long ceased to be solely on the finished wine in the bottle. They see themselves as farmers, as creators of culture and as shapers of cultural landscapes. After all, wine is so much more than just a beverage.
