Humility, gratitude and respect for tradition: these are the cornerstones on which our work as vintners is built. This means humility before the endless bounty of nature, which it is our duty to protect; gratitude for the gifts which the tireless earth permits us to share, year for year; respect for traditions so that we preserve our heritage and our craft. For this determination, we are rewarded with our Grüner Veltiner wines – Alte Rebe Reserve, Schlossberg and Schlossberg Reserve – which regularly win top marks. In 2009, our company was named Up and Coming Vineyard by trade magazine Wine Pur.
Our family has been working on the land for many generations and wine making has always been an important part of our work. However, it was my parents Gerhard and Heide Direder who first decided in 1992 to make it central to their business. Today, I (Robert) have taken over the running of the vineyard, with the active support of my wife, Katharina, as well as my parents. Our little girl Marie provides us with further motivation and good reasons to strive to safeguard the future, as well as the past.

Reliability and inspiration: that is our philosophy. Harmonious cooperation between the generations holds the key to a powerful combination of the traditional vintner’s crafts and state-of-the-art winemaking technology, a combination which is distilled into the taste and quality of our wine. The foundations for our ambition are anchored deep within the loess soils of the Wagram region; and it is these soils which give our wines their characteristic, smooth and polished taste.

There is one thing all our wines have in common, no matter which grape, year or maturity. We care particularly about developing the full complexity of a wine from any given year, so emphasising its unique characteristics and crafting it to be long-lasting. We want to deepen how our wines can be savoured, from the first tentative contact with the palate to an illustrious, full-bodied finished. That is our overarching goal as vintners.

On our vineyards, we rely on extensive management of the soil and maintaining our vines in a considerate manner: we cultivate them without forcing. To some extent, we allow our vineyards to take responsibility for themselves, only intervening when we believe it to be absolutely necessary. One cannot do better than to rely on the natural interaction between loess soil and grape, so our task is to ensure that they should remain undisturbed.

In the cellar, we escort our wines along their journey with care and restraint. We give our wines time and opportunity to ripen, avoid interfering unnecessarily and rely on our intuition. After all, it is intuition which whispers to us that our work is done and the wine ready to be enjoyed. This restraint pays off in particular with delicately fruity, subtle and full-bodied wines. Benefitting from the chance to develop their full potential, they simply melt in the mouth.