Claus Preisinger: Wine starts in the Vineyard

Claus Preisinger is one of the most popular natural wine producers based in the Burgenland region of Austria, specifically the town of Gols which is also home to fellow winemakers Georg Schmelzer and Judith Beck. Preisinger wines are fresh, energetic and usually found with a lower-alcohol percentage than others, making them easy drinking and fun. Alongside KalkundKiesel Weiss, DOPE and Pinot Noir, his most popular wine is Puszta Libre - a great budget wine best served chilled.

Having begun to make wine with his father purely for fun, surfer Claus Preisinger took an early interest in viticulture, but it was not before working with his nearby winemaker Hans Nitthaus that he knew wine was something he wanted to pursue on his own, which led him to his first vintage in 2000. He has since grown the spread across 64 parcels and 19 hectares, which is quite substantial, even for Burgenland.

Widely considered to be the first Austrian winemaker to play around combining Georgian Amphorae (Qvevri) and skin-contact wine production, Claus Preisinger is not one to shy aware from experimentation and keeps his cellar-intervention to the bare minimum with hardly any sulphur, if any, added to his wines before bottling.

Treating his land with a holistic approach, working in line with the lunar calendar and embracing the power of the cosmos, Claus Preisinger is a producer who is able to work in such ways on a larger scale - without it affecting the high quality of wine he produces.

With his wide range of plots, he has lots of grapes to choose from. The wine ‘Bonsai’ is one interesting plot of Blaufränkisch of his, which the vines are grown very small using a ‘Stockkultur’ technique, making them resemble small Bonsai trees. They are also planted very closely together, 9000 vines per hectare which mean the vines fight amongst each other for nutrients. In this Bonsai wine, Claus aims to reproduce something similar to Jura Poulsard, a strong influence on him, by making the Blaufränkisch as light as possible being still a red, but also having a subtle complexity to it too. He achieves this partially from a short 3 day maceration period, enabling very light tannins and juicy, soft structure for the Blaufränkisch grapes.

In regards to Claus’s ethos and philosophy to winemaking “My wines are a reflection of nature. I do not intervene artificially, neither in the vineyard nor in the cellar. Even if this could improve the result, I would rather be satisfied with what nature gives us than meddling and manipulating myself.” - Claus Preisinger.

Here in this documentary, he explains his passion for biodynamics and way of working.
Big thanks to Adam Simmons (Fadebeats / Rhino / ASM) for the edit here.