Andreas Wickhoff spread his wings and travelled far and wide before coming home to roost in the Danube Valley, not too distant from where he grew up in rural Steiermark. As general manager at the Bründlmayer estate in the Kamptal, he keeps the flame burning at what Jancis Robinson has called “a beacon for Austrian wine”. Not an ounce of his worldly, cosmopolitan background, hospitality training and Master of Wine education is wasted as he goes about pursuing and portraying provenance and excellence in wine.

I first met Andreas in Melbourne a year or so after Willi Bründlmayer came for Riesling Downunder in 2015. I had long since fallen in love with the grace and purity of the estate’s Riesling and Grüner Veltliner, and Willi himself is the very image of the worldly, wise, humble gentleman. Andreas seemed the perfect fit for the estate. Lucid, resolute and articulate, he is compelling company and puts you in the picture with consummate ease.

In this interview, I deliberately milked Andreas for his Austrian wine knowledge, and needn’t expand much thanks to his thoroughness and clarity. There are a few names and terms that could do with spelling out, however.

Andreas grew up in Steiermark (Styria), prime wine-growing territory known for its Sauvignon Blanc and Morillon, which, as he explains, is the local name for Chardonnay. Weingut Sattlerhof is the estate in South Styria that changed his life, first through a single-site wine from the Kranachberg vineyard, and later when he joined forces with Willi Sattler.

Premium Estates of Austria is the name of the group Andreas represented. Other members included Fritz Wieninger (Wien), Gernot Heinrich (Neusiedlersee, Burgenland), Fred Loimer (Kamptal) and Alois Gölles, a fellow Styrian famed for his artisanal spirits.

You can learn a lot about the Wachau from this video, including prevalent soils such as gneiss and loess, and the implications of the three-tiered classification system spanning Steinfeder, Federspiel and Smaragd. Andreas gives further insight, using as reference points the likes of Alzinger, F.X. Pichler, and Emmerich Knoll towards the east of the valley, and Franz Hirtzberger at its western edge.

In the Kremstal region, Lenz Moser, Stadt Krems and Winzer Krems are the larger producers mentioned, all of which provide an accessible reference point. In the Kamptal, meanwhile, the sparkling wine programmes of Loimer, Jurtschitsch, Schloss Gobelsburg and Steininger are held up as exemplars.

Staying in the Kamptal, the Bründlmayer winery is in Langenlois and other villages mentioned are Kammern (home to the Lamm Erste Lage, or premier-cru site) and Zöbing (home to the Heiligensten Erste Lage). Note that this area’s classification does not yet extend to grands crus; when it does, you can be sure these will be near the top of the list. Other vineyards we discuss in the Bründlmayer portfolio are Spiegel, Berg Vogelsang, and Loiserberg (for Grüner Veltliner), Steinmassl (Riesling), and Steinberg vineyard (Chardonnay).

Willi’s wife Edwige deservedly gets a few mentions, not least for her love of Champagne. Coteaux Kampenois is Andreas’s tongue-in-cheek nickname for his multi-vintage base wine, a Kamptal twist on the French Coteaux Champenois appellation for still wines from that region. In another French reference, Hubert Lamy is the Burgundy domaine where a young Willi Bründlmayer did a stage.

Finally, there is a reference to the Austrian wine scandal, the mid-1980s crisis from whose depths the likes of Bründlmayer hauled this nation’s reputation before propelling it into the stratosphere. This involved wine producers illegally adding the toxic chemical diethylene glycol—an antifreeze agent—to cheap bulk wine to increase its richness and body. Needless to say, none of the producers we spoke about had anything to do with it.

The powers that be in Austrian wine have since done a superb job in raising standards and awareness of the country’s varied and abundant vinous gifts.

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