F X Pichler

F.X. Pichler is at Oberloiben, in the Loiben stretch of the Wachau. The Wachau is sixteen kilometres of the Danube valley west of Vienna and one of the smallest wine regions in Austria at around 1,350 hectares. UNESCO listed it as a cultural landscape, and the terraces and dry stone walls the monks began building in the tenth century are a large part of the reason.

The winery was founded in 1905 at Oberloiben 27. Lucas Franz Pichler, born in 1973, is the seventh generation. He joined the family firm in 1996, took over the vinification in 1999 and formally took over the winery in 2018; his wife Johanna Elisabeth handles sales and export. Franz Xaver Pichler, born in 1941, and Rudolfine, born in 1951, still work in the vineyards. There are around twenty hectares under the family's own management, roughly half Grüner Veltliner and half Riesling, with a little Gelber Muskateller, Sauvignon Blanc and now Pinot Noir. About a third of the vines are on steep terraces of bare rock that can only be worked by hand.

The vine material matters here more than at most estates. Franz Pichler senior, who lived from 1906 to 1998, began a selection massale of Grüner Veltliner on the Loibenberg and in the Frauenweingarten in 1928, and repeated it into the Steinertal in 1952, choosing vines with small, high-extract berries and better resistance to rot. The family still propagates that selection rather than buying in clones.

The vineyards are Loibner Frauenweingarten, Klostersatz, Steinertal, Burgstall and Trum, the great Loibenberg, and Dürnsteiner Liebenberg and Kellerberg. The estate is certified organic, all its single-vineyard wines from the 2023 vintage onwards, and certified vegan. In 2020 it left the Vinea Wachau association and moved to the new Wachau DAC system, so Smaragd and Federspiel no longer appear on its labels. Under the DAC rules a Ried wine can only be Grüner Veltliner or Riesling, must come from one named site, and cannot show oak or be chaptalised.

The reputation was built in stages. Their Gelber Muskateller was named Austria's wine of the year in 1984, the Riesling Kellerberg 1990 made the name abroad, and then came the two reserve labels: Grüner Veltliner and Riesling 'M', for monumental, first made in 1991 and 1992, and 'Unendlich', meaning infinite, from 1998 and 2003. The estate says its Grüner Veltliner Unendlich 2018 is the first and so far only Grüner Veltliner in the world to have been awarded 100 Parker points. A new winery opened in 2009 at Oberloiben 57, in the middle of the Klostersatz vineyard.

Two of the Grüner Veltliners are worth naming. Klostersatz comes off the deep, sandy, gravelly valley floor inside the curve of the Danube, one of the oldest vineyards in the Wachau and the site the new winery stands in the middle of. Steinertal comes from the coolest and slowest ripening site in Loiben, on bare lime-free gneiss.

The Loibenberg, the Kellerberg, the 'M' and the Unendlich are where the estate's fame really sits, alongside the Rieslings, and very little of any of it is made.