Donauriesling - a new grape variety.

There are some news at the Sonnenmulde winery. We have planted an all new grape variety from which the first bottles can finally be tasted. We proudly present our Donauriesling 2019, a new wine, new label, but still just as much careful craftsmanship.

Donauriesling is a novel, fungus-resistant Riesling Crossbreed, and thus belongs to the so-called PIWI vines. It promises to combine the outstanding quality of Riesling with particularly robust growing characteristics.

In the time since planting, we have been able to gain some impressions of the new vine and it certainly lives up to its promises. Comparative tastings with Riesling show many similarities with fine differences. At blind tastings, however, it has already happened to us that after a while we no longer knew which wine was in which glass. We think that this is quite extraordinary!

In cultivation we could reduce the effort for plant protection by a groundbreaking 75%. For us as an organic farm, this is particularly good news and also the reason why we are involved in the cultivation of PIWI grape varieties at all. We only use natural products for plant protection anyway, but even these cost money and organic plant protection schemes always require more manual work. Donauriesling can simplify organic cultivation and that is good news.

We also experimented with new ideas for the label of the Donauriesling. We have just recently received the first drafts from Simon Wieser at zeichnerei.at and are very enthusiastic. Now we’ll have a good look at them for this season, maybe other wines will also be given a new design next year.