Wenzel - 'Wild + Free' - Gelber Muskateller, Sauvignon, Chardonnay - Lockvogel, AT - 2023

Notes from the Winery/Importer

Michael Wenzel's philosophy is to create a beautiful wine with as little intervention as possible- stripped down to its wholesome, exciting, provocative, living, sensual and pure expression of self. Lockvogel means decoy, and this is intended to lure conservative wine drinkers into the world of skin fermented wines. The Gelber Muskateller vines grow in soil consisting of slate crystals, gneiss particles and quartz. There is no irrigation and the farming is biodynamic. Hand harvested. 90% destemmed into open top fermentation tanks with 10% whole cluster. Native yeast. After 7 days one careful punchdown by hand. 9 days maceration then moved to stainless steel tank. Spontaneous malolactic fermentation completed by spring. Unfiltered with one sulfur addition of 20mg per liter just before bottling. This decoy has approachable and modest skin fermented characteristics and retains its high-toned aromatics and fruit. Bone dry.

Notes on the Producer

We produce living wines that cannot be pressed into a corset. Producing natural wines is like a master stroke - because the highest credo for us is to add nothing and take nothing away. The most important thing is healthy and balanced vines, which we tend by hand - throughout the year the vines are cleaned, tended, pruned, defoliated, the soil loosened and greened, and harvested by hand. Fermentation is spontaneous, i.e. without the addition of yeast. Our wines are bottled unfiltered and only naturally clarified. Either without sulphur or with a minimum dosage of no more than 25mg. This way you get the real taste of the grape and the vineyard in your glass!

"Michael Wenzel has been imported by us since the very beginnings of Winemonger and no producer in our portfolio has undergone a more profound transition in his winemaking style in this time.

Even more remarkable is that Wenzel's transition was not one from good to great,- he started from great. In fact Wenzel's wines were as highly regarded then as they are now, and Michael's decision to throw out a successful model and venture off onto new and unproven terrain was certainly not an easy one. Michael had found himself at a crossroads, realizing that his somewhat traditional approach to the varieties of his region and the winemaking practices he had employed up until then, was becoming stale and boring to him. It was the autochthonous variety Furmint that had really captured Michael's imagination and interest. Almost simultaneously producers in Friuli, Styria and the Loire started to experiment with long-forgotten winemaking techniques that would soon be referred to as "natural" and later become a household name of the more adventurous crowd of wine consumers. This too had grabbed Michael's attention and he saw the potential to marry the two ideas into a new, entirely different Wenzel winery.

And so it began: using many decades of experience and employing the same attention to detail, Michael started to make wines that were a far departure from his former self. Autochthonous varieties, low sulfur, native yeast, and organic farming became the hallmarks of Wenzel's wines, while he experimented with skin contact in his line of natural wines called Wild&Free."

• Wine Monger Imports