WeinSchach, Langenlois, Kamptal, Lower Austria, and one of the best “how did this even happen” stories in Austrian wine. Martina and Andreas Schachenhuber came to it sideways. Andreas is a trained biotechnologist and former strategy consultant, and around 2016 or 2017 they got hooked on a cloudy, funky sparkling wine, then tasted one of Austria’s first pet nats at Geyerhof and that was it. Curiosity turned into experiments in 2018, using must from Andreas’s brother’s conventional estate in the Weinviertel.
When they went commercial, they had no cellar and no equipment. Their fix was a refrigerated shipping container sent by boat from Hamburg to Krems, and they made their first proper batch of 2,500 bottles inside it. A winery in a container. It’s the kind of thing that sounds like a joke and is actually a very smart solution.
The philosophy is the interesting part. WeinSchach is not natural wine, not Sekt, not Champagne, they say. It’s pet nat made by the Méthode Ancestrale, with no added sugar or yeast and no dosage, but with the rigour of a top Champagne house. Most people accept the wobbly imperfections of pet nat as part of its charm. They don’t. Their question was what happens if you chase the oldest method of making sparkling wine with the same consequence as the best houses. So they disgorge to avoid deposits, work single-site, and keep things precise.
WeinSchach, Langenlois, Kamptal, Lower Austria, and one of the best “how did this even happen” stories in Austrian wine. Martina and Andreas Schachenhuber came to it sideways. Andreas is a trained biotechnologist and former strategy consultant, and around 2016 or 2017 they got hooked on a cloudy, funky sparkling wine, then tasted one of Austria’s first pet nats at Geyerhof and that was it. Curiosity turned into experiments in 2018, using must from Andreas’s brother’s conventional estate in the Weinviertel.
When they went commercial, they had no cellar and no equipment. Their fix was a refrigerated shipping container sent by boat from Hamburg to Krems, and they made their first proper batch of 2,500 bottles inside it. A winery in a container. It’s the kind of thing that sounds like a joke and is actually a very smart solution.
The philosophy is the interesting part. WeinSchach is not natural wine, not Sekt, not Champagne, they say. It’s pet nat made by the Méthode Ancestrale, with no added sugar or yeast and no dosage, but with the rigour of a top Champagne house. Most people accept the wobbly imperfections of pet nat as part of its charm. They don’t. Their question was what happens if you chase the oldest method of making sparkling wine with the same consequence as the best houses. So they disgorge to avoid deposits, work single-site, and keep things precise.
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