Michael Wenzel

Kvarc 2016

A wine that turned out to be one of Michael’s most incredible wines to date. One of his three Furmint Vogelsang barrels was going into a completely different direction and for a long time Michael was unsure to release the wine at all. In the end he bottled the wine as an experiment with no additions and under the Hungarian synonym for the prevailing soils - Kvarc. Having spent more than two years in bottle the wine shows an incredibly complex character, full of stoney and salty layers.

The grapes for Kvarc come from Austria`s oldest plantation of Furmint, planted in the 1980s - the Vogelsang vineyard. It is located in the surroundings of Rust in Burgenland, with a soil composed of mica schist, grey and blue quartz. Grapes are harvested at the peak of harvest, gently pressed on whole bunches and then transferred into 500L oak for 15 months. The wine was bottled with a small dosis of SO2 before bottling.

Wine Details:

Region: Burgenland, Austria

Vintage: 2016

Grapes: Furmint

Colour: White

ABV: 12%

Size: 75 cL

Farming: Organic

£38.00

About

Michael Wenzel

Furmint and Austria would not be the same without the story of the Wenzel family. Based in Rust, a (former) stronghold of world- famous sweet wines, Michael Wenzel’s grandfather and father believed in this grape so much that they secretly smuggled back historic clones from Hungary in times of the Iron Curtain and Cold War, risking getting caught (with severe consequences). But when they arrived back to the Hungarian-Austrian border, Wenzel senior would pull out his clarinet, playing old Hungarian folk music which was forbidden back in the communist time ...