New Kids on the Block - The captivating wines of Weingut Joiseph
9/4/20 -
The following email is written by our dear friend Emily Campeau, who came to New York many years ago as part of the opening team at Racines NY. She is now the Wine Director of Restaurant Candide in Montreal and currently lives on the Austro-Hungarian border. Emilly will be releasing the first wines she produced with her husband under the name Wein Goutte later this year, and we're excited to try them! The subject of today's email is the wines of a tiny estate in Burgenland, Austria, called Joiseph. As Emily was a big part of introducing the Joiseph wines to the team at Vom Boden (the US importers), and we miss her whimsical writing and commentary on life, we asked her if she would be open to writing a piece about the estate. // IG: @emycampo_ @weingoutte
There are always two sides to every story — as Dolly and Porter would sing — and I can say that it’s true, when my husband and I tell the story of how we met. While details greatly differ, one of the few things we both recollect similarly is an unbelievably good bottle of rosé from Joiseph, peppering the first of many evenings which solidified a harvest fling into the foundations of love. I can recall the plenitude of that night in a heartbeat; that familiar sensation tickling one’s senses when travelling to a country that isn’t home but could as well be, if just for a while. It was my second night of harvest in Austria and I was attuned to the newness, ready to be wowed.
We dined on a huge pot of spaghetti and a simple tomato sauce that I made on a whim, discreetly trying to impress my colleagues with my pasta skills. It’s a useful habit of mine, wanting to nourish everybody around, and comes in handy at times such as harvest, where the work exponentially multiplies the hunger. I chopped some onions and garlic, dropped some chilis into the hot oil, added fresh and canned tomatoes — a wonderful trick someone taught me long ago for achieving balance in sugar/acid content — and made sure the texture of the sauce would be coating enough but slightly liquid to follow us until the bottom of the pot. The spaghettis went in and we sat down. A piping hot pot of pasta can always be a trusted wingman.
I was trying to play nonchalant the fact that we were drinking out of Zaltos on a Wednesday, not totally aware that this was common practice at Austrian wineries. I was being careful not to over express myself, as I am sometimes prone to do, glass in hand. I have managed to break delicate stemware in the past when making a point about subjects no one cared about, like the greatness of Creedence Clearwater Revival or how Müller-Thurgau should be more respected.
Anyway, earlier that night the winemaker I had chosen to intern with had given me a leftover bottle of the aformentioned Joiseph rosé — still two-thirds filled — that had been sitting out for a few days, opened. I still didn’t know anything about this project/label, except that Luka Zeichmann was fun to be around. I knew this much because he was one of the two guys in charge of a cellar (on top of working for Joiseph) I was hanging out at, and we had become acquainted the day before.
After the rosé was properly chilled, it hit the Wednesday-night-Zalto. It didn’t take me long to sniff the promise of elegance ; it was rather jumping out of the glass. As I later described it in an Instagram post: "This Blau rosé is everything. It’s a garden of roses, a piece of bloody meat, it’s firewood, it’s a great sticky spice cake, it’s savory like drinking a very well made spritz spiked with olive brine. It’s quite literally the bomb." And moreover, it drank especially well with weekday spaghetti. Right there and then, I became a die-hard Joiseph fan.
While I have a notable count of their bottles in our cellar at home, we choose special moments to open them. They never fail to make me extremely happy, and to reassure my faith that wine is made to be enjoyed, not calculated or overanalyzed. They carry the spot-on description of drinkability, but never fall short of complexity, layers upon layers of it. This, when making wine, is probably one of the hardest thing to achieve: restraint from flashiness, or pursuing trends, and keeping a lightness to the purpose. The wines from Joiseph, as Stephen Bitterolf (who brings them in) accurately described them, are wines that winemakers want to drink when they are off work, which is one of the sweetest compliments a wine can get in our industry.
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You might be wondering whether there is a Mister Joiseph that is alive and kicking who passed his name down to the winery, but alas, it is only a great word play that smashed Joseph and Jois together in one word. Mr. Joiseph might exist in a fictional form, personifying the project in the partners’ minds, an odd fella that stands apart and never does things like anyone else. This man doesn’t exist, but his way of celebrating the unconventional was an imaginary trait that the team embraced as their modus operandi when they started the project 5 years ago.
Alex Kagl, Richard Artner and Luka Zeichmann formed their trio in January of 2015, when an unexpected opportunity flew their way. Some vineyards in the town of Jois — in the good part on top of it, on the hills, not the valley — had been offered to them through someone who knew someone. After a little debriefing, they decided to take the plunge. Richard and Alex had met during a winemaking course, and Luka was finishing up his studies in agriculture, and was working for an other winemaker at the time. Richard is Luka’s godfather, and had expressed willingness to support him in the winemaking projects he would set out to do in the future. A few handshakes later, they had a brand new plan lined up, and Alex joined as the third member of the Joiseph band. They walked into their vineyards armed with cutters just in time for pruning season that same winter.
Soon enough the roles were distributed to each member: Richard and Alex would be in charge for the vineyard work, and Luka would be managing the winemaking operations. There is a non-negligible geographic component to this division: the town of Jois in on the upper part of Burgenland, and Luka wanted to stay where his life is, which is an hour further south, in Mittelburgenland. He said: "If I was going to be responsible for making the wines, I wanted them to be close to me." An understandable request that organized the duties early on. Of course, many of the multiple tasks involved are also shared amongst the three of them, like bottling and labelling and all of the others unglamourous things making wine is really about.
The Joiseph’s cellar is located in Unterpullendorf, an hour drive from Jois. It is uncommon to have a winery fractured in two different locations in Austria, because a vast number of them are inherited from family member to family member, with vineyards scattered in the nearby villages. People like Luka, Alex and Richard, who start their venture from scratch — with the plus-value of locking down vineyards of a certain age on pristine sites — are very few, unlike many other parts of Europe where starting a winery as a second-life project is a much more common story. Alex and Richard still have jobs on the side as of now, with the ultimate goal in mind to be able to leave them for good in the near future.
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"Jois! where the hell is Jois?" is a fair question, and reminds of those incredulous kids in Footloose, asking Kevin Bacon where the hell this Beaumont place was, where they could dance, fun and fancy free. Dancing is certainly allowed in Jois too, just like Beaumont, but the fun really lies in grape-growing rather then showing your moves. Here’s the rundown:
The three gents from Joiseph grow vines in this small village named Jois, which is located in the region of Burgenland, on the northernmost tip of Lake Neusiedl (a wonderfully shallow puddle of mud where it is possible to walk from one shore to the other — because the deepest point is usually around 1m80 or about 5 feet.), which could arguably be described as either in Western or Central Europe. It all depends on whom you are discussing this with.
Austrian vineyards are smooshed to the Eastern side of the country, because there is a little mountain chain known as the Alps, gracing the rest of the country with its presence. Burgenland is bordered by Hungary to the east, who’s hot, dry pannonian winds have a great impact the region’s climate, and thus on viticulture and grape-growing, broadening both shoulders of the season significantly. Lake Neusiedl is also a small glimpse into the past of the Austro-Hungarian Empire days — the bottom part of it belongs to Hungary, where it bears the name "Ferto."
The lake is a climate mitigator. It is 36 km long (~22 miles), and between 6 and 12km wide (~4-7 miles), and acts like a mirror, reflecting the light on the land around. It has an effect on precipitation and other weather movements. I am still surprised when I hear wine professionals classifying Austria as a "cool-climate" country. Certain parts are definitely cooler, but that big chunk called Burgenland is at times like living in a pizza oven.
Jois is part of a Burgenland sub-region called Leithaberg, whose frontiers are drawn at the foothills and in the valleys close to the Leitha Mountains. This small hill range is on the limit between Niederösterreich (a huge province encapsulating seven wine regions, the most famous of them being Wachau) and Burgenland. This 35km stretch of hills is basically a hiccup between the end of the Alps and the beginning of the Carpathians, which arch through seven countries in Central Europe from the Czech Republic to Romania. At a mere 454 meters, the highest point of the Leitha Mountains (Sonnenberg) is not spectacularly high, but these mountains do have repercussions on the macroclimate, mesoclimates and viticultural microclimates, by bringing the coolness back to the area at night time, thus preserving the grapes’ acidity. The soils here are a mix of a few different things: schist and limestone sprinkled with plenty of sea creatures fossilized on the hillier sites. The valley has richer soils of silt, clay, sand and gravel inherited from the Pannonian Basin, which lays in the southeastern part of Europe, a consequence of the Pannonian Sea going dry in the Pliocene Epoch (roughly 5 to 2 millions years ago). The name Pannonia came from a province of the Roman Empire.
While there are a few notable exceptions, BIG and BOLD seem to be a general state of mind in the area amongst conventional-leaning producers, seasoned with a heavy use of new oak, and the presence of international grapes; this is yet an other part of the world where Bordeaux was unsuccessfully reproduced. The focus seems to be changing, and low-intervention oriented winemakers certainly had a role to play in this.
In only five years, the project of Joiseph has greatly expanded. From a solo hectare, fragmented in 5 different parcels, it now clocks in at 6 hectares, plus one hectare of young vines of Furmint and Blaufränkisch that have yet to come into production. This vineyard with young vines is the only one that was purchased, everything else is rented from different owners and a lovely neighbor the partners are very fond of. He concedes a part of his Demeter certified land — that they’d like to buy in the future — and also sells some grapes to Joiseph. All of the farming respects the rhythms and fluctuations of nature, and emphasizes a careful, observation-oriented approach, powered by a lot of hand work. The organic certification process began as soon as 2015, when they got started, and all of the parcels that they farm are now certified.
When diving into the world of "natural" wine — used here to indicate wines made with minimal sulfur addition, farmed at least organically, and crafted with care for the earth and those who drink it— a pit stop in Burgenland will definitely appear early in the journey. A drive around the lake could take you over a week if you’d stop at every place famous for making wine in this manner. Names like Preisinger, Koppitsch, Gut Oggau or Beck might ring a bell, and now Joiseph has been added to this growing list. Their wines sell out fast, and have made a remarkable entrance in markets around the world.
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I have been attempting to dissect the magic since the spaghetti dinner, with every barrel tasting, every bottle drunk. Coupled with the meticulous farming, is the natural talent that Luka Zeichmann has for making wines that share a great quality: balance. As simple as it sounds, it is much easier said than done. The cellar, in the village of Unterpullendorf as said before, is simplistic: an old barn that stays cools and humid, a few tanks, a press, a hose, barrels of various age and size. There is no recipe, but quite a hefty dose of intuition.
The whites see a pre-pressing soak that can last up to 48 hours. This is described as a "pragmatic way of processing" by Luka, who says his old press can do its job better after a short maceration, minimizing the loss of juice and adding structural components to the finished wines. When he says "it reduces the mechanic stress that the wine has to go through," for a moment I wonder if this technique could help me with my own tensions. Harvest is around the corner, maybe it’s worth a shot.
The reds contain various percentages of whole-cluster fermentation, depending on the vintage, the mood of the winemaker, and the quality of the stems. Planted in their vineyards you’ll find: Blaufränkisch, Zweigelt, Grüner Veltliner, Muskat Ottonel, Welschriesling, Neuburger, and a few others that make up Gemischter Satz blends.
Determining harvest dates is a major consideration when working towards achieving balance and retaining natural acidity. Picking happens pretty early in that sunny part of Burgenland. That earliness can seem heretical to certain people. Last year, when Luka decided to make a pet-nat, he asked for Welschriesling grapes to be harvested earlier, with a higher acid content to make the bubbles light and fresh. A few of his family members that were helping for the harvest went on a mini-strike for a couple of hours, saying it was inconceivable to pick these grapes that were too sour. We had that pet-nat as an apéritif three weeks ago, and I was thankful this very funny problem was solved, and that the wine could be made in the end. Because it was, of course, unbelievably delicious.
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It’s been nearly two years since I had that first sip of Joiseph, and, reminiscing on that day and how much I’ve grown since, I feel particularly delighted to have been asked to discuss how I became their fangirl, here, on this very honorable site. It gave me a solid reason to dive back into how one sip of rosé — ok, one bottle — surprisingly changed the course of my entire life for the better. A solid friendship with Luka grew out of this first encounter, and I have the utmost respect for what he, Richard and Alex have built in just a few years. When I sometimes lose my wine faith, and need a reminder of why my work in this industry is worth the hassle, I pull this magic trick out of my hat: I make a big pot of sauce with the tomatoes from our garden (no can needed here), I pick a bottle of Joiseph from the cellar, and shut the world around my spaghetti-loving husband and I, who is still seduced by my pasta making skills every time, or so I think.
-Emily Campeau
