Barbara Ohlzelt, Riesling Kogelberg 2022

Barbara is based in the village of Zöbing, just north of the Kamptal’s regional centre of Langenlois. She farms 6-7ha in various small, choice locations within some of the region’s most famous ‘Erste Lagen’ vineyards. Her vineyards are typically planted very densely and are either inaccessible or unworkable by tractors or other mechanical devices so the work is very largely by hand.

Kamptal is famous for producing some of Austria’s bigger, more robust wines and producers like Loimer, Brundlemayer and Hiedler are rightly famous for their broad, generously flavoured and full textured wines. Received wisdom says that these warm slopes above the river Kamp and the deep, predominantly Loess soils inevitably produce these rich wines. Barbera, very quietly but quite deliberately disproves the theory and is making some of the regions most clearly and cleanly delineated wines; precise, linear and excitingly intense wines that seem both serious and joyful at the same time.