Wine & Spirits - April 2020 - 39

(under the name "Mosler") would also come to dominate vineyards
in Styria (today's eastern Slovenia and southeastern Austria). But the
grape and its outpost in Rust were poised to suffer a horrible series
of hits.
Phylloxera, world war, revolutionary dissolution of empire, Depression ... all of these early-20th-century calamities were exacerbated by a
new national boundary separating German West Hungary's capital and
mercantile center, Sopron, from newly created Austrian Burgenland.
"Furmint had already become rare by the time my father inherited the
family vineyards," Wenzel reported, "and economic conditions were
such that he nearly gave up winegrowing to take a job in soda water
manufacture." When Robert took over in the 1950s, furmint was a mere
memory. Its ill fortune had, to some extent, been of furmint's own making; and when Heidi Schröck professed to "spend more time in my furmint vineyard than in any of the others," that was not solely testimony
to fascination and affection. Demanding in site, wanting tough viticultural love, stubbornly acid-retentive and needing far more than the proverbial hundred days to ripen, furmint is known even among partisans
as a diva. And as one 21st-century initiate would remark: "She attracts
powdery mildew like a magnet."
"We began producing sweet wines in the 1960s," related Wenzel,
thinking it unnecessary to clarify that he meant began once again. "German tourists would buy them. For Austrians, such wines were then too
expensive," he explained, and unlike for Hungarians, no longer part
of their culture. The fate of furmint gradually nagged at him. Having
grown up speaking Magyar and taking advantage of an emerging localized porosity in the Iron Curtain of the 1980s, Wenzel began cultivating cross-border ties. In 1984, he crossed over with a bundle of furmint

UNDER THE HUNGARIAN CROWN, THE TOWN OF RUST
GAINED FAME AND TITLE AS A "ROYAL FREE CITY"
THANKS TO ITS AUSBRUCH MADE FROM FURMINT.

cuttings taken from Hungarian clones. The moment scarcely seemed
propitious for a reintroduction, but Wenzel's cause was about to catch
a remarkable break. No one seems to know who was responsible, but in
June 1986, an amendment was passed to the Austrian Wine Law that had
been enacted just eight months earlier: "Notwithstanding the stipulation of Section 1"-in which allowable grapes had been restricted- "for
the production of Qualitätswein of exceptional ripeness and manner of
harvest [i.e. Spätlese, Auslese, etc.] the following varieties are permitted: Jubiläumsrebe, Scheurebe (Sämling 88), Furmint." Even if Wenzel's
fledgling stand represented the sole furmint in Austria, it was now legal.
After further propagation and a few promising harvests, he presented
neighbors with the case for furmint, and free access to cuttings. Three
took him up on the offer.

Hanging by a genetic tHread
I first met István Szepsy in 1999, ten years after privatization had triggered a gold rush of foreign investors into Tokaj, prominent among
them Royal Tokaji, which had tapped him as its first winemaker. TokajiAszú from his own small estate soon emerged as Tokaj's first cult wine in
eight decades. A direct descendant of the 17th-century pastor credited
with having codified Tokaji-Aszú methodology, Szepsy was bullish on his
region's future. "I can tell you confidently," he averred in fluent English,
"that the quality of wine I have so far achieved is not more than fiftyfive or sixty percent of what is possible, maybe less." But he harbored
a misgiving about the massive replanting that had been undertaken to
eliminate tractor-width rows. "Perhaps it was a mistake," Szepsy told me,
"to replant with any of the existing clones, and we should have tried to
do a mass selection from our few really old vineyards." If any direct link
remained to the quality that had made Tokaji famous, wouldn't it reside
in these living genetic repositories of ancient viticultural wisdom? In the
midst of a "collectivized" vineyard, one could stumble upon haphazard
head-pruned vines that had been overlooked and neglected for decades.
Larger stands of old furmint sometimes survived on forbiddingly steep
and, for that very reason, once-cherished slopes.
When I returned to Rust in 2001, I asked Wenzel what he thought of
Szepsy's conjecture. Out came a newly-reproduced 1876 benchmark:
Hermann and Rudolf Goethe's Atlas of the Most Valuable Grape Varieties.
Wenzel opened it to a vividly detailed plate that suggested why furmint
had been known in Rust as "zapfner." Zapfen translates as, inter alia,
pine cones; and like Burgundy's pinot fin, the clusters on display there
were conical, tight and small-berried, no more resembling those hanging
on the Hungarian clones in Wenzel's vineyard than the Goethe brothers' depiction of blaufränkisch looked like the long, loose, big-berried
bunches of black grapes that prevailed in early 21st-century Burgenland.
But Wenzel had something to tell me more remarkable than anything in
the pages of a book: Remnants of furmint had survived in Rust! Worried
lest zapfner go extinct, a former mayor, Friedrich Seiler, had collected
cuttings and propagated a tiny plot. On rediscovery, the remaining vines
appeared largely degenerate; but cuttings from the most promising had
just emerged out of official quarantine, and this Ruster Klon was going
into the ground as we spoke.
By the time Weingut Wenzel crushed its first grapes from Ruster, aka
Seiler, furmint in 2005, the variety's prospects in Rust had brightened
considerably. Two of the three estates that had planted Wenzel cuttings
in the early 1990s had passed to a new generation whose talents and
ambitions explicitly encompassed furmint revival. Günter Triebaumer
had enjoyed unusually wide experience abroad while his wife, Regina,
had interned under Alois Kracher and played an important role in the
US revival of Austria's wine fortunes (with Chicago-based VinDivino).
Schröck's niece and nephew Barbara and Paul Schandl had assumed
direction of the estate named for their father, Peter, who, they revealed,
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