Some interviews are planned for weeks. This one took about fifteen seconds. We met at the Magnum Bottle Party during VieVinum in Vienna, both of us slightly surprised to have made it past the door, and Leo Aumann said we should do it now, standing up, with a glass in hand. He had brought a Pinot Reserve.
That choice says something about where Austria is at the moment. White wine is what the market asks for, and red wine is talked about less than it was. Pinot is the exception, because Pinot is not really treated as a red wine at all. It is its own category, and in a country where half the year is warm, it is the bottle that still works in summer.
People do not want these big, dense wines with a lot of tannin anymore. They want fruit, it should be fun to drink.
Leo AumannLeo Aumann IV, V and VI
The name is a running joke at the estate and a useful shorthand. There is Leo Aumann IV, Leo Aumann V, who is the one in front of me, and Leo Aumann VI, who had just left, because he is at the wine college in Klosterneuburg and still has things to learn there. Five generations in, with the sixth already in training.
The estate sits in the Thermenregion, between Gumpoldskirchen and Baden, south of Vienna. Wine here is documented from 1141, when Cistercians from Clairvaux founded the abbey at Heiligenkreuz and then the Freigut Thallern estate at Gumpoldskirchen. The monks had first pick of the hillsides, which is a piece of luck that carries forward nine hundred years later: those are the sites the family farms today.
Fifty hectares is a large estate by Austrian standards, he says, though not by any other. What it buys is range. For the reds, Pinot Noir and St. Laurent. For the whites, the two grapes almost nobody outside Austria can pronounce, Rotgipfler and Zierfandler, plus Chardonnay.
The Wine in the Glass
The Pinot we drank is the entry level wine, aged in 500 litre casks, 13.5 per cent. It has a clean edge to it and a firm, well drawn tannin structure, the kind of wine that is easy on the terrace without being dull, and that does as much work in the kitchen as in the glass. Leo describes it as elegant and fruity and leaves it at that. Salespeople who oversell their cheapest wine are rarely selling anything else.
His own training was in agriculture, not wine: sugar beet, wheat, barley, malting barley, soy. The family still farms. What changed his mind was an internship at Weingut Markowitsch in Göttlesbrunn, another mixed farm at the time, where he saw what happens at the last stage, when the crop is refined rather than sold. You can make good bread out of wheat, I said. Turning grapes into good wine, he replied, is a different order of problem.
He is well into his fifties, he says, and you can never stand still, because the customers move too. The mistake he sees in others is rigidity, holding a line through a decade in which the market has changed under everyone. That flexibility is also his answer to the question of which bottle he would be. A rosé, he decided. Crisp, even slightly reductive whites when it is warm, and in winter, with something on the plate, anything from a fragrant Pinot Noir to a dense red with real tannin. Adapted to the situation, which is either a philosophy or a job description for a man who spends the year in restaurants rather than an office.
The Problem Is Now Too Much Sugar
Ask about climate change and Leo does not start with drought. He starts with the clock. Ripening comes early and fast, so harvest starts early, often at night, and finishes early in the morning, so the fruit arrives in the cellar genuinely cool. The risk that occupies him is overripeness, which is the exact inverse of the problem the estate used to have.
In those days the fix had a nickname. They called it the Tullnerfeld sun, after the sugar factory, and they used it when the grapes did not get there on their own. Nobody has needed it for ten years. Sugar is easy to add and impossible to remove, which makes the picking date the single decision the vintage turns on.
In the Thermenregion we have the lowest yields in Austria. The vines are used to relatively little water from the start.
Leo AumannDrought worries him less, and for a structural reason. Low yields per vine mean a vine that can cope when the water is not there. The sites are steep, some of them terraced to the point where machinery gives up and the work goes back to hand, hand harvesting included. What is left as the real exposure is that narrow window in autumn when everything has to come in at once.
Copenhagen, and What He Noticed
The export conversation went somewhere unexpected. Asked which markets interest him, he talked about a meal. The estate had recently been at Alchemist in Copenhagen, and what stayed with him was not only the food but the city: how quiet it is, how many of the cars are electric, how much of the wine world passes through. For Austrian wine in particular, he thinks, that makes it a market worth taking seriously.
A month after we spoke the fair was in Warsaw. In January the estate pours in Copenhagen.
Weingut Leo Aumann is exhibiting at the Cool Climate Wine Summit in Copenhagen, 17 and 18 January 2027. The range runs from Rotgipfler and Zierfandler through Chardonnay to Pinot Noir and St. Laurent, which is a lot of Thermenregion for one table.