Carnuntum is one of the smallest wine regions in Austria, wedged between Vienna and Bratislava, and Weingut Riedmüller sits at the far end of it, in Hainburg an der Donau, the easternmost town in the country. The Danube runs past the vineyards. The Small Carpathians start here. And the wind never really stops.
I first turned up at the estate unannounced, somewhere around 2020 or 2021, which is the kind of visit that either ends the acquaintance or starts it. At VieVinum in Vienna, five years on, Michaela Riedmüller brought a bottle of the Ried Braunsberg to the camera.
The wind is good for the climate, because we have the wind turbines, and it is good for organic winemaking. It is not good for the hair.
Michaela RiedmüllerA Hill, a Carnation and a Label
Blaufränkisch is the grape she is known for, and in this corner of Austria the conversation usually goes straight to the Spitzerberg. She does not disagree. But the bottle she brought was the Braunsberg, the hill above her own town, growing right beside the Danube, and she is clear about why: it is the Hausberg, the home mountain, and she has been living with it since her mother told her it was something special.
The labels make the point in a quieter way. Each one carries a calligraphic drawing of a flower that grows in that particular vineyard. On the Braunsberg it is the Federnelke, the feather carnation, on the dry grassland of the hill. Her reasoning is almost scientific and entirely charming: if flowers this particular grow there, something about the place is particular, and the people who planted vines there decades ago must have known it too.
What Is Not in the Wine
The 2022 Ried Braunsberg is 100 per cent Blaufränkisch, open fermented with no added yeast, no sulphur before or during fermentation, punched down by hand, pressed, then 24 months in barrel and bottled unfiltered. The barrels are 500 litres, mostly Austrian oak, and always third, fourth or fifth fill. New oak never comes near the Braunsberg or the Spitzerberg.
In the glass it is structured from the first sniff, light and delicate, with an edge that the old wood gives without ever announcing itself. It is a good lesson in Blaufränkisch as a terroir grape: put the Braunsberg beside the Spitzerberg and the difference is the hill, not the cellar.
She resists the idea that she has broken with what came before. The vineyards were her parents'. The low intervention approach that defines her Down to Earth range has also worked its way into the classic wines, but she describes it as focusing on the original rather than replacing it.
I would not say I made something differently than my parents did. I just try to keep focusing more on the original and to bring it out more in the glass.
Michaela RiedmüllerNineteen
She started wine school at 14, which in Austria is ordinary, and took over the family business at 19, which is not. Her parents retired and asked what happens now. She had the training and the ambition to make her own wine, so the answer was yes.
Being that young also sent her back out. She studied winemaking at the University of Applied Sciences, took a master's in international wine marketing and worked repeatedly in South Africa. The combination is deliberate: learn where you come from, at the winery, and learn outside it as well.
Asked who shaped her, she names two people. Her mother first, for the sentence about the Braunsberg being something special, which she has been living inside ever since. Then Dorli Muhr, whose work with Blaufränkisch in the same corner of Austria has done more than anyone's to put it on international lists.
And if not wine? Something with her hands. She cannot sit still for long, wants to build things, and it would have to involve nature and soil, because that is the part that grounds her.
Certified This Year, and a Weather Station
The question about organic certification had an answer I was not expecting: this is the year. The estate has farmed this way for five years, has now finished the third year of conversion, and the wines carry the label from this vintage. Sustainable certification was already in place.
The other addition this year is a weather station in the vineyard, feeding back rainfall, frost risk and leaf wetness. The point is timing: doing what needs doing on the right day rather than the wrong one. In a place this windy and this exposed, that is the difference between a treatment that works and one that does not.
With nature you can never be fully prepared. But with this information you can take your steps in combination with nature.
Michaela RiedmüllerCopenhagen, and the Blaufränkisch Question
She exhibited at the Cool Climate Wine Summit in Copenhagen in January 2026, and the part she reports with most pleasure is that the room liked Blaufränkisch. For an Austrian producer used to selling the grape patiently, that is not a small thing. The Down to Earth wines found their people too.
Asked which bottle she would be, she chose the Ried Braunsberg. Elegant and characterful at the same time, she says, and a wine that knows where it comes from, which she regards as the thing one must never forget.
Weingut Riedmüller is exhibiting at the Cool Climate Wine Summit in Copenhagen, 17 and 18 January 2027. The estate is half an hour east of Vienna, runs a Heuriger, and sits next to the Roman city of Carnuntum, which she insists you visit while you are there.