Nibiru, "Grundstein" 2020

In the northernmost corridor of Northern Austria’s famed Kamptal wine region, the reaches beyond where appellation committees and the supposed those-who-know thought possible to cultivate a worthy, beautiful, moving wine – here, Josef Schenter & Julia Nather work under the name Nibiru to do just that, to be the anomaly. Perhaps it’s more a lesson in how full of it conventional wisdom or appellation committees often are than anything else; but it is, to the young couple, a venture into the nearly astrophysically daring. The name of their imprint “Nibiru” is derived from a Sumerian astronomical myth that mentions a planet “Nibiru” entering the solar system every 3600 years and traveling in the opposite orbit of our sun from the rest of our small system’s planets. In short, they see theirs as a literalization of this analogistic running counter-the-grain. After all, the Kamptal is a very traditional region with high-scoring wines and a lot of rules in order to achieve those scores; their winery, in this miniature universe, is a bit like a planet orbiting counter-Earth. Originally from Bavaria, Julia made her way through the fine dining world of Vienna before a fateful cellar-stint at the famed restored monastery-wine-estate Schloss Gobelsburg here in Kamptal where she met Josef, who grew up in this region on his family’s farm, the same one they now run. Working with grapes typical of the region (Grüner the specialty as is Riesling, while they also grow some Zweigelt, Portugieser, Müller-Thurgau, & Pinot Blanc), they never fine or filter their wines, add less than 20ppm SO2 at bottling and farm the grapes from which these wines are made according the biodynamic principles with the hope that they will be a fully regeneratively-farmed estate in the next 5-10 years. Quite a goal and already quite a feat for a young winery in the historical nosebleeds (too far north) for “worthwhile” wines. Every now and then, it’s said, a planet enters our near orbit, shuttling that-a-way across the sky…

Vinifiaction & tasting: 100% Grüner Veltliner. After a hand harvest from two35-year-old vineyard sites, the grapes go into stainless for fermentation with wild yeasts. 50% are fermented with the skins for 5 days. After a brief aging period on the fine lees, the wine is bottled unfined, unfiltered with just a touch of SO2.