HM Lang

Markus Lang is a man who had neither studied oenology nor trained as a winemaker until October last year when he started studying viticulture in Vienna, Austria. However, he has learned to recognize problems and find solutions — the best possible solutions. Earlier this year, he left his old manager jobs and became a full-time wine producer in Krems-Stein — at 55 years of age. "I want to find the way to perfect viticulture in the face of global warming and increasingly opulent wines," he says. Since his hobby beginnings 10 years ago (his first vintage was 2012), Markus and his wife, Heidelinde, have manually created isolated biotopes far above the Danube River on old, abandoned terraces (that were already completely taken over by nature again) surrounded by natural forests, newly planted hedges and vegetable beds—permaculture in the making… The three annual Demeter-certified biodynamic Grüner Veltliner and Riesling bottlings prove that brightness, lightness and digestibility in combination with structure and terroir-driven complexity is possible even with 11% alcohol. Lang picks far earlier than anybody else in the Danube Valley — in 2018, 65 (!) days after the flowering — but this doesn’t mean he harvests unripe grapes. His grapes are just ripe and have this uplifting esprit that is somewhere between fruity and sour and delivers bright, light and tense wines with zero grams of residual sugar and 10% to 11% alcohol that you can drink all night long without getting down. However, this is only the fascinating result of an avant-garde approach that classifies HM Lang for the Parker Green Emblem for sustainability in every sense. To mention only the basics: 1. Only two passages per year with an old, very light German tractor: one on the frozen soils in winter and one in the summer heat to steamroller the grass and to keep the soil wet and the organisms alive. All the rest is done afoot and manually. 2. Leaf walls of 250 centimeters for a good solar power plant that enables Lang to pick early when the fruit still has energy and this virgin freshness. 3. New plantations downwind to protect the leaves from evaporation. 4. The world’s most spectacular basket press constructed by Markus Lang himself that presses 100 tons of grapes with 6.5 bar without electric energy, just by gravity. 5. The wine cellar/winery is located in an old, abandoned tunnel drilled into a massive rock that surrounds it by 25 meters on top and naturally keeps the temperature at 11 degrees Celsius all year. 6. Vessels are oak barrels, clay amphorae and stoneware. 7. Lang’s wines have the Demeter certification. All this doesn’t cost much energy (mostly muscles) and makes HM Lang face global warming without fear. “We have enough methods to handcraft light and digestible wines even nowadays,” Markus Lang sums up his fascinating three-hectare project in Krems-Stein.

Nothing in the life of Markus Lang happens without intention, but there was still a lot of room for the unforeseen. Years ago, when he was a sought-after materials scientist working for Aerospace and the US Army and many other companies, Markus Lang could not have known that he would be producing wine today. Then, in 2008, an aunt died, and he suddenly owned two hectares of vines in Krems/Donau, Lower Austria. What to do with them? Producing wine was a good idea, but Lang had no idea about wine, let alone how to make it. But, he thought to himself, "It could be a good balance to what I do full time. Something for the arms, legs and head —especially for the head." Starting with the 2012 vintage, HM Lang has become one of Austria’s most fascinating wine domaines in less than a decade. Cultivating three hectares of Demeter-certified vineyards in the Steiner Schreck and the Steiner Braunsdorfer, Markus Lang and his wife, Heidelinde, handcraft three wines—one dry Riesling (“This is not a love song”) and two Grüner Veltliners (“Kalt und klar” and “Dritter Akt”)—that are low in alcohol but seriously structured and highly digestible. The grapes are pressed in Markus’s spectacular basket press, and the naturally clear must is fermented spontaneously in oak and concrete where the wines remain for more than two winters on the full lees without any addition of sulfur. The clarity and finesse of these wines is unique in Austria and not really what Smaragd-Austrians are looking for. It doesn’t make me wonder, though, that the Nordic, pure, light, crisp and coolish white wines from HM Lang have just been discovered in Scandinavia where they fit the taste of the sommeliers and chefs of some of the world’s finest and craziest restaurants.