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View wines by Hans Tschida

Hans Tschida is an obsessed winemaker. Obsessed with typicity, clarity and quality. When we first started out importing wines from Austria, local wine journalist Walter Tucek introduced us to Hans Tschida (pronounced like ‘cheetah’).

We had visited quite a few wineries that day and had tasted some amazing dessert wines. Before we walked through the gates to the Angerhof Tschida winery, though, Mr. Tucek took us aside: “Hans Tschida is in a class of his own. The best in fact.”

Walter went on to compare this winery to Alois “Luis” Kracher and other big names, claiming that he liked Tschida better. At that time we had not heard about this winery called Angerhof Tschida (Angerhof, by the way, is the name of the winery building and has no special meaning) so a healthy portion of skepticism seemed appropriate.

Hans tasted us through twenty-six of his dessert wines. The experience was religious. Each of his wines was a precise and stunning portrait of a varietal. Each presented a single predominant fruit character, paired with immense complexity and depth.

Here was a line of wines like portraits on a gallery wall, each one disparate from the next yet connected by the artist’s distinct signature and style.

As in any good tasting we went from lower concentration to higher complexity and depth, and quite a few times we reached a point that seemed impossible to top. Yet each wine we tasted was deeper and more complex than its predecessor.

“He is obsessed” commented Hans’ lovely wife Lisa with a smile on her face. “He’ll be out there very day to caress his grapes, one by one. There’s not a day that he stays in. He will keep harvesting so selectively that there will be only a single grape left in each bunch.” Hans didn’t deny it. Nor should he try: his ambition is too obvious to be obscured. Hans is not interested in second best. He wants his wines to mark the top and nothing less.

Hans Tschida produces all three dessert wine types:Ice Wine, botrytis affected wines, and Schilfwein, which is his personal favorite. In the old days, winemakers from the Burgenland would make Schilfwein (”reed wine”) or Strohwein (”straw wine”) in their attics by lying the grapes out to dry on mats of woven reeds. Now they build a long tunnel, similar to a green house, in which they can better control the temperature as well as lay out many more grapes. The mats of reeds, pulled from the nearby Neusiedler Lake, are still being used just as they were hundreds of years ago.

With the obvious quality of these wines, one naturally wonders why they have not achieved the same level of popular success as many lesser dessert wines have in America. The wines scores top marks in the major wine publications, but has remained firmly below the radar. One answer might be marketing. While his colleagues spend a great deal of time traveling the world to sell their brand, Hans refuses to do so, as it would mean neglecting his vines.
His approach might be a good one after all: In a world where news travels faster every day, a strategy that combines high quality with no publicity is becoming a marketing technique in its own right. Hans Tschida’s recent rise to the very top not just in accolades but also in popularity are a testimony to this idea.

When we walked out of the winery that day, we knew we wanted to import the Tschida wines and do that work. However, it would take another four years before we would get that chance: Hans was locked into an unfortunate contract with another importer. But we kept in touch, and when that importer shut down their shop, he turned to us first.

Today, with great excitement, we are launching our first selection of three wines by Hans Tschida. A Schilfwein, a Trokenbeerenauslese, and an Ice Wine. It’s a Winemonger childhood dream come true.