Notes from Jenny & Francois Selections:

"Similar to many other growers in our book, the Koppitschs’ journey wasn’t always this joyful. The present-day winery started with a complex post-war story, as Alex’s grandfather Leopold went missing during WW2, becoming a prisoner of war. As a trained baker and agriculturalist, his Russian captivators put him to use as a teacher in Moscow. When he finally managed to return home in 1947, he found the estate of his meanwhile-deceased father divided up among his nine siblings who, having had no contact with him for years, had considered him dead. Luckily for him, his mother kept a small field for herself, which he then turned into a mixed farm including a winery. The farm would mainly sell eggs–you can still spot a rusty metal sign with the inscription Frischer Eier (”Fresh Eggs” in German) outside the tractor shed–with wine in dopplers (the local slang for 2-liter bottles) only as an up-sell item. 

The young couple took the helm in 2011, when Alex felt it was time to start his own thing after spending five years as a winemaking and biodynamics assistant for Gerhard Pittnauer, another star winemaker in the area. Seeing that innovations and thinking outside the box pay off, Alex and Maria took the leap of faith, only to be met with… a steep decline of the family’s financial situation. With little kids to care for and similarly little income from their wines, which were quite different from what people would expect of Burgenland back then, Maria recalls how at one point they didn’t even have ten euros to fuel up their car. “But that’s OK—if things are too easy, they don’t really make you grow as a person. Everything Koppitsch is now stems from all these hardships. It also made us grow a lot as a couple; going and talking through all this together truly strengthened our bond,” Maria explained in an interview, with her typical humble acceptance of the things that life throws your way."