I Spent 3 Days at One of the World’s Most Unusual Wineries — and Ended Up Listening to Dirt

I've had a lot of unusual experiences as a wine writer. I've been doused in a river in New Zealand by a mismeasured bungee cord, found myself trapped in a convention of witchily dressed Stevie Nicks fans in Australia, and nearly died in a helicopter in Virginia (its rotor hit a tree branch while taking off; not recommended). But until I got to Gut Oggau , I'd never tried listening to dirt.

The vineyard was named Eugenie because all of Gut Oggau's vineyards have names, just as people do. I was lying on my side between two rows of vines with one ear pressed to the earth. Around me, 10 other people were also lying on their sides listening to the dirt. Gut Oggau is a natural and biodynamic wine producer in Austria's Burgenland, and we were all there for a twice-yearly event called Root Time. It's not uncommon for some wineries these days to offer experiences that might include an hour or two of grape picking before you retire to a tasting in a beautiful hospitality center, usually followed by a fancy dinner. Root Time is not like that. But Gut Oggau is not like other wineries.

Eduard and Stephanie Tscheppe founded Gut Oggau in 2007 and rapidly became stars in the natural wine firmament. Early on, they felt the wines they were making each had distinctive personalities, so they began labeling them as such, with pen-and-ink portraits on the labels — Winifred, Timotheus, Joschuari, and so on — and word-sketches of their personalities, e.g., "Winifred: The daughter from Timotheus's first marriage, which ended suddenly when his wife disappeared mysteriously over night. Just like her cousins, Winifred has a winning and open personality, is sociable, and of a cheerful disposition."

This could all be irritatingly twee, except that the wines are terrific, and the Tscheppes' adherence to biodynamic farming and low-intervention winemaking , and to expressing in a very real sense the personalities of the vineyards they work with, is heartfelt and honest. Stephanie says, "The way we paint the canvas of our vineyards is very individualistic." 

Related: Organic vs. Biodynamic vs. Natural Wine — What's the Difference?

Back to the dirt. We'd started that day in the predawn dark, riding as a group on bicycles out to one of the vineyards. This was May. The air was cold, and at 4:45, the sun was rising over the vines and Lake Neuseidl lay misty and gray in the distance. Soon we were taking turns stirring silica particles in a large copper pot of spring water with our hands. First one direction, then the other, a process in biodynamics called dynamization. "It's a very meditative thing to do," Eduard said, "and it needs that human touch." True; it was meditative. But at 5 a.m. on a spring morning in Austria, a copper pot filled with eight gallons of water is cold as hell, so it was helpful that the 11 of us were taking turns. (Eduard, apparently not made of regular human flesh, usually does a good percentage of the stirring on his own.) 

"The vortex in the water is a microcosmos that showcases the macrocosmos," he said as we stirred. "Galaxies are spirals as well. You see that spiral in snails, in fossils, in the solar system." We took turns strapping a copper tank with a hand-powered sprayer onto our backs and tramped the vineyard rows, misting the vines with dynamized silica. The sky went from predawn gray to gossamer pink, the new light making each droplet on the vine leaves glint. Macrocosmos, microcosmos. In that particular moment and in that particular place, what he was saying made perfect sense.

Of course, many things in the moment make perfect sense. Getting into that helicopter in Virginia, despite the area it had landed in being hemmed in by close and very large evergreens, had seemed to me like an excellent idea at the time. We make leaps of faith, and sometimes we hurtle through the air, flailing. But biodynamics by its nature requires one of those leaps. Its buy-in asks you to set aside empirical skepticism. 

Developed by the Austrian philosopher/spiritualist Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s, biodynamics revolves around one central idea: that a farm is not simply rows of plants cultivated for human use, but a single large living organism, an organic whole. Everything works together: the soil, the humans, the plants, the animals, the atmosphere, the microbes. It's all an interconnected web. "With modern agriculture," Eduard said, back when we were at the winery for our post-vineyard, post-breakfast biodynamics class, "you have no animals in the fields, you drive through on a tractor, you spray with fertilizers and pesticides, and the system is all kind of torn apart. It exploits the resources to maximize production, but destroys the system in the end." 

Being by nature a pro-science rationalist, woo-woo talk about macrocosmoses and microcosmoses tends to give me psychic hives … and yet. The overall concept of biodynamics makes complete sense. Nature is a complex web. Pluck one strand, and the vibrations run through the entire network. Or zap your soil with enough chemicals, and as a side effect, it will go from a multibillion-being microbiological universe to dead land. Eduard, rolling along in his talk, noted, "Churchill once said, 'All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom , justice , honor , duty , mercy , hope. ' With biodynamics, the word is harmony ." We munched our toast with that in mind.

""Churchill once said, 'All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom , justice , honor , duty , mercy , hope. ' With biodynamics, the word is harmony .""

So who were we, us Root Timers? Vacationers, natural wine acolytes, floaters in between? Three natural-wine-loving Cypriots; one Russian tech guy living in Cyprus, friends with the three; a husband and wife with a cashmere business in Salzburg; one food magazine publisher from Vienna; Gut Oggau's German importer, his wife, and their early-20s artist daughter; and me. We ate homemade bread and preserves and drank coffee under the elderflower arbor in Gut Oggau's courtyard, and maybe there's some magical confluence of dawn exertion; honest, good food; and a weaving of ideas by a good teacher that can go a long way toward conquering intellectual wariness. It also never hurts if things lean lighthearted rather than preachy.

"Some of you arrived here on a plane with 150 strangers," Eduard said, pausing at the whiteboard where he'd been writing. "Imagine if you put 150 chimpanzees on the plane! After six hours, they'd kill each other. Alcohol was partly propagated because it helped tribes get along." With wine consumption declining these days, this is a good point to make: Drink wine, and you're less likely to murder your neighbors. 

I can't say that it was exactly for that reason, but over the course of the three days of Root Time, our entire group definitely drank a lot of wine. We also ate, happily and heartily, because the vineyard work we were doing is hard labor, and because what is wine without food? What's usually served at Gut Oggau's low-key wine tavern is in line with the classic Austrian heuriger (wine tavern) tradition: cold cuts, salads, simple fare to go with wine. But for Root Time, she and Eduard bring in a chef friend, Mateo Breña, to make more ambitious, ultra-local meals: seared steak with peppercorn sauce , green beans with crispy buckwheat kernels and a creamy tahini sauce, and a glorious shallot tarte Tatin . It had never crossed my mind to make a tarte Tatin with anything but fruit before. I am forever a convert.

Breña, who grew up in Mexico, has cooked in restaurants in Paris and San Sebastián, and currently lives in Burgundy. (What can you say? The man fell in love with wine.) His food emerged as if by magic from the minuscule kitchen off the courtyard, and with it we downed glasses of Gut Oggau's Theodora, an energetic, green-appley blend of Grüner Veltliner and Welchsriesling; Josephine, a silky red made from Blaufränkish and Roesler, full of black plum and wild berry flavors; the latest vintage of the Winifred rosé. As promised by her character sketch, Winifred did have a winning and open personality and a cheerful disposition. Very rosé. Admittedly, the demand for brooding, sullen, ill-tempered rosés is minimal, but still.

Our two days were full: lessons in pruning and vine care; after-dinner bicycle rides in the dark to yet another vineyard, where we lounged in chairs around a fire, drank wine, listened to Bach, and looked at the stars; more great meals; conversations with strangers turned friends. And yes, on the second day, talk about the cosmic: "I'm going to draw a circle now," Eduard explained. He stepped back to look at it. "Hm. More like an egg. Maybe inspired by the omelet this morning." Around the circle, the astrological signs. "But it's more about the passage of the equinoxes through those constellations," he explained. "25,920 years. The same number of breaths an adult human takes in a day." 

OK. So, me and astrology, we don't get along, mostly because I think astrology is moronic. And yet … well. Sometimes you have to swim out into the river and let the flow take you where it will. With biodynamics, Eduard said, "There's no right or wrong about all this, there's no scientific proof, but it's still something to take into consideration. We live in a human-centric world, but we're really only a small part of everything."

Another take: Teresa, the owner of the cashmere business in Salzburg, at one point said to me, "The thing about the past two days that's meant the most to me is that it's been true . There are so many fake stories, so much marketing — but this is true."

On the final morning, we planted a pomegranate tree. Dug a hole, rooted the young sapling in it, tamped down the earth, watered it, gave it a home. Pick your form of truth, but roots in the ground is inarguably true. I checked in with Eduard and Stephanie not long ago, and our tree is doing fine. Growing toward the sun, as plants do. But as we all high-fived and took selfies around our vine, I thought back to the previous morning, lying on the ground, listening to the dirt. Or, really, to the earth. Because with my other ear, I heard the wind rustling the vine leaves, I heard a bird a little ways off announcing his existence, and I heard an enormity of insects, all around, buzzing and chittering and thrumming with life. I settled into the experience, and my senses were as acute as I could ever recall. I smelled the living earth, that calming earthy-mushroomy geosmin aroma that's the product of soil-dwelling bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi. Some say it has an oxytocin-release effect on us. "There's a reason it's called Mother Earth," Eduard had said later. "That scent's been in our genes for millennia."

Root time, literally, isn't human time. We race into the future whipped along by alarms and deadlines. Trees don't do deadlines; neither do grapevines. Think of the poet Andrew Marvell's lines, "My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires and more slow."

"If you lie in the field with the insects around there's this hum, this constant hum, that goes through your body," Eduard said. "Just guess how the wine from this field would taste if the place were silent."

Getting to Root Time

When to go:Root Time occurs twice yearly, in May or June and in August. The three-day experience runs $1,200 per person (and sells out, so book early). Guests are typically a mix of Gut Oggau fans, people in the wine business, wine lovers, food lovers, and, really, anyone else; and while they come from all over, the lingua franca of the event is English.

How to get there:Gut Oggau is located in the tiny town of Oggau, about an hour's drive from Vienna. The best way to get there is to fly to Vienna, then rent a car or take a taxi from the Vienna airport. You will not need a car while in Oggau — the winery provides bicycles for all the Root Time events. ( gutoggau.com )

Bottles to try

• 2024 Gut Oggau Theodora White ($45).A light amount of skin contact before the grapes are pressed gives this pale gold blend of Grüner Veltliner and Welchsriesling a lightly tactile character and lively green apple–tangerine flavors.

• 2022 Gut Oggau Timotheus White ($49).About three weeks of resting on the grape skins gives this Grüner Veltliner/Weissburgunder blend a lightly golden, hazy color and peppery, melon-inflected flavors. Like all the Gut Oggau wines, it's unfined and unfiltered, and it has zero added sulfur.

• 2024 Gut Oggau Winifred Rosé ($45).Transparent and red-cherry in hue, this lively blend of Blaufränkisch and Zweigelt is harvested specifically for rosé; think pomegranate arils and citrus zest — and a walk through summer fields.

• 2022 Gut Oggau Joschuari Red ($62).More than 40-year-old Blaufränkisch vines above the shores of Lake Neusiedel give this red its electric ruby-purple color and deep flavors suggesting wild berries and tobacco. Though intense, it's not heavy — only about 12% alcohol.

• Gut Oggau Gut Feeling ($32).Stephanie and Eduard Tscheppe's new foray into nonalcoholic drinks is a floral, lightly bitter (in a refreshing way), gently carbonated combination of extracts from the herbs and plants that grow in their vineyards. Fragrant, herbal, lightly honeyed (with honey from their beehives), chamomile, nettle, yarrow, and dandelion. Lightly lightly sweet, lightly lightly sparkling, a touch bitter, and very herbal. Really good.

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