We discuss and discover one of Austria’s most popular red wine grapes in this Zweigelt wine guide and interview with Austrian winemaker Christina Netzl. Amanda Barnes interviews her in her Carnuntum vineyard, where they discuss this special Austrian wine grape, how the variety behaves in the vineyard, how you work with it in the winery and her favourite food pairings for the different styles of Zweigelt wine.
Zweigelt Wine Guide: Quick Guide
- Most planted red grape in Austria with 6,426 hectares
- Austrian breed, created from a cross of St Laurent and Blaufränkisch. Made by Dr. Fritz Zweigelt in 1922
- Ripens mid-season
- Widespread across all wine regions
- Red wine with soft tannins, notes of cherry and berry fruit. Can be light and fruity, or fuller bodied and more concentrated. Wide variety of styles made
Discover more about Austrian wine in our fact sheet.
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Interview and Zweigelt wine guide with Christina Netzl – clip transcript for the hearing impaired:
Amanda Barnes: First of all can you explain, give us the pronunciation… because I’m really struggling here… Zweigelt?
Christina Netzl: Zweigelt, yeah good job! It’s a very hard Austrian name.
And it’s a very Austrian variety, isn’t it? Because tell us about the crossing and how it came to be a grape?
Yeah, so the name comes from the professor Zweigelt who crossed Blaufrankisch and St Laurent to produce this very typical Austrian grape variety, which is now actually the dominating red grape
variety here in Austria. So Zweigelt is the main red grape we are producing here.
Fantastic, and we’re in your vineyard of Zweigelt, so do you want to just show us the vine and talk us through the fruit and its characteristics?
So Zweigelt generally is producing very big bunches you can see here, so the punches are quite tall, which means you can work with it quite a lot so this is why the style of the Zweigelt wines is varying quite a lot you can produce something really fruity, light, low tannins. Maybe something you can drink a little bit chilled, and so it’s lots of fruit in there, very easy-drinking red, which I really like too, but when you have older wines and more characteristic soils, let’s say, so maybe higher attitude a little bit more gravel or stoney sites, you will get some really spicy and structured styles in the Zweigelt wines. Then finally and of course you can reduce the bunches, you can reduce the number of punches, and yet you can reduce the size. So what we are doing is we are cutting the top of the bunches to reduce the pressure of the top onto the main grape here, and we can stay out longer having smaller bunches, having a smaller crop, and therefore more structure and more spice in the wines.
Excellent and we’re in Carnuntum which is renowned for having some of the bigger styles of
Zweigelt? Not necessarily, ok! How would you say the regional characteristic is?
Yeah, I wouldn’t agree completely because we are, Carnuntum is on the border to Burgenland but we are still very close to the river Danube, so we are still lower Austria and therefore we have cool influences coming from the river meaning that we have cooler nights and cooler winds,
especially during the nights, which is bringing freshness and spice to the wine. So we are not completely known for the full-bodied style of Zweigelt, but for the spicy and structured which means for me especially the pepper, so I think Zweigelt is producing some great pepper, more the white pepper on the palate like the Gruner Veltliner, and what the white wine section does. I really like to focus and to work with this pepper in the grape. And this is really typical Carnuntum for me.
I was going to ask you for your favourite pairing for Zweigelt, but I’m going to change my question and ask for two pairings… the first one, for the lighter, everyday easy drinking style, and the second one for your more single -vineyard, longer-aged Zweigelt.
So the lighter one is that great with just some easy, light food, it can be some pasta or antipasti or
you know some like Italian-style having prosciutto or something like that it, which also exists in Austria! And with the more full-bodied, you can really use it with… I like to pair it with the regional wild boar for example, so some really spicy meat and peppery meat like deer or so as well you can really work with the spicy aromatic meat styles to pair with a single vineyard Zweigelt.
Fabulous! Thank you
More features on Austria’s wine regions and Austrian wine:
- Tunnel Vision – Austria’s focus on single vineyard wines
- Terroir Essentials & Fast Facts on Austria’s wine regions and wine production
- Blaufränkisch wine guide and the Spitzerberg wine region
- Carnuntum wine region guide
- The past, present and future of Austrian wine
- Grüner Veltliner wine guide
- St Laurent wine guide
- Traisental wine region guide
