Festival report
Martiniloben in Illmitz, or how to taste thirty Trockenbeerenauslesen in a weekend
For nine days in November the cellars of Illmitz open their doors. If you care about botrytis, there is no better two days anywhere in the world.
- Visited
- Where
- Illmitz, Burgenland
- Region
- Burgenland
- Taster
- Harris
Illmitz has no hill. It sits on flat ground east of the Neusiedlersee, among shallow salt lakes called Lacken, and nothing about the landscape suggests great wine. What it has is fog: the lake and the Lacken put moisture into the air on autumn mornings, the afternoon burns it off, and Botrytis cinerea arrives on schedule almost every year.
That reliability is the whole story. In most of the world a Trockenbeerenauslese is an event that happens in exceptional years. In Illmitz it is a line on the price list.
Every November, around St. Martin’s Day, the village runs Martiniloben. Cellars put a yellow Offene Kellertür flag outside, open their doors, and pour. You buy a booklet of vouchers, walk from address to address, and taste. In 2025 it ran from 1 to 9 November.
There is no venue
This is the part that does not come across in any description of the event, so it is worth being blunt about: Martiniloben has no festival site. There is no marquee, no ticketed enclosure, no row of branded stands. There is a village, and for nine days a large number of the houses in it open their front doors.
You walk up somebody’s drive, past their car and their bins. The signage is often a sheet of A4 taped to the door. Inside, the tasting might be in a hallway, in a courtyard under an arcade, in a garage with the press still in it and a bicycle leaning against the wall, or down a narrow staircase into a barrel cellar beneath the kitchen. The person pouring is the person who made it, and quite often their father is sitting in the corner.
That intimacy is the thing. At a trade fair you taste a portfolio. Here you are standing in somebody’s house, and the difference in what people will open for you is enormous.
You collect a booklet of vouchers and a glass, and walk. There is an official Degustationsliste naming the wine each estate is pouring, which is useful for planning and almost immediately irrelevant, because the interesting bottles are the ones not on it.
We walked it over two days and stopped at roughly twenty-five addresses.
Day one
Weingut Andreas Lang poured a Weissburgunder Trockenbeerenauslese 2012 alongside a Weissburgunder Eiswein 2012 and a Sämling Aszu 2017, which is an unusual thing to find in Austria. We spent a while talking to a man about wine, and about New York, before asking how long he had worked there. He said: it’s my shop. That’s my father.
Arkadenweingut Heiss produce around 100,000 bottles a year and pour like people who have plenty. The Bouvier Trockenbeerenauslese 2022 was the wine.
Weingut Helmut Lang ran a flight of three Spätlesen, two Beerenauslesen and a Trockenbeerenauslese. The Trockenbeerenauslese was serious. Then the family produced a bottle that was not on any list, which is the thing that keeps happening here.
Hildegard und Hans Gangl contributed two more Trockenbeerenauslesen.
Day two
Weingut Helmut Gangl poured fifteen sweet wines in one sitting. The three that stood out were a Zweigelt Ausbruch 2013, a Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese 2017 and a Pinot Blanc Trockenbeerenauslese 2008.
Lackenblick, named for the view across the salt lakes, showed a Gelber Muskateller Auslese 2023 and a Welschriesling Trockenbeerenauslese 2017. Both notably smooth.
Weingut Schwarzbauer poured a Chardonnay Trockenbeerenauslese 2007 that was not on the menu.
Weinbau A. & M. Gangl: Welschriesling Trockenbeerenauslese 2022.
Malloth Weinkelterei: a Muskat Ottonel Trockenbeerenauslese, a Zweigelt Trockenbeerenauslese 2011, and a Chardonnay 2002 from a special bottle.
Reiterweingut Frank: Welschriesling Trockenbeerenauslese 2013.
Weingut Rosenhof closed the weekend with a Welschriesling Ausbruch 2013.
What is worth knowing before you go
Ausbruch is not Trockenbeerenauslese. It is a separate Austrian Prädikat, historically tied to Rust, made by pouring must or wine over shrivelled botrytised berries. Several Illmitz producers make it from red grapes, which is rarer still: the Zweigelt Ausbruch bottlings from Helmut Gangl and Malloth are worth going out of your way for.
Everything is Gangl. There are several unrelated Gangl estates in the village. Helmut Gangl, Hildegard und Hans Gangl, A. & M. Gangl, Günter Gangl, Gerhard Gangl. Get the full name.
Ask what is not on the list. Two of the best wines of the weekend, the Schwarzbauer Chardonnay 2007 and whatever the Langs opened, were not on the Degustationsliste. If a producer likes talking to you, the conversation is the tasting.
A note on the scores
We left Illmitz with thirty-two bottles from twelve estates, and the total came to under fourteen hundred dollars. Ten of those bottles now carry scores. Three are above; the rest have their own pages, at Rosenhof, Kracher and Andreas Lang.
Two more fall below our publishing floor and do not appear anywhere. Per how we score, that is not a verdict on the estate.
The most expensive bottle of the weekend and the best bottle of the weekend were the same wine, which almost never happens.
The festival happens in people's houses
There is no marquee and no festival site. Every one of these is somebody's front door, hallway, garage or cellar, opened for nine days. A yellow flag outside is the only signal that you can walk in.
