The Treasure Cave

Treasure hunters

You all know us as your personal natural wine dealers but we are a bit more than that. We travel, we search, we taste, we connect, we are on the look out for the best wines out there: we are the TREASURE HUNTERS. Think of us as the “Indiana Jones” of the natural wine world. We like to get our hands on small experiments, special barrels, limited editions. In order to do that we visit our favourite producers, we try their wines and if we discover something that stands out, we grab it and share it with all our natural-wine-lover-friends. Our relationship with the producers is based on trust and respect, we value their hard work and we appreciate their effort in minimizing their carbon footprint through natural and minimalist farming. Every producer has a story to tell and a creative mind which often leads to crazy experiments and trials.

Labels

Together with a very talented Salzburg illustrator, Matthias Bergsmann, we have created a series of labels that tells a story about us and the wine producers. These creative comics represent us, Nina and Rafael, on the adventurous path to the discovery of the “treasures” i.e. wines. Every label will tell you a little bit about the producer, the winery, location etc. Matthias’ first 2 labels ever made are dedicated to Koppiscth and Wimmer Czerny.

On the Koppitsch label you will notice the two hunters trying a way across the Lake Neusiedl. something is in the water, there is a legend about a mermaid living in those waters a long time ago, maybe she’ll help them find the location of the treasure. If you look closely you can spot her!

On the Wimmer label the 2 hunters had to look under the see for their treasure but an ancient creature is giving them some scary looks, it’s a Mangalitsa pig swimming above them, this treasure is buried under the sea.

Wines

The treasures we find are normally are wines destined to be blended but we think that the unique ones deserve a special treatment and therefore we get our hands on them.

Our very first find was the Weissburgunder Orange from Georg Schmelzer, at this point we didn’t know Matthias Bergmann’s illustrations yet and therefore the label was done by the producer. The wine though can be find exclusively in our onlineshop as we manage to get the whole barrell for us.

The recent findings at Koppisch and Wimmer Czerny have given us the inspiration to create a cool series of wines with its own labels in order to share some fun and interesting facts about the producers with all of you.

The Weissburgunger Orange is really special wine and here is why. Georg is a very generous and enthusiast about his work, we spend hours (from 7 pm until 3 am) in his wine cellar trying every single barrel. His cellar was a wine lover’s heaven with the many small barrels made from different types of wood (each wood gives the wine different characteristics) kept in perfectly organised rows. After tasting, what was probably 40 different versions of orange wine, we fell in love with the Oak barrel aged Weissburgunder. Almost like a Bourbon Whiskey in taste, it has vanilla and caramel aromas, yummy peachy notes and some earthiness and creaminess.

The Koppitsch’s treasure is a special experiment: a blend made from white and red grapes. We loved the result so much that we decided to share this limited edition wine with all of you. The wine has both a white wine and a red wine character, in fact you can taste flavours like grapefruit and pineapple which you can normally find in whites perfectly combined with aromas of raspberry and cherry which you can usually taste in reds.

Wimmer Czerny’s treasure is a Roter Veltliner which was meant to be part of a blend but the wine was too good to be blended. 15% of the grapes spent time in Amphoras the rest spent some time on the skins before the pressing. The result is a really lovely white, aromatic and fruity with notes of peach, apricot, apple, orange and caramel. There is a nice touch of creaminess in there too. We are extremely happy that we got our hands on this gem. The winery is beautiful and self sustainable. The terrain is rich in fossils as the slopes used to be covered by the sea millions of years ago.