Something is Rotten in the State of Austria
A scandal in Burgenland shows the forces that influence what we drink—in an era when all of life feels like a conspiracy.
When you first hear about the scandal, it’s like something out of a Wes Anderson movie: the Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben—a blaufränkisch from century-old vines, hailed by critics as a masterpiece, the greatest Burgenland wine of all time, awarded 100 points—has been rejected by the official Austrian wine tasting panel as faulty, and must now be relabelled and sold as mere table wine. At a press conference during Austria’s premier wine salon in Vienna, two grown men engage in a shouting match. Insiders question the motives behind the tasting panel and call the Austrian wine law “bankrupt.” A shadowy article appears in a trade magazine accusing the winemaker and critic of conspiring to orchestrate a PR stunt. Both the winemaker and the critic make Instagram videos threatening legal action.
My colleague Simon Woolf has posted an excellent account of the kerfluffle over the Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben at The Morning Claret.
The wine in question, the 2023 vintage of Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben, was made by Roland Velich of Moric, perhaps Burgenland’s most famed winemaker. It is, without doubt, among Austria’s greatest red wines, from 80- to 100-year-old vines, a wine that can stand next to top reds all over the world. I profiled Velich and his wines in my book Godforsaken Grapes, as well as here at Everyday Drinking.
In that article, I reviewed the 2021 Moric Alte Reben Lutzmannsburg, calling it:
“Fragrant, perfumed nose of wild herb, cherry, wet stone, a hint of smoke. On the palate, it’s bright and crunchy, but refined, elegant, and complex, with lots of fresh red fruit, hints of licorice and tobacco, profound at the midpalate and a long, long finish. Deep and earthy, it’s like picking berries in beautiful, ancient forest after a heavy rain. An incredible wine.” (Yes, like all wine writers, I can be over-the-top sometimes.)
In any case, the idea that this wine could be “faulty” or “flawed” is ludicrous. According to Woolf, Roland Velich had good reason to be angry at the official tasting panel ruling, and suggested a wider conspiracy:
In particular, [Velich] outlined how growers who work with minimal intervention—spontaneous fermentation, no additives or corrections, no filtering or clarification—are regularly penalized for making wines that are supposedly “not typical.”
Anyone who covers Austrian wine knows that the official tasting panel regularly penalizes natural winemakers like Christian Tschida, Claus Preisinger, Franz Weninger, and others. Woolf says:
As I wrote in 2024, countless low-intervention winemakers have abandoned the quality wine system, instead declassifying their entire output to table wine, and accepting that they cannot mention geographic terms on the label. Growers usually make this choice after their wines are repeatedly refused the prüfnummer [the official certification to be labelled a quality wine]. The usual reasons given by tasting panels are that the wines are cloudy or hazy, they are not typical of the stated variety or region, or that they display a fault such as volatile acidity.
In response to the scandal, Rudolf Schmid, head of wine at the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture, poured gasoline on the fire, accusing Velich of gaming the critic’s 100-point score purely for marketing purposes. This, according to Woolf, made no sense:
Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben 2023 first made the headlines in late September 2025, shortly after wine critic Stuart Pigott—at that time employed by JamesSuckling.com - tasted and rated the wine with a perfect 100 points. Others also praised the wine. Falstaff’s Peter Moser scored it 99 points in November 2025…Velich bottled the wine on 4th September 2025, and made it available for critics to taste shortly after. He had every expectation that it would receive its prüfnummer—its passport to be labelled a quality wine from Mittelburgenland—as it had for the previous two decades. He submitted the wine to the tasting panel twice, first on 26th November 2025 and then again at the end of January 2026. It was rejected both times.
For me, the strangest part of the controversy is the two video statements posted on Instagram by Pigott, the critic who scored the wine 100 points—the second reel to vehemently deny that he is part of a “conspiracy.”
Woolf’s blunt assessment of the Lutzmannsburg Alte Reben fiasco: “There is little doubt that the system is broken.”
While I agree with Woolf, I believe the issue is even bigger and wider than that. Because this Austrian wine controversy is really about two broken, bankrupt systems colliding at the same moment: One the one hand, a quasi-fascist, judge-jury-and-executioner, self-important tasting panel; on the other hand, the gatekeeping, bullshitting, self-important business of scoring wines on a 100-point scale.
I mean, let’s be super honest here. In this controversy, we’re basically asked to take sides about who’s right: an imperious tasting panel’s ruling of “faulty wine” or a gatekeeping wine critic’s rating of 100 points. That’s a pretty cringe choice, if you ask me. After all, a $150 wine rated 100 points by JamesSuckling.com is a wine that’s going to be so heavily allocated that you will likely never taste it. If you’re taking the side of the wine critic, please take a moment to watch a video of that critic’s employer explaining how he rates on a 100-point scale:
As we all know, we are living in a nightmare era of conspiracy. Whether it’s the social media algorithms manipulating our consumer decisions, technofascists forcing AI down our throats, the Epstein files, the purging of January 6th by the Department of Justice, or PACs with questionable intent spending millions in our local elections, people are finally starting to question the broader, darker forces at play in their everyday lives. Most of us come to wine and spirits to escape all this.
But alas, as we’ve talked about many times here in this newsletter, the forces that influence what we drink are just as pervasive as in the rest of our lives. The only solution, as always, is to distrust the institutions—all of them, both “official” and self appointed—hell-bent on defining taste and quality for you. The first step in rejecting established hierarchy, arbitrary ratings and rankings, and received knowledge is independent tasting and thinking. Since you’ve read all the way to the end of this post, I believe you know where to find that.
