Gerhard Sanin

The Path

Today, Gerhard Sanin is cellar master and winemaker of Erste+Neue. The title marks responsibility, but the craft is carried more through steady attention than through display. In Alto Adige, where the landscape asks for clarity, his role is to turn that setting into wines that stay composed and legible. The way he speaks about vines and wine follows the same line: economical, practical, and attentive to continuity.

The Work Today

“Now we are also trying to make a selection from these old vines and propagate this old genetic strength.” That line points to the present tense of Sanin’s work. The old vines are not treated as static relics; they are material still in motion, worth selecting from and carrying forward where the strength is strongest. The emphasis is on judgment, patience, and responsibility. “Old genetic strength” frames lineage as something usable, not decorative. In that sense, the work at Erste+Neue is less about interruption than about refinement: keeping what remains viable, active, and useful.

Signature

Gerhard's signature dishes include Vernatsch. Vernatsch sits inside his working vocabulary as a named point of reference. It is not treated as garnish, but as part of the core language around which his approach is organized. That makes it less a label than evidence of where his attention has been trained and where it remains fixed.

In Their Words “I like white wines that have nerve, salinity, and are also long-lived and interesting in their development.” “Now we are also trying to make a selection from these old vines and propagate this old genetic strength.” Taken together, those lines set out the standards behind the work. The white wines he prefers are not soft-focus; they need nerve, salinity, and the capacity to develop over time. The same thinking appears in the vines themselves, where longevity and development matter as much as immediate result. At Erste+Neue, the throughline is clear: structure, vitality, and time are part of the same craft.

Acclaim

Sanin’s standard remains explicit: white wines with nerve, salinity, and long-lived development. That preference is not a side note; it is the measure by which the work reads. In a profile built on understatement, the most useful detail is also the simplest one: a winemaker committed to texture, balance, and evolution, and to the old vines that still carry that charge.