Hans Setzer

The Climb

Training at Klosterneuburg gave Hans Setzer a technical base shaped by discipline and repetition. From there, the craft reads as an apprenticeship in observation: learning to taste carefully, to track what fruit and site are doing, and to let understanding accumulate over time. His path has favored control over display, with the work kept direct and precise.

Today

Vineyard character is treated as a matter of structure, not rhetoric. Hans Setzer describes one site this way: "This location is oriented to the southeast and has sandy brown soil with a lot of limestone." Orientation, soil, and limestone are presented as working variables, the elements that carry expression from vineyard to bottle. Cellar practice follows the same logic. Hans Setzer says: "All of our site wines (except the Große Reserve) are spontaneously fermented in stainless steel and aged on the lees until about four weeks before bottling." The method favors measured development while keeping the wines anchored in freshness and definition, with lees aging adding quiet depth and stainless steel maintaining a clean frame. The style is further narrowed by what is left out. Hans Setzer is explicit: "The character of the site is especially important to us, so there is no oak and no malolactic fermentation." That choice keeps the vineyard’s outline intact, leaving the wines with clarity, tension, and an unmasked sense of origin.

Signature

Hans's signature wines include Weinviertel DAC Reserve »8000«, Roter Veltliner Ried Kreimelberg, Ried Kronberg Reserve, and Setzer in Pink. Together, these names sketch a portfolio built around distinction of site and variety, with each wine carrying the same disciplined, place-led sensibility that defines his broader work.

In Their Words “All of our site wines (except the Große Reserve) are spontaneously fermented in stainless steel and aged on the lees until about four weeks before bottling.” “The character of the site is especially important to us, so there is no oak and no malolactic fermentation.”