Club Batonnage

Twenty four years in the club

Since co-founding the project in 2000, Christian Tschida has held the Andau station as winemaker at Club Batonnage in Andau, Austria. The title sits beside his own Burgenland work, where farming, natural wine, and friendship carry the weight of the method. Here, the work is collective by design: five winemakers, each with a separate estate and a separate cellar language, meeting around one red wine rather than a range.

Erich Scheiblhofer, head winemaker at Weingut Scheiblhofer in Andau, brings a more infrastructural sense of wine, shaped by Weinakademie, Weinmanagement Krems, and the practical systems of a modern estate. Tschida’s line is more stripped back. He has described feeling fully like a winemaker only during harvest. Club Batonnage gives that harvest feeling a shared table.

Blaufränkisch, Cabernet, Merlot

The wine begins outside a single estate. Club Batonnage draws Blaufränkisch and Cabernet Sauvignon from low-minerality vineyards in the Leitha Mountain area of Jois, with fully ripe Merlot from the Andauer Prädium in Andau. The blend places Burgenland’s red grape beside Bordeaux varieties without pretending they are native companions. The decision is part of the point.

On harvest day, the group selects fully ripe to slightly overripe grapes by hand in the vines. The must undergoes cold maceration at 4°C before fermentation, a temperature chosen for extraction of color and aroma without pushing tannin too far too early. After fermentation, the wine enters new French barriques for 2 times 12 months, 24 months in total, a double-oak regime that few Austrian red-wine projects use with this level of intent. Production stays small, a maximum of 12 barriques per vintage.

A cellar with a club memory

Club Batonnage is less a tasting-room winery than a club-shaped cellar idea. The project began with a blind tasting in the summer of 2000, when close friends in the Austrian wine scene used wine as a way to argue, test, and unsettle habit. The name comes from bâtonnage, the stirring of lees during fermentation, but the borrowed cellar term also carries the group’s stated intention: to stir the Austrian wine world from inside its own traditions.

The atmosphere is casual and relaxed, built around a rebellious wine-culture identity. That matters because the wine itself is not casual. It takes the furniture of serious red wine, ripe selection, French barrique, long aging, limited volume, and puts it under a club sign rather than a single-family crest. The conversation stays at cellar level. The room is quieter than the label’s wild-boy mythology suggests.

A Burgenland red held in common

The project matters because it holds a specific Austrian argument in bottle: Burgenland can make a structured, age-minded red blend without surrendering its own ground. Tschida has held the role since 2000, and his farming-first natural-wine conviction still meets the club’s polished, barrique-aged red program.