Die Weinschwestern

Cellar work held in one house

Fermentation, aging and bottling meet at the same cellar threshold. Cathrin Bihlmayer, cellar master at Die Weinschwestern in Lowenstein, keeps that work inside a compact family producer in Württemberg. Her career record is unusually concentrated: one producer, one place, one cellar role. The public house identity is Die Weinschwestern, the wine sisters, while the estate sits within the Bihlmayer family business, with Bernd and Cathrin Bihlmayer named as owners and four sisters leading the project’s public-facing energy.

That makes the lineage here less a chain of famous cellars than a matter of sustained responsibility. Bihlmayer’s title, Kellermeister, places her at the operational core of the wine work, where lots move from fruit to ferment, from vessel to bottle, and where the house style has to hold without becoming fixed. Die Weinschwestern opened in 2019 as a small family winery project within Weingut Bihlmayer, carrying a different tone from a formal estate label: more direct, design-led, and approachable, but still tied to the cellar discipline that gives a wine its shape. The hands are not theatrical here. They are accountable.

Württemberg fruit, kept close to the cellar

The vineyards attached to the estate are given as 19.5 hectares, with the Löwensteiner Wohlfahrtsberg named among the important sites. The soils named for the place, Bunter Mergel and Gipskeuper, belong to the Württemberg register: marl, gypsum-rich keuper, slopes that can carry both white tension and red structure. Riesling, Weißburgunder and Grauburgunder form part of the white program; Lemberger and Spätburgunder sit on the red side, with Cabernet Blanc adding a more recent German crossing to the estate’s palette.

The house also makes white, red and rosé wines, along with sparkling work. One named bottle, the 2023 Hoppa Sparkling Alkoholfreier, comes from Cabernet Blanc and is given as 0.0% alcohol, with a stated shelf life until December 2026. That detail matters because it shows the project’s range without needing to overstate it: classic Württemberg varieties on one side, a non-alcoholic sparkling bottling on the other, all under the same family roof. The house gives an annual output of 140,000 bottles, a scale large enough to require order, and small enough for the cellar master’s decisions to remain close to the wine.

The terrace and the tasting room

The setting is the hilly countryside around Löwenstein, where the winery’s informal side comes forward in the tasting room and on the wine terrace. The atmosphere is relaxed rather than ceremonial. Bottles are presented with the youthful Die Weinschwestern language, but the place still reads as a working estate: vineyards nearby, cellar work behind the label, and a family name carrying the weight.

Conversation stays at tasting-room volume. The pleasure of the place is not in polished distance, but in the short line between slope, cellar and glass. A Riesling from Württemberg, a Grauburgunder poured at the counter, the Cabernet Blanc behind Hoppa: each keeps the room connected to Cathrin Bihlmayer’s cellar.