Willi Opitz Red Eiswein 1998 375ml

Willi Opitz Red Eiswein 1998 375ml

A fantastic Eiswein from a top Sweet wine maker.   Willi Opitz having won the International Wine Challenge Late Harvest Winemaker of the Year.  This is a complex & intensely rich wine with layer upon layer of honeyed unctuous flavours. This Eiswein has notes of apricots, honey and marmalade throughout the nose and palate.  Made with Gruner Veltliner grapes.

Willi Opitz, a mechanical engineer by training, is a cheerful and earnest man and his wines inspire the same kind of reaction as the man himself.

It was only in the early 1980s that Willi Opitz started to make wine with a small vineyard of about 1.5 hectares near the large shallow Lake Neusiedl in Burgenland, Austria – which is a large wine-producing region on the eastern border of Austria.

As a ‘weekend winemaker’, he worked with just the Muskat Ottonel and Zweigelt varieties. In 1995, he left his career as a mechanical engineer at a nearby food company in order to devote himself to his ‘hobby-wine’. Today, he cultivates around 17 hectares and produces about 30 wines although his cultivation methods remain similar, totally focused on quality. In 1997, he relocated to his current winery in Illmitz. Willi has an undoubted talent at marketing: a partnership with McLaren produced a range of Formula Wines, and there was also a Mr President wine enjoyed by Bill Clinton who met Willi on a visit to Austria. Mr President is the American label of his flagship wine Opitz One! Perhaps his most ‘interesting’ project was his 1995 CD release, ‘The Sound of Wine’, a recording of his wines undergoing fermentation. Opitz undertook the project because when he was a boy his grandfather had told him that ‘fermenting wine speaks to you of everything it has experienced during its year in the vineyard.