New producer profile: Stagård, Kremstal, Austria
The old cellar has been standing for almost a millennium!
The yard for harvesting has been there since 1424. Benedictine monks planted vines and grew apricots there.
Then in 1786, Urban's family took over the farm and have been making wine there ever since.
But whence the name Stagård?
In 1981, Kenneth Stagård traveled to Austria from Sweden and married into the family.
He and his wife, Elisabeth, started the Swedish branch of this estate and renamed it Lesehof Stagård.
Kenneth’s son, Urban, and Urban’s wife, Dominique, took over in 2006, making them the tenth generation to run the estate. They immediately began the crucial transition to organic viticulture, with certification gained in 2009 and in 2020 were certified as biodynamic.
The wines are made with minimum winery intervention and rest for far longer than normal on their lees, gently extracting more quality from the grapes, giving greater structure and texture to the resultant wines.
Their goal of making bold, exciting and authentic wines, simultaneously expressing evolution and tradition, has been fully realised and we are very excited to have two of them for you. And while some wines will appear to be more fun and others more serious, they are always authentic and always engaging.
“Single vineyards are the essence of all our efforts. Just by focusing on them you can work on the marginal differences offered by the diversity of soils. That’s what wine is all about: details, subtleties, and character.”
—Urban Stagård
To try them is to love them - and we've two to get you started.