Markus Huber is the leading winemaker in Austria’s Traisental DAC, a tiny appellation southwest of Vienna, sprawled across the postcard foothills that tumble out from the towering Alps. The loess and limestone soils here combine with the cooling mountain winds and continental altitude to create the ideal conditions for growing sparkling wine. This region sees a long, cool ripening period every fall that intensifies phenolic complexity while keeping acid levels high and sugar levels reasonably low. That’s Bubbles 101.

The Traisental’s wunderkind is Herr Huber himself, winner of 2015’s “Falstaff Winemaker of the Year,” the Oscar of the Austrian wine industry! He’s also taken home best white wine producer at the International Wine Trade Fair, and earned best Grüner Veltliner producer at the IWC in London. In short, he’s a comet! Markus is a 10th generation grower, sure, but having inherited only four hectares, this winery is truly his baby now. He’s grown the property to fifty hectares and now boasts vines in a number of erste lages, Austria’s equivalent of premier cru sites.

As our third example of Grüner Veltliner’s majesty, let’s turn to the most punk iteration, a bombastic beauty from the iconoclastic winzer—yes, the Deutsch word for vigneron is winzer (!)—Johannes Zillinger. This is a very different Ried Kellerberg, lying some 100 kilometers east, just outside the Slovakian border in Austria’s largest appellation, the Weinviertel. This region is best known for spicy, bright, cheap & cheerful Grüners you pound at some Vienna tavern after a long day with Klimt & Schiele at the Belvedere. But Zillinger’s Grüner is something else entirely. This wine is mesmerizing, subversive, and ecstatically irreverent.

Zillinger is a madman. He’s a 5th generation wine farmer who up and went to Georgia to pick up on the most ancient winemaking techniques extant. His father was already among the first in Austria to convert to organics (in 1984!). But when Johannes was given the reins in 2013, he took it to the next level, converting to the witchy woo-woo ways of biodynamics, seeking total harmony with nature. He then shipped in a bunch of Georgian qvevris, the massive clay amphoras the Georgians have buried underground and used for wine production since time immemorial and started employing them alongside numerous other unconventional techniques.

To make this single-vineyard Grüner, Johannes hand-picks the grapes from vines interplanted with herbs and lavender, then puts a tenth of them directly into the qvevri whole cluster, allowing for skin-contact with the juice, an orange wine technique that brings a savoury and spicy element to the wine. For the remainder of the cuvée, Zillinger puts half the juice into stainless steel and half into barrels made from their local acacia trees rather than the usual French or Slovenian oak. He then utilizes lees stirring to enhance the texture and round out the acidity of the wine. The result is a beguiling joy! A savoury salinity of peppercorn heaven floating over rich poached pear energy and an elusive charm, something like ‘fernweh’, a Deutsch word with no English equivalent: ‘missing somewhere you’ve never been.’

Pair this with thinly shaved, imported mortadella from the Italian Centre for possibly the most simple yet successful pairing of your life.