A Gruener Veltliner with barely 20 milligrams of sulphur, a Gelber Muskateller left five weeks on its skins: these are the bottles Christina Netzl added to her family's Carnuntum cellar after training in oenology, managing wine, and interning at a London importer. She returned to Goettlesbrunn in 2007 and, in 2015, launched a natural wine range that now sits alongside the classic bottlings of her father Franz.
Backstory
The Netzls farm in Goettlesbrunn, a village at the heart of Austria's Carnuntum region east of Vienna. Christina grew up on the mixed family farm and developed an early passion for wine. She studied oenology and wine management, then interned at a London importer before joining the winery in 2007. Her own label arrived in 2015, built on minimal-intervention methods that run parallel to the long-established Franz und Christine Netzl estate wines. The two ranges coexist under one roof, representing two generations and two philosophies.
The Region
Carnuntum lies between Vienna and the Slovak border, shaped by the warming pull of the Pannonian plain and the cooling influence of the Danube and nearby woodland. The result is a long, even ripening season well suited to reds, which is why the region is best known for Zweigelt and Blaufraenkisch. Christina builds her wines around what she calls the typicity of Carnuntum, letting site rather than recipe lead.
Vineyards & Farming
The estate works around 28 to 30 hectares, split roughly 60 percent red to 40 percent white. Soils are gravelly, and the hillside parcels are ringed by trees that cool the sites and slow ripening. The vineyards moved to organic management from 2013, reached fully organic vineyard and cellar work by 2016, and carry organic certification (AT-BIO-402) from the 2018 vintage. The white plantings include Gruener Veltliner, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Welschriesling, and Gelber Muskateller, while reds run to Zweigelt, Blaufraenkisch, and St. Laurent.
Winemaking
Christina favours soft, low-impact vinification and older production styles. Whites and reds ferment on indigenous flora with sulphur kept low. The Gruener Veltliner sees only around 20 mg of SO2 before bottling. Skin contact runs long where she wants texture, up to three weeks for white blends and five weeks for Gelber Muskateller, and her orange wine is bottled with no added sulphites. Reds such as Zweigelt are destemmed, skin-fermented, and aged in large oak, with some cuvees also raised in amphorae and tonneaux.
The Wines
The Christina range covers a fresh, unfined Gruener Veltliner, a skin-contact Orange blending Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Welschriesling, an unfiltered Rose, a carbonic-fermented St. Laurent, and a Zweigelt raised twelve months in large oak vats. The wines are typically unfined, unfiltered, and low in sulphur. They reach drinkers across Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, and Asia, carrying Carnuntum's gravel-grown character to a wide audience.
