Dorli Muhr

Her grandmother’s .17-hectare plot, a wedding gift from an aunt in 1918, was in truth a brutal place to make wine. So when Dorli first thought of doing it in adulthood, she initially looked for vineyards in France before buying virgin land on Tuscany’s Maremma coast. But then love whisked her away to Portugal, where her marriage to winemaker Dirk Niepoort—and his revelatory wines from Douro—upended her thinking.  Those were the qualities she wanted from wine, “freshness and elegance and length,” and gradually she became convinced that they depended on two things: old vines and a continental climate. Maremma would give her neither. But maybe, just maybe, Spitzerberg could. 

Dorli and Dirk decided to make a go of it in the early 2000s, more as a passion project than out of any commercial conviction. “It was not my ambition to create a new winery and brand,” says Dorli, who separated from Dirk a few years ago. “I just wanted to make wines for myself.” At the time there was little ambition marking any of the wines being made locally, which were simple and inexpensive reds from the Blaufrankisch varietal, often farmed as a hobby among aging men who’d tend a few rows of vines in the morning before shifting to other business—or a nap—in the afternoon. But early experiments persuaded Dorli that the potential was there. 

Situated within a narrow corridor between the Alps and the Carpathians, Spitzerberg’s vineyards occupy the only place in Europe where there are no mountains dividing the north from the south. Dry southeasterly winds cruise through the gap, pushing damp Atlantic weather systems away. On the rare occasions when rain falls outside of spring, “the wind dries it out immediately,” Dorli says—keeping the vines as dry and healthy as the quick-draining, sandy soil. 

Blaufrankisch vines that were old and deep-rooted enough, she found, could produce captivating wines under these circumstances. The problem was that old vines tended to have old owners, and old owners tended to be too proud to sell. Not to be deterred, Dorli hung a land-wanted poster—to buy or rent—in the waiting room of the village doctor. “I thought maybe the old vineyard owners would come out of an appointment knowing that they needed a new hip, and see my phone number,” she recalls. It worked. Once people discovered that she wanted old vines—and was committed to keeping them—offers began to flow. The parcels were often tiny, split by family inheritance, but three or four rows at a time Dorli grew her holdings, which now comprise 12 hectares spread among 36 distinct parcels (which she cover-crops against erosion).

“By 2004, I understood that we had an outstanding terroir,” she says. “But every year I kept discovering a little more, and I got more deeply involved. It felt like the mountain was commanding me—challenging me and telling me what I must do.”

For nearly 20 years she made wine in a literal garage. But she crafted her 2022 vintage in a new winery whose design reflects every lesson she has learned in that time. Enclosed by 30-inch-thick brick walls that hold winter temperatures all the way through spring, it’s also shielded on three sides by wisteria vines that block the summer sun but shed their leaves to let winter rays through. Hand-picked grapes are sorted on site and partially destemmed, with roughly 30 percent whole clusters undergoing foot-treading for “fast and intense extraction that’s also very soft and careful,” Dorli says, “because you think with your feet—smashing only the skins but not the stems or seeds.” 

As soon as native yeasts trigger spontaneous fermentation, she racks the whole-cluster lots to neutral barrels to complete fermentation off the skins. “This gives us a lean structure with verticality and precision, and tannins that are very silky,” she explains. Meanwhile the destemmed portion, fermented on wild lees and gently punched down in open vats, contributes fruit and body. Slow fermentation in the cellar’s cool ambient temperatures are key throughout, coaxing lifted aromatics from the lithe structure. Each vineyard lot rests for a year in mid-sized neutral casks, before being blended and maturing for a second year in bigger old-oak vessels, then spending another year in bottles before release. 

Made with such precision, there’s a Burgundian transparency to Spitzerberg Blaufrankisch—and a tensile athleticism that demands its own descriptive vocabulary. “I always think of these wines, energized by the limestone soil, as prima ballerinas pirouetting on their points,” Dorli says. “They have the tension, power, and training of a body builder—but in a different way, where everything is going up. The art of ballet is fighting gravity, and that’s what our wines are like,” she continues, before springing toward other metaphors. “They are tense and intense, the way silk is a tense textile: you can look through it, yet it has strength and resistance … or the way a Gothic cathedral is very different from a Baroque one: vertical and slim and elegant, but in no way tiny.”

Great wines have a way of outrunning any description you try to pin on them. That’s what makes them great. But it seems like no accident that this prodigal granddaughter of Spitzerberg reaches so readily for metaphors that convey sensations of thrust and movement. Her winery is a calm, cool sanctuary of meticulous control. But when she steps outside its thick, church-like walls, the wind still whips her hair into a frenzy, tugging and tossing it in a constant reminder of the force that drives her wines toward distinction. On the rocky outcrops that mesmerized her as child, with the Alps on side and Carpathians on the other, “the wind is part of the terroir.”