Next to our vinegar cellar, a new orchard has been growing since autumn 2025. Two hectares, planted as standard trees meant to carry large crowns one day, the way fruit trees used to be grown in Styria. On them grow old apple varieties: Ilzer Rosenapfel, Klöcher Maschansker, Steirische Schafnase, Bohnapfel, Lederapfel.
It takes around ten years for a tree like this to bear a full crop. We will then turn the apples into Apple Cider Vinegar and Apple Balsamic Vinegar. The balsamic then matures for at least ten years in oak barrels. Do the math and you land around 2045. So we will fill the first bottle from this orchard in just under twenty years. Time into Taste.
Why old varieties
As table fruit, these apples are of little use. Often small, usually too sour or too tart to eat raw. In cider and later in the barrel, they bring exactly what a vinegar needs: acidity, tannin and aromas that many modern varieties have lost. Our Apple Cider Vinegar comes from cider apples like these, from Maschansker, Rosenapfel and Bohnapfel.
Most of these trees do not stand on our land. They grow in the meadow orchards of the Styrian Vulkanland, with farmers, some of whom we have worked with for as long as the Manufaktur has existed. They know who has which varieties, who harvests when, and which tree carries a variety that no longer appears in any catalog. As long as someone needs this fruit, the trees stay. And with them, the meadows that shape this region. Nature into Culture.
What is left over
When mashing, we sort, wash and chop the fruit. Cherries, apricots, peaches and plums first pass through a destoning machine, because for Apricot Vinegar or Plum Vinegar, it is the flesh that counts. That goes into the fermentation tank. The stones dry in the sun for a few weeks and then end up in our wood-chip heating. We call it our “Kernkraftwerk”, a play on the German words for fruit stone and nuclear power plant.
The pomace, what remains after pressing, goes onto our fields as fertilizer and to farmers in the area. So does the stillage, the residue from the still. It is spread on fields and orchards around Riegersburg. A good share of what comes out of the orchards goes back there. The wood for the heating comes from our own forests.
Sun and water
We have had our own solar power system since 2016. Today it covers around half of our electricity needs.
We need a lot of water: for washing fruit, for cooling, for cleaning. We collect the cooling water and reuse it for cleaning, so that as little drinking water as possible goes down the drain unused.
Taking time
“Growing bigger is not a goal in itself for us. What matters more is making good use of what is already there. An orchard that will only deliver balsamic vinegar in twenty years fits that equation.” Kathi & David
