There are questions you don't ask for years, until you do, and afterwards everything is different. Alois Gölles junior asked one of them in the early 1980s. He was an engineer in fruit processing; he understood what happens to fruit when you give it the right process. The question was simple: Why don't we turn good fruit into better vinegar?
The hills where it all began
In the late 1950s, Alois Gölles senior was one of the first in Styria to grow fruit systematically on hillsides. The slopes around Riegersburg, the volcanic soil of the Styrian Vulkanland: that was his terrain.
What the father had built was the raw material. The son turned it into the question.
Klosterneuburg, 1982, Modena
Alois junior studied at HBLA Klosterneuburg, the Federal College for Viticulture and Pomology. He learned what lies within a fruit: the acids, the sugars, the aromas that only emerge when you give the process room.
In 1982, he traveled to Modena and saw what was possible with grapes. Years of maturing in the barrel. Concentration through evaporation. A depth and texture that could not be rushed.
The question almost asked itself: If it works with grapes, why not with apples?
The barrel, the time, the result
The first attempts demanded patience above all. Boil down sweet cider, ferment it, fill it into barrels, wait. In 1984, the result was ready. The world's first apple balsamic vinegar. A category that had not existed before: no balsamic from apples, no vinegar of this sweetness and depth from local fruit. For 15 years, Gölles remained the only producer worldwide.
This is not an anecdote. It is a fact that shows what happens when you give a simple question the time it needs.
What began in 1984 is the heart of our range today. The Apple Balsamic Vinegar matures for at least ten years in oak barrels. It is the product that says the most about us: about patience, about trust in the process, about the conviction that time achieves more than any technical shortcut.
The XA Apple Balsamic Vinegar goes further still. More than twenty years of maturing in the batteria, seven different wooden barrels, each smaller than the last. A result that cannot be explained without tasting it.
Alois Gölles invented a category in 1984. Today, others are asking the same question. That is a good thing: it shows the question was the right one. What counts is the answer.
Time into Taste.
