Barbara Őhlzelt's Gruner Veltliner Verjus delivers vibrant character with a crisp, lively edge. Enjoy it neat for an intense, mineral-driven experience with lingering green apple notes, or dilute with sparkling water to unlock its aromatic potential and create a naturally alcohol-free, sugar-free refreshment. This versatile ingredient shines in salad dressings, baking, sorbets, and cocktails - simply replace vinegar or citrus wherever you'd like that distinctive Gruner complexity. Pure, unadulterated, and endlessly adaptable, it's a premium choice for creative cooks and mindful drinkers alike.

About the Producer

Weingut Barbara Öhlzeltis is based in the village of Zöbing, just north of the Kamptal’s regional centre of Langenlois. She farms 6-7ha in various small, choice locations within some of the region’s most famous ‘Erste Lagen’ vineyards. Her vineyards are typically planted very densely and are either inaccessible or unworkable by Tractors or other mechanical devices so the work is very largely by hand.

Kamptal is famous for producing some of Austria’s bigger, more robust wines and producers like Loimer, Brundlemayer and Hiedler are rightly famous for their broad, generously flavoured and full textured wines. Received wisdom says that these warm slopes above the river Kamp and the deep, predominantly Loess soils inevitably produce these rich wines. Barbera, very quietly but quite deliberately disproves the theory and is making some of the regions most clearly and cleanly delineated wines; precise, linear and excitingly intense wines that seem both scarily serious and madly joyful at the same time…. Like listening to Rik Mayall explain the meaning of life … on Jackanory !

They are deep, they are persistent, there’s a sense of everything being very deliberately … hmm… not ‘controlled’ but definitely properly ‘considered’. The acidity is always mouthwatering but stays resolutely the right side of sharp. Alcohols sit around 13.5 and there’s no shortage of flavour or ripeness and yet there’s never a hint of excess either. The wines are tense and precise but never in the slightest forbidding. You end up starting with ‘Lithe’ in the thesaurus when you run out of different ways of describing them.

Vineyard and Winery

Verjus … literally ‘Green juice’ is made from under-ripe grapes harvested around the first week of August … some 4-6 weeks before they are ‘wine-ready’. In effect it’s a late green harvest but instead of dropping the bunches to the floor, they are taken to the winery and pressed. There are no additives and there is no fermentation … in the bottle it’s just ‘green’ grape juice with zero alcohol. It sounds ‘sharp’ and it is but the flexibility and number of uses you can put Verjus to are remarkable … Zero alcohol, zero added sugar ‘adult’ drinks … Cocktails … Mocktails … dressings … sauces… patisserie etc etc. Whereas vinegar is acetic and therefore argues with wine, Verjus is grape juice and therefore tends to compliment wine.