A look at the Burgenland producers’ ritual harvest-time gathering.

Words by Eliza Dumais

At the height of harvest season, in the Austrian town of Oggau, Eduard Tscheppe told me to eat dirt. Needless to say, I obeyed. 

Tscheppe helms Burgenland winery, Gut Oggau, with his wife, Stephanie — a project somehow synonymous with both buzzy, de rigeur natural wine culture, and the more serious tenets of the contemporary biodynamics movement. But Gut Oggau hardly requires an introduction. You already know the wines: Bottles ensconced in clean, white labels, each of them featuring an illustrated portrait and a first name. No, that’s not Zweigelt you’re drinking, it’s Winifred. Don’t call it Blaufrankisch — it’s Joschuari.

I’d arrived in Burgenland to work harvest: A month devoted to picking and processing grapes with the producers, while hopefully absorbing their unique genre of wisdom by osmosis. This was not my first rodeo — in fact, it was my third (harvest, not rodeo). But the enterprise that is Gut Oggau, I quickly gleaned, does not lend itself easily to comparison. 

In mid August, a heatwave shouldered into Burgenland. We began harvesting at 3:00am, clipping grapes by the jittery yellow beams of our headlamps until the sun rose, and the temperature began to spike. And for all the absolute masochism that is a 2:00am alarm singing its hateful three-note jingle, that daily sunrise was — I say with utter earnestness — a worthy antidote to the limitless fatigue. Every morning, floating up like a helium balloon, round and blazing, the sun would hover at the center of the vines, holding court as if preparing to offer a sermon. 

In the midst of harvest, I should mention, time operates on an axis entirely different from that of the real world. No matter where, or with whom you’ve chosen to work, each day will last 4 years, at minimum — in terms of laborious monotony, yes, but more essentially, in terms of the fervent, exponentially increasing intimacy of the relationships you establish in the meanwhile. All of which is to say, by the end of my first week, I’d seen five awe-rendering sunrises, I’d forged several iron-wrought friendships, and I was at least 20 years older.

My first “weekend,” then, just so happened to coincide with what Eduard and Stephanie call “root time.” I’d heard the monicker thrown around casually in the preceding days, but the term held little meaning for me. Until, of course, it did. 

The premise is this: Several strangers, gathered for 48-hours of communion in the form of shared labor, meals, bike rides, biodynamics discourse, the list goes on. Among the patrons at my root time: A farm-to-table restauranteur inspired by the growers’ agricultural practices; a bar-owner from Vienna who’d spent quite a bit of time slinging Gut Oggau to impressionable drinkers; an importer from Croatia; a restaurant impresario from New York; a handful of sincere, curious fans, with professions utterly unaffiliated with wine.

On our first day, after gathering around a large table rife with local honey and fresh bread, we rode bikes to Judas — one of the more labor-intensive vineyards in Gut Oggau’s purview. Here, Eduard demonstrated the proper ways to inch along, cutting bunches of grapes at the stems, removing berries marked with sunburn, rot, or otherwise faults. But before we began, he advised us to take a moment to acknowledge the soil. Cupping the earth in his hands, he asked us each to smell it — a proper deep inhale. We passed the clump of ground between us like a game of telephone, each of us reaching our hands to our faces to breathe in, before proffering the material onwards. In a certain sense, it felt like telling secrets; this odd, proximal exchange. 

Next, he asked us to listen. To lie down, our ears pressed to the earth, acknowledging auditory signs of life. And just like that, we all sank down, contorting ourselves into odd comportments so as to listen properly (from afar, surely the whole tableau gave the dystopian impression of massacre). He left us there a few beats longer than any of us had anticipated — just long enough to spur the prickling sense of discomfort that accompanies stillness; silence amongst other bodies. Then, last but not least, as we all returned to our feet hesitantly, he asked us to taste. 

When I tell you that not one person hesitated…well, you’ll just have to believe me. It is not often that a group of 12 untethered strangers will carry out a directive like that without pause. But here, there was a certain latent acknowledgement in the air — an obvious awareness that this kind of intimacy with the ground was not just normal, but essential.

Once again, we passed palm-fulls of soil between us in cupped hands, each of us gingerly placing small flecks against our tongues. I suppose I could tell you what it tasted like — but the tactile notes are not important. The point was our absolute willingness to engage; our humble acknowledgment that the crass act of eating dirt was not beneath us. Of course, it wasn’t. 

I’ll admit, as a writer by trade, I spend a considerable amount of time absorbing sensory information. At times, too intently. It can be oppressive, even — this eternal desire to clock the nuances of minutiae in the world; to preserve it all in the brine of proper terminology. But even I had never taken this particular step. Had never introduced myself properly to the ground. And now, it seemed such an obvious oversight.

Plenty of programming followed: Throughout the course of the afternoon, we biked across several vineyards. We sat enrapt while Eduard broke down the principle tenets of Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamics bible. We tasted press juice in the cellar, and bottled wine in the courtyard. We ate dinner at a long table stacked with wines fermented from the same grapes we’d just spent the afternoon harvesting. And after dinner, we biked back towards Judas to sit around a fire, polishing off the evening’s final magnums, ogling stars so high wattage, they felt manufactured — all of us, speaking amongst ourselves with a warmth and candor rare for new acquaintances.  

On Sunday morning, we convened at the winery at 5:00am, just before sunrise — a brief taste, once more, of what had become routine for those of us here for the long haul. While we watched the sun come up in its ruinous glory; its blazing, adjective-defying ascent; we prepared a biodynamic treatment for the vines: A mix of silica and water, to be blended by hand. We took turns, reaching our arms into large metal vats, winding them in tiring rounds like some form of downward gesticulation, before pouring the solution into backpacks we wore to traipse up and down the vines, pumping the spray across the greenery. 

There was more — a decadent lunch, a tree-planting ceremony, a sit-down lecture on the relationship between agricultural practices and the cosmos. But I’ll spare you the details, and instead, tell you this:

If there is one thing I gleaned from my several-week Oggau sojourn — moving through these vines, dining at these tables, working beside these bodies — it had to do with the particular flavor that conversation takes on, in the light just before sunrise. There’s something about mutual fatigue, vibrating enthusiasm, a willingness to be here in the first place — a certain candor that comes with engaging in the face of discomfort. And if I were to guess, I’d say that particular breed  of magic had something to do with our commitment, in isolated and communal ways, to awe. It is a rare, nearly oxymoronic thing, to feel awe routinely. For the entirety of my tenure, we did, though. Every single day.

Of course, I cannot, in good faith, tell you that one weekend of Root Time bears any hard and fast resemblance to the experience of harvest in longevity. And on that note, I am well aware that harvest, itself, is a privilege of my profession. But for those of us without the capacity to shirk the trappings of real life for several-week stints, well, there’s root time: This small, glowing window into the outsized magic — the inclination towards awe — that comes with working a harvest. And even if in miniature, I can say that it’s the closest bite-sized version of the thing I’ve ever witnessed. And frankly, even a mouthful is worthwhile. At the very least, you’ll know what dirt tastes like.