This is as natural as they come, folks. In the glass this wine looks a bit like cloudy apple juice. The nose is alive with intense floral aromatics, pear skin and quince. Plenty of structure in the mouth, with grainy tannins, a shot of lime juice and plenty of funk. Watch out for a bit of sediment in at the bottom, that's a hallmark of a natural, unfiltered wine.

Austria, so often overlooked by the wine scene in much of the world, is home to no shortages of winemakers imbued with a beautifully rebellious, open-minded, and independent spirit. Gerhard Pittnauer is among their number, and his wines are the perfect expression of how a passion-led operation can produce truly stunning wines, at once uncomplicated yet utterly fascinating. Gerhard inherited his winery at the tender age of 18 following the death of his father. Untrained, inexperienced, and armed only with his nose and taste buds, he set about forming the business in his own image, basing his wines on little more than the wines he’d learned to love from elsewhere around the world. It was clear to the young winemaker that biodynamics (which despite having a solid history in Austria, he’d discovered in France) was the way forward. Together with his wife, Gerhard produces what he calls ‘living wines’ - those which are grown rather than made - and which are the ultimate expression of his instinctual methods and his 15 hectares of rewilded land.