20
25!
The 2025 vintage brings the first red Wellentänzer! But — hmm — a small residual risk remains, because once again we don’t know whether we’ll be able to “rock the cradle”, so to speak. But we assume we will. After all, what began as an experiment in 2018 has not disappointed us a single time. This has been confirmed not only by the trade press with highly gratifying reviews, but also by pragmatic technicians who uncovered our secret to success: it is above all the constant movement of the buoy that keeps the yeast in the wine from ever coming to rest. This is similar to bâtonnage — the manual stirring of the yeast in the cellar — except that in our case it is an uninterrupted, months-long wave dance. The result: stylistically unique wines with a “creamy” character.
By the way: the grape variety will not be revealed until mid-2026 😉
THANKS, LOUIS!
Louis-Gaspard d`Estournel (*1753; †1844) was a bachelor from an old winegrowing family in Saint-Estèphe. He is not only the founder of the world-famous Bordeaux winery Château Cos d’Estournel, but also the first to understand how much wine benefits when it is allowed to rock.
What Fabian Sloboda has further developed with his artist friend Nikolaus Eberstaller is a much less complicated route to the goal: buoy instead of a three-master. Louis-Gaspard d’Estournel traded by ship to Africa, Arabia and as far as India. He sold his wines to very illustrious people: the moguls, the kings and princes in India as well as the sultans of the coastal regions. After a time however, the market and demand for wine collapsed and business was poor. This meant he had to bring back all the wine barrels that had already been shipped. When he compared its quality with the batches left at home, his bad mood disappeared faster than expected: the well-traveled wine tasted great. Even more, it tasted better than the wine stored in his cellar. Louis soon realized that the constant rocking in the ship’s hold was good for the wine stored in wooden barrels. He used this insight to pull off a marketing coup: he stamped the returned wines with an “R” for “retour des Indes” – back from India. The wine sold like hot cakes. As a result, he decided that from now on all his wines would have to travel by ship before they could be sold. Environmentally speaking, it was completely harmless, because back then all the ships still sailed with wind.
If you want to experience something new, you have to dare to take the plunge. The Wellentänzer (Wave Dancer) was worth diving in …
In 2018, when enthusiastic wine lovers were already embracing Fabian Sloboda’s project, he began
collaborating with the young winery Irsslinger on a sister project on Lake Zurich in Switzerland.
