Up With the Dawn to Toil in the Fields
August 19 - September 12, 2026
A Brief History of Kirb and Mazz Learning to Love Wine
We didn’t always appreciate nice wine. When we first moved to Berlin, we were thrilled to find “drinkable” €3 bottles at the grocery store; you wouldn’t want to consume just about anything at that price point in America. Pleased with his new cheap thing that was fine, Kirb didn’t particularly want to learn how to appreciate good wine. He was sure that as soon as he did, he’d just end up paying more money to enjoy something expensive when he was already enjoying something that was cheap. Where’s the sense in that?
The first time we tasted natural wine was at Noma in 2015. (Is there a single more pretentious sentence than this? Probably not.) It was a tart, skin-contact white wine from Mendall, produced near Catalonia, Spain. We had never tasted anything quite like it, and knowing nothing about natural wine, believed that it was made from actual orange juice instead of grapes when the waiter told us it was an “orange wine”.
In case you aren’t clear with the terminology, there are some big differences between “natural” and “conventional” wine. Pretty much every bottle in a grocery store is going to be conventional wine; you usually have to go out of your way to specialty shop to buy natural wine. Most people don’t know that conventional wines can contain anywhere from 75-99 additive ingredients, depending on the country. These include preservatives, fining agents, dyes, stabilizers, and more. For natural wine, nothing goes inside except for grapes. No pesticides, no chemicals, no additives, (aside from maybe a bit of sulphur during bottling for stability). The land is farmed sustainably and biodynamically, and the vineyards are only watered by rain. The wine ferments spontaneously without the use of outside yeasts to quicken the process, and it’s usually unfiltered and unfined when it goes into the bottle. The result is wine that can vary widely from season to season and tastes alive in a way conventional wines simply don’t. It’s the way wine was made for thousands of years before it became a mass-produced product.
Our wine education progressed over the following years as our neighborhood, Neukölln, despite being the literal garbage can of Berlin, somehow morphed into the natural wine epicenter of Germany. Different shops opened up all over the neighborhood, each specializing in wines from different countries across the EU. In those days, you could still pop into a neighborhood wine bar and get a beautiful glass of natural wine for €5 or €6. Regular trips to incredible wine countries like France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece also certainly helped our education along.
Then the pandemic hit, and we couldn’t travel anywhere anymore. Like everyone else, we were stuck at home for months on end. With some genuinely incredible timing, MORE Natural Wine had opened up a natural wine delivery service in Berlin mere months before the pandemic began. We couldn’t go anywhere or do anything, so the amount of money we were willing to spend drinking a bottle of wine on a Tuesday jumped dramatically. Each new wine we discovered was like a tiny vacation to a place we were no longer allowed to visit.
These months were the real catalyst for us learning about wine and how to appreciate it, specifically natural wine. We read books like “How to Taste” by Jancis Robinson, “Natural Wine for the People” by Alice Feiring, and “An Unlikely Vineyard” by Deirdre Heekin. We started keeping a wine journal and writing down our thoughts on each bottle we drank, including notes on what we smelled and tasted. Once we were allowed out into the world again, we went to wine fairs and made friends (Hi, Alex and Julija) and got to meet some well-known winemakers in person. Some of them turned out to be complete assholes (Hi, Claus Presinger). As prophesized, that same €3 bottle of wine from the grocery store a few years back now tasted like complete swill.
Drinking and learning about wine became a hobby we both genuinely enjoyed. And aside from enjoying the taste of natural wine, we learned to respect its ecological implications, as well: the conventional wine industry is the biggest user of chemical pesticides in Europe, many of which are carcinogenic, mutagenic, and toxic to the reproductive system. A PAN Europe survey found that every conventional bottle they tested contained pesticide residues, an average of four pesticides per bottle, the majority of which were fungicides. Biodynamically farmed vineyards are also significantly less prone to erosion and destruction of topsoil. In general, we support sustainable agriculture and don’t want nasty chemicals in our drinks.
Pastoral Longing
Eventually the pandemic ended. We got to travel again. We cut back on our wine budget significantly, but still enjoyed nice bottles as a treat or celebration. We continued spending far too many of our life minutes staring at screens, both professionally and recreationally. And though we went outside regularly to enjoy nature, it was always just as spectators, never as stewards of the land. Aside from foraging the occasional mushroom, we lived in the city and our hands never touched soil.
Doomed to subsist inside the perpetual digital hellscape of late-stage capitalism, ever more detached from the loam, our daydreams became increasingly pastoral. What if we moved to the French countryside and bought a run-down farm? Mazz, the chemist, would tend to the soil in the vineyard and élevage in the cellar, while Kirb learned cheesemaking from the local mongers; in a season or two his own wheels would come to market. Our fingernails would sport the ruddy patina of farm hands, our clothes sun-bleached and twice-mended. The most important “screen” in our daily lives would be the one affixed to the door frame that kept the flies and mosquitos at bay. In dreams, we became idyllic luddites, attuned to the rhythm of the land, drinking wine produced of our own labor. In reality, we moved to Vienna and continued staring at our phones and laptops.
Still, we wanted to participate in winemaking in some form or another. The most realistic option for city folk like us to get involved was working a harvest. We’d talked about it for years in Berlin, but the logistics were tricky, especially since there weren’t any half-decent wineries even remotely close to the city. Harvests are particularly hard to plan for, as it’s never clear when they will begin - that all depends on when the grapes are ripe. Similarly, it’s impossible to know exactly how long a harvest will last. If it rains, you can’t pick, and that entire day is lost (extra water on the grapes messes with the sugar content, affecting the final alcohol percentage). So, if you are taking time off from a full-time job to relocate for harvest, you have to commit a significant chunk of time to the winemaker (likely all of your available vacation days). And you usually need to make that decision months in advance. It’s a big commitment.
Unlike Berlin, we could tell immediately that Vienna was a much more viable location to work a harvest, as it is literally surrounded by vineyards. There was a real possibility that working a harvest here wouldn’t require an indefinite relocation, just a lengthy daily commute. As much as we love to boast and brag about how easy it is to get around Austria with public transit, sometimes having a car would make things a whole lot easier. Getting to and from rural wineries is exactly one of those scenarios.
We took every opportunity we could to learn more about the wine scene in and around Vienna when we moved here, including a day trip out to Burgenland that we covered here on the blog:
The next weekend, we went a bit farther afield to Neusiedl am See in the Burgenland wine region. Some of the best wines in Austria are produced here, many of which we knew from our time in Berlin, like Koppitsch Winery. It was only because Mazz follows Koppitsch on Instagram that we learned about the Neusiedler Sturm Wanderung, a specific annual walking and wine drinking event. We took the train an hour from Vienna and were dropped off right at the foot of the vineyards, where we paid €5 deposits for wine glasses and began walking along a set path through the fields. Every five minutes or so, a new winemaker had set up a makeshift heuriger where you could buy wines from the previous vintage or glasses of “sturm” from the current ongoing harvest. Sturm - which means “storm” in German - comes from the first press of the grapes and is only partially fermented, with a cloudy appearance from the active yeast. The flavor ranges from sweet to sour depending on the grape, and tasted significantly different from stall to stall. At only €2-€3 per glass with a low ABV, it was easy to sample the offerings from each winemaker along the trail without getting thoroughly sauced. Our favorite, unsurprisingly, came from Koppitsch, the winery we were most excited to see. Their wines are reliably light and delicious smashers, and their sturm made from chardonnay tasted like strawberry lemonade.
This day trip turned out to be fortuitous. We met Maria Koppitsch at the event and introduced ourselves. Months later, in May of 2026, she posted on Koppitsch’s Instagram that they were looking for harvest workers. Kirb applied, Maria remembered him from the Sturm Wanderung, and he was offered the gig. She made it perfectly clear that there was no way of knowing exactly when the harvest would begin or end, and that he had to be available from mid-August through September. Kirb was able to free up his busy schedule to make the commitment.
So You Want to Toil in the Fields
Every 43-year-old whose profession has been digitally outsourced dreams of one day becoming a migrant day laborer working for minimum wage. For Kirb, this seemingly unattainable dream came true.
One way to look at the summer of 2026 is that it was particularly hot; another interpretation is that it will probably be the coolest summer we will ever experience again for the rest of our lives. Regardless, the grapes all across Europe were ready to be picked earlier than ever this year. Quite literally: Burgundy, France has extensive records, and this was their earliest harvest in 500 years. In Burgenland, we started picking on August 19th, while the summer sun and heat were still in full gear.
This meant that the crew needed to get started each morning with the dawn, around 6:00am. Kirb’s morning began at 4:00, where he was out the door just before 5:00 to walk 15 minutes to the main train station and catch the 5:18 train to Neusiedl am See, arriving at 5:58. Even though the winery was 60km outside of Vienna, thanks to a single direct train it actually took less time to travel to Neusiedl am See than it would have to the wineries located around the outskirts of Vienna. Koppitsch may well have been the easiest possible winery for him to reach.
Neusiedl am See sits in a sea of vineyards, and Koppitsch has vines in different plots all over town. Their family has been making wine in the region for hundreds of years; Alex and Maria took over six hectares of family plots and began making natural wine in 2011. Larger conventional wineries in the area like Heinrich have 100 hectares and use mechanical harvesters that forcibly shake grapes off of their stems. Every Koppitsch grape is harvested by hand with a pair of clippers and a wheelbarrow.
Here's the gist of the job: big bunches of grapes are all held to the vine by a single stem. Find that stem, clip it, and the bunch falls down into the wheelbarrow below. Repeat. Quickly. Once all the grapes in a section are cut down, move the wheelbarrow to the next post and begin again. When the wheelbarrow is full, push it up the narrow metal ramp and dump out the contents into the grape trailer. Lift up the empty wheelbarrow and spin around, then push it back down the ramp to clip some more grapes. After a few days, Kirb eventually stopped feeling like he was going to stumble and fall and break all his bones every time he emptied the wheelbarrow.
Once the grape trailer was full, we’d head back to the winery to empty it. Some grape varietals went straight into the mechanical crusher, stems and all. Mechanical plates press in as the large barrel spins, with slots that allow the juice to run down into a pan. From there, it’s pumped into stainless steel vats to separate out solids and begin the fermentation process.
Other grapes, like rotburger, were de-stemmed first using a special machine. (Fun fact: rotburger is more commonly known in German speaking countries as Zweigelt, named after Fritz Zweigelt, a card-carrying Nazi and antisemite, so considerate winemakers are trying to transition away from that namesake.) We worked together with specific tasks: Alex and one other worker shoveled grapes into the top, with a second person shoveling the bare stems spit out by the machine into wheelbarrows, and a third person emptying those wheelbarrows into the compost trough. When the shoveling person needed a break, we’d rotate jobs. Alex never got tired. His combination farmer/dad strength was genuinely impressive.
Other clusters of whole grapes went into huge plastic buckets for carbonic maceration, where they were saturated with carbon dioxide and then covered. Without oxygen, traditional fermentation can’t begin, so natural enzymes inside the grapes turn sugar and malic acid into a small amount of alcohol instead. After several days of this, the grapes are crushed the old-fashioned way, with human feet, and then regular fermentation begins. Wines made with carbonic maceration are particularly fruity, juicy, and easy-drinking. Find a bottle of Koppitsch Lemon 2026 when it’s released for a taste of Kirb’s foot wine.
Usually, picking only lasted for about 6 or 7 hours a day. This was for several reasons: it’s draining to do physical labor for much longer than that, it’s much harder to continue working in the direct afternoon sun, and it’s best to harvest the grapes before the sun warms them up. Apparently, when you press warm grapes, it negatively affects the fruity notes of the wine. So, we were usually done working in the early afternoon. Trains back to Vienna departed every hour on the hour, so depending on when the picking ended, it took 1-2 hours to get home. Back in the city, Kirb would fight the urge to take a nap so that he would be good and tired when the sun set around 9:00pm, giving him a solid seven hours of sleep before waking up again at 4:00 the following morning and repeating the process.
While waking up that early wasn’t ideal, it did mean he could watch the sun rise every morning on the train while drinking coffee and listening to music. Hana Stretton and Phil Elverum were particularly good soundtracks to solitary train journeys at dawn.
Harvest Family
Alex and Maria run the show in every sense at Koppitsch, handling all of the duties in the winemaking and wine-selling process between the two of them. Kirb expected to be tasked with cleaning chores and other grunt jobs after the picking was done each day, but those hours of extra labor were all done by Alex and Maria once we were dismissed. Mazz pointed out that it wasn’t strange at all that they did all of the cleaning themselves: any contaminants from inadequate daily cleaning could ruin an entire vintage of wine and destroy their business. Quality control started and ended with them. If Kirb took anything away from this experience, it’s just how much hard work is required to run a “small” winemaking operation like Koppitsch.
But when it came to harvesting the grapes, many hands made light work, and that meant enlisting all sorts of family members. On any given day in the vines, there were three generations of Koppitsches working side by side. Alex and Maria’s middle son worked alongside three of his 13-year-old friends for the entire harvest, the boys fully willing and able to talk about football and video games for six hours straight every day. Alex’s parents, who live at the winery, were also regularly cutting grapes, and his sister came out from Vienna each weekend to help as well. Nieces, neighbors, friends from town: everyone chipped in during harvest.
This Isn’t Summer Camp
When Kirb was first offered the job, he was asked if he wanted to stay in the guest apartment in the basement of the Koppitsch family home during the harvest. He was hesitant at first, unsure if he wanted to abandon Mazz for weeks on end. But she supported the idea, likening the experience to “wine summer camp” and encouraging him to make friends with the other seasonal workers coming from abroad. When Kirb later followed up with the winemakers and told them he would indeed like to stay at their house, they reiterated that he had previously said he could commute, and informed him that there was no longer a bed available. Daily train commute it would be, then.
Like anything, there were pros and cons to this arrangement. The other three hired harvest hands - two from the US and one from Canada - were basically living on top of each other in a basement with two sets of bunk beds separated by a thin curtain, a bathroom, and a living room with a small kitchenette, couch and TV. Despite being forced to commute, Kirb was still interested in enjoying the “wine summer camp” experience as much as possible; having worked as a camp counselor in Germany the previous two summers, he enjoyed trauma bonding in close proximity with overworked peers. Unfortunately, his harvest coworkers were not so keen to share this experience.
The main perk afforded by staying in the Koppitsch house was access to a phenomenal cellar of natural wine. Though some limits had been set this year on which bottles and how many of them could be consumed (a previous harvest group gluttonously drank 74 bottles of very nice and expensive wine), there was still a veritable treasure trove of great wine offered up to the crew, most of which Kirb had never tried. This wine, of course, was to be consumed in the evening. As Kirb arrived in Neusiedl at 6:00am and then departed in the early afternoon each day, he was excluded from the vast majority of socializing, drinking of interesting wines, and discussing those wines with natural winemakers whom he liked and respected. This situation wasn’t ideal.
The only way for Kirb to enjoy the social elements of the harvest was to stay overnight on the living room couch in the guest apartment. Two of the inhabitants were particularly uninterested in this arrangement, seeing it as an incursion on the little space they were afforded, and not as an opportunity to include and bond with a team member who also wanted to enjoy the full harvest experience. These weeks in Burgenland brought plenty of positives; camaraderie was unfortunately not one of them. Clearly, the other harvesters were not built for summer camp life. It must be noted, however, that one of the fellow harvesters, who was back for his third harvest with Koppitsch, was genuinely a joy to converse with while trimming grapes for hours on end. Thanks for being cool, Gus.
A Proper Wine Education
While it certainly would have been more fun to get along effortlessly with the other harvesters, making friends wasn’t the main reason for taking this gig. First and foremost, Kirb was interested in learning about the natural winemaking process by actively taking part in it. In the fields, this meant using his senses to determine which grapes should be picked. The intense summer heat had caused certain varietals to suffer, and grapes had to be regularly tasted to ensure they were sweet enough to press. A strange disease affecting the rotburger vines caused seemingly-ripe grapes to lose all of their sweetness; any grapes showing a light red color instead of dark purple were mouth-puckeringly sour and had to be discarded.
After several days in the tanks, we sampled each of the juices that were just beginning to ferment. The sturm from each variety was surprisingly unique, and it became clear that there is a real art to pulling the wine at just the right moment in the fermentation process to capture the perfect flavor. We also tasted the wines in the cellar that were still aging, including a gemischter satz from a plot that had been pulled and replanted with other vines several years past. It had a nose, bizarrely, of sour cream and onion chips. Like ripping off the seal and sticking your face straight into a tube of Pringles. Maria insisted that some time ago that same wine smelled like actual crap; eventually, it might turn into something palatable. Later, we opened a 2017 bottle from those same gemischter satz vines and it was actually delicious.
Kirb asked Alex which wine was his favorite that he’d produced, and he said it was the entire 2025 vintage. Maria smirked and said that Alex says that about every new vintage; he’s always improving from year to year. They opened up the entire 2025 line for the harvesters to sample, and it was a great experience to taste each of the different wines at the same time. Koppitsch wines vary wildly from fun, fruity smashers that are perfect for a sunny picnic to delicate, serious reds that could be served with fine cuisine. Knowing which grapes were used in which bottles, from specific types of terroir, using different pressing methods, definitely brought new appreciation to the tasting. Afterward, Kirb was thrilled to take a few of his favorite open bottles back home to Mazz, so she could enjoy them too. Of the 2025 vintage, our favorites were the Dío and Abendrot, as well as the Aeon Red 2022.
Back to Where It Began
A few weeks after harvest ended, both of us went back out to Neusiedl am See for the 2026 Sturm Wanderung. This year, Kirb had a new appreciation for the sturm each winemaker presented, having tasted each variation in the Koppitsch cellars. But as it turned out, Koppitsch didn’t actually prepare any sturm for the event. Due to the early harvest, they would have needed to pull from their tanks weeks beforehand, and unlike their neighbors making conventional wine, they don’t have the large-scale refrigeration required to halt further fermentation. Instead, they presented young chardonnay and rotburger, and it was entertaining (at least to us) seeing Maria patiently explain to each new confused person who walked up that they didn’t have sturm and were instead offering young natural wines. Every other winemaker at the Sturm Wanderung charged by the glass; Koppitsch took donations which would go to the local fire department, freely pouring people whatever they wanted to drink.
As Alex filled our glasses with bottled wine from the previous year, we chatted with him about whether he got to take a break now that harvest was over. He smiled and said that he didn’t. He would finally relax during the three-day span between Christmas and his birthday at the end of the year. During those three days off, he had big plans to exclusively play Zelda with his sons.
As we sipped wine and chatted with Alex and Maria, it was nice to reflect on where life had taken us over the course of our first year in Austria. When we visited the Sturm Wanderung in 2025, it furthered our desire to want to take part in the winemaking process, whatever that may entail. Now, in 2026, two winemakers we respected had become our friends, and they were serving wine Kirb helped create. We’ll likely never realize our dream of shunning modernity and disappearing to the French countryside. That’s fine. We just have to keep grabbing onto opportunities like this whenever they arise. Hopefully, they’ll serve as foundational experience for more pastoral undertakings down the line.