Designer Wine: A Precedent Setting Invention of Jammertal Wine Estate

Jammertal Wine Estate’s success story stems from its original concept of designer winemaking.

Producing wine is not a l’art pour l’art activity. It’s about making products for sale. The final value of a ready - made wine would be influenced by a lot of factors. One of them is especially important: how it fits with the costumers’ tastes.

In the wine business there are global and local trends. Sooner or later global trends would make a significant impact on local preferences.

Just an example: until the early 2000s you could read disdainful articles by experts squawking about what a mistake the trend towards making red wines with higher alcohol content was. Nowadays no one anywhere in the world would take a red wine seriously under 13.5 % alcohol. The time of 12.5 % Bordeaux wines for $$$$ is over.

We could also cite the long - lasting debate of the necessity of small barrel ageing. As a rule of thumb those who opposed changes most vehemently were the ones who were not prepared for them either professionally or financially.

Knowing about trends is necessary but that alone is not enough to achieve success. We recognised the importance of identifying exactly what our customer target groups wanted. We needed to know their preferences of style and taste and what they were willing to pay more than average for. We started our market research in the early 2000s and kept going ever since.

We do not produce any wines by chance. It is not like we pick some grapes which we ferment into wine in whatever way we can then begin to age it under the instructions of the person with the loudest voice in or around the winery.

We manage our grapes and define our winemaking style and methods in a way that follows the market needs identified by us.

We abandoned the idea of making wines to our own taste and selling them with a little help of a haphazard ideology.  Listening to our audience would make us more successful. Great wine is an artwork, but one mustn’t forget about the fact that the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel were commissioned job for Michelangelo. Money makes the world go round…

If you decide to enter in this kind of game you need a solid background including:

Outstanding vineyards

State-of-the-art technology

Highly competent viticulturists and winemakers

A global knowledge of wine and tasting experience 

Enthusiasm, persistence and financial strenght to be able to reach the end of your chosen path

Jammertal Wine Estate – in good vintages - produces huge quantities of different batches of superb quality wines. These are aged in different ways providing a great deal of options for costume made blending. In most of the cases we would involve our serious buyers into that process. This kind of work demands concentrated attention, discipline and a lot of time but on the end results would certainly justify our efforts.

Jammertal Estate has created an opportunity also for individual buyers to compose wines that suit their own needs. We involve them personally in this process. Thus, if someone wants a world-class wine created in their own image which they play an active part in creating, they don’t need to build or buy a winery. They can decide not only the composition of the wine but also its presentation and image. The finished bottles can then be kept in their own vault.

For more information, please contact Kata Polgár, the manager of the Jammertal Estate Visitor Centre.