Peter Veyder-Malberg walked away from advertising in the early 1990s, learned winemaking through harvests in Napa and across the Southern Hemisphere, and spent fourteen years converting Weingut Graf-Hardegg to biodynamic farming before founding his own estate in the Wachau in 2008. He farms four hectares of steep, terraced vineyards across more than twenty parcels, almost all by hand, producing fewer than a thousand cases a year. He has opted out of the Wachau Codex to focus entirely on individual vineyard expression.

Weitenberg is tucked about four hundred meters back from the Danube, looking down to Weißenkirchen from a south-southwest facing slope that catches shaded mornings and strong evening sun. It is one of the warmer sites in the Wachau, and it holds Peter’s oldest vines: planted in the early 1950s as massale selections from across the region. Each vine is genetically distinct from the next. These seventy-plus-year-old plants produce small grapes with small berries and naturally low yields, aged for nine months in a large old Stockinger oak barrel.

The 2024 is crystalline and concentrated, with cantaloupe, golden apple, and a thread of raisin that speaks to the old vines. White pepper and hazelnut at the finish. Orthogneiss bedrock and some mica schist impart a tension that holds the wine's richness in check. Peter's most structured grüner veltliner, and arguably his most age-worthy.