Winemaking is in Dorli Muhr’s blood. Upon her grandmother’s wedding in 1918, she was gifted a tiny vineyard in Spitzerberg from an aunt. Situated within a narrow corridor between the Alps and the Carpathians, Spitzerberg’s vineyards occupy the only place in Europe where there are no mountains dividing the north from the south. Dry southeasterly winds cruise through the gap, pushing damp Atlantic weather systems away. Dorli visited her grandmother’s vineyard often with family and soon fell in love with winemaking. She bought land in Maremma, off the coast of Tuscany, and soon married Dirk Niepoort, himself a scion of one of Portugal’s most renowned winemaking families. Eventually the duo returned to Spitzerberg in the early 2000s, where Dorli replanted vines on her family’s old fallow soils and worked with Dirk to craft new, thoughtful, and elegant wines that didn’t just capture the terroir, but cooperate with it. 

Some years later, Dorli split from her partner, Dirk, and is today carrying on the winery, which has since grown to nearly 12 hectares spread among 36 distinct parcels, and practices biodynamic farming, in her name, with the aid of daughter Anna.