The Nazi Origins of Your Favorite Natural Wine

In 2016, the Austrian Wine Marketing Board, an organization dedicated to fostering the commercial success of Austrian wine, launched an investigation of Friedrich Zweigelt’s role in the Third Reich.

The results, which appear to downplay Zweigelt’s importance, included a piecemeal biography assembled by German wine historian Daniel Deckers. In it, Zweigelt appears as an oenological Adolf Eichmann, ensnared by the banality of evil, following orders to better his agenda, or simply to stay alive. The report seems to suggest that Zweigelt’s complicity was, in comparison to others who pledged allegiance to the Nazi Party, not egregious.

Following a grassroots campaign by an Austrian performance art group to change the grape’s name, a December 2018 video segment produced by Austrian media company Kurier described red wines like zweigelt as the vessel in which Burgenland — Austria’s easternmost and rich wine region — “stores its gold.” In Burgenland, zweigelt is associated with red wine but not its Nazi creator, says a reporter, who ends the segment with a single, resounding question: Does Fredrich Zweigelt acquire more importance by this discussion than he’s entitled to?

“In our generation, zweigelt is not linked to the person Zweigelt,” says Austrian natural winemaker Werner Meinklang. For the Meinklang family farm, growing organic zweigelt is about as standard as a New Jersey farmer growing tomatoes in the summertime. He says that among those who know the history, nobody in Austria denies that Zweigelt was a Nazi. The question, then, for Meinklang and other winemakers, is how to acknowledge the grape’s history, if at all.

Much of 20th-century wine cultivation and trade in Central Europe was entwined with Nazi occupation and the rapid spreading of its ideology. In Germany, under the guidance of Gauleiter of Westmark — and eventual Reichsstatthalter (Governor) of Austria — Josef Bürckel, the military succeeded in building the Weinstrasse, a 53-mile road connecting the most prominent wineries along the Rhine, all the way up to the French border. Bürckel, who would go on to lead the Reich’s efforts in annexing Austria, thought that by building a road to connect German vintners’ villages, he could boost wine sales across Germany. Officially opened in 1935, the Weintrasse holds the title of the oldest commercial wine trail in the world. Each September, the German village of Bad Durkheim, the site where Bürckel inaugurated his wine route, hosts a massive Oktoberfest-like festival. In 2015, CNN Travel called the trail a “best-kept secret,” stating that it might be a secret kept purposefully since many Germans seemed “reluctant to advertise it.”

Josef Bürckel opening the Weinstrasse in 1935.

While Nazi officers built wine trails across Europe, groups of occult Nazi agriculturists — whose work may, or may not, correlate to the production of what we know today as “natural wines” — began to take hold of Eastern Europe. Groups like the Reich League for Biodynamic Agriculture advocated for a landscape that fused both environmental and national sentiments; the League flourished under the quiet support of early occultist Heinrich Himmler, whose own home featured a biodynamic garden.

Established six months after the Nazis seized power in Germany, the League combined blood-and-soil ideology with practical arguments around the economic advantages of biodynamic farming methods. While some Nazis worked actively against bureaucrats backed by chemical industries, others argued that “cosmobiological knowledge” was a necessary pathway to attaining proper soil tillage. For the 1936 Summer Olympics, Berlin’s athletic fields were treated biodynamically, without artificial fertilizers and pesticides, relying instead on manure, compost, and a variety of homeopathic preparations meant to channel astral energies. Select Nazis even embraced anthroposophy, a central element of biodynamics, which presupposes the existence of an intellectually comprehensible spiritual world, accessible to humans. As historian Eric Kurlander writes in Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, “By drawing on the same currents of Lebensreform as the occult movement, anthroposophy — and its successful outgrowth, biodynamic agriculture — epitomized the deep antagonism toward conventional medicine and a strong conviction that modern life had damaged their souls and bodies.”

National Socialists gravitated toward organic growth of plants, fruit, and wine not merely because of their agreement with pseudo-science, but because it offered a means of political and social control over the land. As Peter Staudenmaier, a professor of German history at Marquette University, writes in Organic Farming in Nazi Germany: The Politics of Biodynamic Agriculture, 1933–1945, “it opens a new perspective on the tactics adopted by allegedly nonpolitical environmentalist networks attempting to accommodate themselves to a totalitarian state.”

“it’s not necessarily all that shocking to find that while some Nazis are fine-tuning organic farming practices,” Staudenmaier told me, “other Nazis are using highly industrialized methods to launch attacks over Eastern Europe or mass murder Jews.”

Fredrich Zweigelt might not have been a member of the Reich League for Biodynamic Agriculture, but he tried desperately to gain the approval of Adolf Hitler. Shortly after the Anschluss in 1938, in an editorial for Das Weinland, Zweigelt wrote: “Adolf Hitler, the Führer of us all, has saved his home country. Only those who have suffered the infinite pain and terrible subjugation of an alien system over a period of five long and bitter years will be able to appreciate what we Austrians have felt and experienced during these great days.”

In 1958, on his 70th birthday, Fredrich Zweigelt was honored with the eponymous naming of his hybrid grape by winemaker Lenz Moser. The last time Zweigelt spoke in public was to accept an award honoring his work with wine. In his acceptance speech, he spoke about grape hybridization, explaining that even the discovery of only one valuable new hybrid can pay handsomely.

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