Birdland breaks ground
Wine connoisseurs and local dignitaries celebrate the launch of Birdland
On 25 June, we celebrated a moment we had been working towards for a long time: the groundbreaking ceremony for BIRDLAND Winery in Apetlon. After years of preparation, an ambitious idea is now becoming a tangible place. A place where we want to create wines that are unmistakably rooted in the Seewinkel and help make the region known far beyond its borders. Our ambition is deliberately high: when wine lovers and connoisseurs in New York, London or Hong Kong talk about wine, we want BIRDLAND to become a natural part of that conversation. With the groundbreaking ceremony, we stepped into the public eye for the first time and took the first step on this journey.
Under typically Pannonian summer skies, people gathered in Apetlon who are already supporting and accompanying BIRDLAND, as well as those who were simply curious to see what is taking shape here. Managing Director Bert Jandl and Chief Winemaker Felix Åhrberg shared insights into the inspiration behind the winery and our ambition to combine international winemaking expertise with the distinctive character of this landscape. Among the guests were political dignitaries such as Apetlon Mayor Silvia Pitzl and Maximilian Köllner, Mayor of Illmitz and Member of the Austrian Parliament, as well as highly regarded winemakers from the region, including our neighbour Ernst Steindorfer, with whom we share a particularly close friendship. After the conversations, speeches and the ceremonial groundbreaking itself, the focus of the afternoon eventually shifted to where it should at any winery sooner or later: enjoying good company and tasting wine together.
Birdland: local value creation, global ambition
Although our winery is still under construction and many of our wines need more time, the day already offered a first taste of BIRDLAND. For the first time, we were able to present our Rosé — one of the first three wines with which BIRDLAND will make its debut in summer 2026 — to a wider audience. We were particularly delighted by the positive response from some of the region’s most respected wine connoisseurs. Here, in a region with a long winemaking tradition and an extraordinary depth of experience in the glass, such recognition carries particular weight. For us, this first tasting was therefore much more than a supplement of the groundbreaking programme: it was the first real-world test of the bigger idea behind BIRDLAND.
However international our ambitions may be, our starting point remains the Seewinkel. BIRDLAND is being created here for a reason. The Pohl family, who own the winery, have been closely connected to the region for decades; Bert Jandl knows it from almost three decades of working in tourism; and for our wines, too, this landscape is far more than simply a designation of origin. We want to help bring additional visitors to the region, forge even closer links between wine and tourism, and create local economic value. Our new winery at the entrance to Apetlon will therefore be more than a place of production; it will also be a place for tasting, meeting and exchange. Maximilian Köllner summed it up perfectly at the groundbreaking ceremony: Ultimately, a project like this should benefit not only Apetlon, but the entire region. With the groundbreaking, we have begun building towards exactly that.
