FX Pichler

The F.X. Pichler family wine estate is now in its seventh generation. Lucas Franz Pichler (*1973) and his wife Johanna Elisabeth (*1982) currently manage the winery, with Lucas Franz in the role of managing director, wine grower and oenologist, and Johanna Elisabeth being in charge of sales, marketing and export.
Franz Xaver (*1941) and Rudolfine (*1951) Pichler are still actively involved in the family business and can be found working in the vineyards, which they cultivate with dedication and experience.
The family can look back on a long tradition of winemaking. During the middle of the 19th century, the winegrower Franz Pichler II moved his family from the wine-growing village of Rohrendorf near Krems to the Wachau Valley. His grandson Franz Pichler VI later acquired a property in Oberloiben, in commune of Dürnstein, in the year 1898. It was in this very wine cellar in Oberloiben No. 27, that global wine success was written right up until the 2008 vintage.
In the year 1906, Franz Xaver’s (F.X.) father was born into the winemaking family. As a vintner, he studied the quality of vineyards and diligently recorded his observations of the growth and quality of individual grapevines into his notebook. Thus, his selection massale (Massal Selection – the French term for the practice of replanting new vineyards with cuttings), enabled him to identify the most outstanding Grüner Veltliner vines from each vineyard and then propagated new vines from that budwood. He began in 1928 and continued until 1952.
Towards the end of the 1930s, he was also a founding member of the winegrowers’ cooperative (Winzergenossenschaft) in Loiben, which was established to ensure the economic survival of the numerous small winegrowers in the town.
Now in the seventh generation, Lucas Franz carries on with the family tradition as a winemaker and attended the Krems viticulture school between 1988 and 1992. He is grateful to his father, Franz Xaver, for passing down his colossal knowledge and decades of experience and dedication to exceptional wine quality.