“Vinegar dad,” “culinary ambassador,” “taste fanatic”: there are many labels for Viennese entrepreneur Erwin Gegenbauer, 65, and they’re all fitting. But the impression you get after meeting him and visiting his remarkable factory in Vienna’s 10th district is, more than anything, that of an alchemist devoted to creating, blending, and fermenting vinegars of exceptional, unmistakable quality. He prefers to call himself “the world’s smallest vinegar producer.” That may well be true, but it’s also true that his vinegars are loved by top chefs like Massimo Bottura and used in the kitchens of the finest Michelin-starred restaurants. His workshop is equipped with modern tools made from natural materials: bottles, demijohns, glass flasks, oak barrels, carboys, stills \u2014 custom-built equipment designed by him, including a special “Gegenbauer fermenter.” His vinegars are pure: not pasteurized, not filtered, not diluted.<\/p>\n
The catalogue includes around 70 vinegars made from wine (Cabernet, Sauvignon, Riesling, Merlot, and so on), fruit (including the Japanese citrus yuzu), vegetables, and aromatic herbs \u2014 essentially every fruit and vegetable nature has to offer. What matters most is preserving the natural aroma and flavor, the purity of the production process, and the quality of the ingredients. Only excellent products, picked at exactly the right point of ripeness, grown on organic, monitored farms that follow the Gegenbauer code of practice. When harvesting apples, for instance, he starts with the fields most exposed to the sun, facing south, before moving on to the ones facing north. Twelve kilos of raspberries go into a single liter of raspberry vinegar. Only when these quality standards are met is Gegenbauer willing to bottle his vinegars \u2014 otherwise they go down the drain. Turning raw ingredients into the finished product is a painstaking process: the fruit or vegetable is fermented until it becomes alcohol, which is then fermented again into vinegar. Aging takes a minimum of three years, with an acidity of 6 degrees for wine vinegars (5 for fruit vinegars), compared with the 12 degrees commonly used elsewhere and then diluted down to 6 with water. The bacteria are crucial too \u2014 he has around 600 strains, which he selects and tends to personally. Gegenbauer also produces beer, oils (pressed from fruit seeds), and coffee, imported from Trieste and roasted in-house. Prices vary depending on production time and cost: from 13 euros (250 ml) for the simplest vinegars (apple) up to 150 euros (100 ml) for the noble vinegars (Traminer, Bouvier), which age for eight years and are so special and prized for their bittersweet flavor that they can be served as a digestif. Until a few years ago Gegenbauer also made balsamic vinegars, but he stopped because of the flood of fake brands padded out with additives, sugar, and caramel coloring, bearing labels boasting years of aging that simply weren’t true. Instead, he created his “house sweet vinegars,” true elixirs for the senses made through a complex two-year process followed by three more years of aging. There are about twenty of them (date, pear, fig, sour cherry, raspberry, banana), priced around 38 euros for 250 ml.<\/p>\n
The family history spans two centuries: from founding grandfather Ignaz Gegenbauer, to father Erwin, and on to him, Erwin junior, the last in line, who overhauled the company’s core business while keeping the name alive like a true dynasty. The grandfather was a sauerkraut merchant who made his own kraut with vinegar and sold it from wooden barrels at markets. After the First World War, when supplies ran short, he started producing vinegar as well. Between the two wars, amid widespread poverty, sauerkraut was a precious food for the working class because it was rich in vitamin C, and the family business thrived. In 1929, grandfather Ignaz founded a factory in Vienna’s 10th district, Favoriten \u2014 a working-class district, today multicultural. It’s the same site, since extensively renovated, where his grandson Erwin now works and lives today with his wife and children (Waldgasse 3).<\/p>\n
In the 1960s, Erwin’s father gave up vinegar production and invested in jarred vegetables \u2014 sauerkraut, pickles, peppers \u2014 which he produced in factories in Bavaria and Czechoslovakia and sold through supermarkets. At the height of the business he had 650 employees. As a young man, Erwin junior studied economics and business, spent long stretches abroad (Paris, London, New York), and eventually returned to Vienna in 1987, when he took over running the company. “I was rich and would have made every mother-in-law proud \u2014 I went around in a pinstripe suit like a manager, but I wasn’t free.” Today he’s more likely to be found in work overalls, or eccentric outfits of his own choosing. In 1992 his father handed him the company. But market pressure to cut prices and quality, along with grueling negotiations with industrial buyers, pushed him toward a radical decision: sell off the plants in Bavaria and the Czech Republic, get out of the pickle business, and dedicate himself to his true passion \u2014 quality vinegar. Naturally, the best in the world. His ambition wasn’t unfounded. As a child, his father had taken him along on trips to the vinegar cellars of Modena, the home of balsamic vinegar. Those smells and aromas laid the foundation for his calling.<\/p>\n
Rather than calling it an art, Gegenbauer prefers to talk about “passion, the joy of what I do.” He describes himself as “a conservator of aroma.” “I’m not an environmentalist, but we’ve destroyed our planet \u2014 I want to produce things in a way that lets future generations live the way we do.” In other words, without destroying anything, respecting the environment and nature. His multi-level factory, spread between a rooftop terrace and catacomb-like cellars, also houses a shop for tastings and sales, where exquisite samples are doled out drop by drop with a pipette. It runs on a circular, self-sufficient model. On the terrace he’s installed agrivoltaic panels which, besides storing energy, allow him to grow the aromatic herbs used in his vinegars and oils right underneath. He also tends plants, keeps a henhouse and bees, and uses ancient, untreated grains dating back to the Stone Age (einkorn and emmer wheat) that he buys in for fermentation, muesli, and bread. Indeed, Gegenbauer has even opened five rooms as an “urban farm stay” (minimalist Japanese design, very elegant), so that for breakfast he can offer guests his own house coffee and muesli. For retail, he also has a stand at the Naschmarkt, Vienna’s historic market, where his father once sold sauerkraut and which has since become a multi-ethnic boutique market. The Gegenbauer brand is now a byword for excellence. He could turn it into an empire and become very rich, but he doesn’t want to: harmony and perfection are enough for him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Vinegar dad,” “culinary ambassador,” “taste fanatic”: there are many labels for Viennese entrepreneur Erwin Gegenbauer, 65, and they’re all fitting. But the impression you get after meeting him and visiting his remarkable factory in Vienna’s 10th district is, more than anything, that of an alchemist devoted to creating, blending, and fermenting vinegars of exceptional, unmistakable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7738,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":17,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7605"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7740,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7605\/revisions\/7740"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}