The old wine cellar

Renovation of a historic wine cellar

For centuries, in the beautiful region of Weinviertel near Vienna were a variety of wine cellars in the so-called Kellergassen - a piece of rural and preindustrial everyday culture.
In the wine cellars, also called press houses, the grapes from the surrounding vineyards were processed to Wines and sold then preferably in Vienna about 100 km away.


However, in recent decades, wine production has increasingly shifted to large storage halls with huge steel tanks right next to the houses of the winemakers. The beautiful old wine cellars with their restricted space offer and small wooden barrels are therefore used only for storrage, decay or fall victim to demolition.


It ́s a shame - for with every torn down wine cellar stories, memories, cheerful, reflective, sometimes also terrifying that the wine cellar keeps and likes to tell to the silent listener disappear forever. We, the Frank family, have been living in the small village of Niederschleinz (about 90km from Vienna) for more than 10 years such an approximately 200 year old wine cellar, in which we removed the grape juice from our 800 qm wine types to process wine, according to the season 200 - 400 litres. This is done with our orginal and still functional press, the technical principle of which has already been developed by ancient Egyptians.

But our wine cellar shows the 200 years and now a comprehensive renovation is due - so that the old walls are fit for the next centuries!

We make a 200-year-old piece of cultural heritage fit for the next centuries

The extensive refurbishment planned by us involves the complete exchange of the already «antique» electricity installation, drainage of the partial still orginal masonry, the outer roof, an interior walling of our cold roof, the complete tapping and plastering of interior walls, servicing or repair of small Machine parks and many more. This requires a lot of sweat and also money.

For this we need support

For the renovation of our old wine cellar, including the machines we need € 10,000. We can raise € 6,000 ourselves. For the remaining € 4,000 we ask you for friendly support - and are sure that the rewards for your generosity will be appreciated.

Plus, at the «Kellerfest 2019» (cellar celebration 2019) we also want to be present with an artistic project. This project will portray the people who have managed the cellar since 1820. We literally want to «bring them in front of the curtain». To do so we will search all Archive (county and national) for historical pictures of the previous owners of our cellar (photographs in a present sense exist since the 19th century). Maybe owners of other cellars will join the initiative, we will contact them during the upcoming weeks at the wine cellar association. Be a part of it!