It is my first time at Root Time, the intimate weekender hosted by Gut Oggau, the renowned winery in Burgenland and all about „food for thoughts“
– This is my personal review.
3:45 AM.
The alarm rips me out of a dreamless and way to short night. Hung over from last nights wine, I am fumbling for my socks in the dark. The world hasn’t started yet, but apparently, we have. By 4:30, ten semi-strangers turned co-travelers from all over the world gather in hushed silence outside the winery. We pedal toward the vineyards on e-bikes, surrounded by a light that looks like out of a Terrence Malick film. My body protests while the huge mosquitos of Burgenland try to test me. Head’s still heavy but something about this pilgrimage cuts through the hangover.
We arrive at the vine yard as the horizon starts to tremble. A collective exhale. Then silence. Meditation. Eduard seems like a conductor of space, not music. The birds chirp and the sun rises exactly after the meditation ritual. The perfect moment!
“Everything is connected,” Eduard had told us the day before. At the time, it felt like a pleasant abstraction. Now, standing between the soil and sky, watching gold light spill over the vineyard, it feels like the only truth that matters.
The 5:01 Ritual
We begin to stir. Literally.
Buckets of water. Ten people standing in a circle like an esoteric start-up ritual. Stir. Vortex. Reverse. Repeat. It’s the 5:01 ritual. The motion is hypnotic, oddly grounding.
What started out feeling like a parody of a new-age cult starts to shift. No commandments. No preaching. No one telling you what to think. No one trying to sell salvation in a bottle. Instead, it’s all invitation. „Take it or leave it — but see it first.“ “Biodynamics is not about belief. It’s about seeing the impact when you take that extra step. It’s about respect. It’s about rhythm and balance. No hocus pocus.”
Seems like rhythm is everything out here.
Food for Thoughts
Eduard and Stephanie don’t serve knowledge. They plant it. “Harmony. Balance. Holistic circle.” These aren’t just words printed on an organic label. They’re living systems here.The atmosphere is as much a player as the grape. The soil holds memory like an archive. The plants are not passive.
„They reach for the sun and simply every step counts,” Eduard says as we walk through the rows of vines. “If you respect the steps, you’ll see the quality in the fruit.” It’s not dogma, it’s design. Not rigid rules, but an ancient logic trying to remember itself through us.
Ancient Logic, Modern Relevance
We talk about agriculture, but not the kind Monsanto wants you to think about. We go waaaayyyyyy back!
Before industrial farming. Before synthetic fertilizers. Before the land was something to be “managed.” We talk about the history of agriculture like a lost art. Eduard references Manfred Klett and Doettenfelderhof, Max Planck and..of course…Rudolf Steiner. Platonic years, ascending and descending moons, and the four elements.“Plants are the game changers,” he says. I scribble it down. They don’t just grow. They translate. Between cosmic rhythm and earthly reality. They are antennas. They read the stars and channel them into sugar and acid and juice.
Eduard offers his knowledge without preaching. “Learn to live from mother, learn to die from father.” It hangs in the air like a koan. Nature can be very brutal.
The No-Cellar Philosophy
“We focus on the vineyard, not the cellar.” That’s the thing. No fancy tricks. No hiding behind tech. The Gut Oggau method is to trust the land. Trust the plant. The cellar is where the wine rests, not where it’s manipulated.
Same process for all colors. Red. White. Orange. Rosé. “It’s not about varietal anymore,” Stephanie told me over a glass. “It’s about energy.” Wine is liquid time. Liquid sunshine. A distilled year. A memory of the weather, the soil, the spirit of the people who made it.
The days bleed together in the best way. After lunch we bike again. Now we listen and talk about biodynamics, cosmic rhythm, and adaptation and Piwis (fungus-resistant hybrid grape varieties). Eduard sees them as part of the future. Not as compromise but as part of adaption and evolution. “You have to adapt. But adaptation doesn’t mean losing the core. It means protecting it.” We talk about climate change. Fungus. Risk. Reward. Legacy. But it never feels like a TED Talk. It’s dinner-table philosophy with an honest background.
What Root Time Was (and Wasn’t)
It wasn’t a workshop. It wasn’t a lecture series. It wasn’t a retreat. It was am mix, never boring and more like stepping into a parallel world, a 50minutes drive from my hometown, Vienna. No fancy PowerPoints. No musts. No scientific proofs either. Lots of feelings and agricultural truth from thousands of years. It was waking up early to see the sun and falling asleep late with a belly full of natural wine, great food and good stories.
“It’s not about right or wrong,” Eduard said on after the last breakfast. “It’s not about believing in the moon or hocus pocus. It’s about paying attention. Everything matters. And if you care, it shows.”
