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Where well-heeled wine enthusiasts go to ski

11 December 2024 By Patrick Schmitt

While there are plenty of high-end Alpine ski resorts with fine restaurants, one in particular is positioning itself as the go-to for well-heeled wine enthusiasts.

That place is Lech am Arlberg in the Austrian alps, situated between Innsbruck and Zurich airports, and near St Anton, which is famous for its challenging pistes and vibrant après ski.

What sets Lech apart is its focus on providing an extensive, upscale and broad wine offer via its top 14 hotels, which actually compete in a ‘Best Bottle Award’ each year, which sees the winning outlet take home a trophy for serving the highest-scoring example of a particular wine style – following judging by critics and local sommeliers.

Such establishments stand out for their restaurants featuring large wine lists with not only an excellent offering of Austria’s finest wines, including mature examples, often bottled in large formats, but also a huge range of top labels from the world’s classic regions, such as Tuscany and Bordeaux, as well as Napa and Burgundy.

As I found out earlier this week, one of these outlets, the Hotel Burg, which is located in Oberlech – a car-less resort located a short gondola ride above Lech – has a cellar featuring as many as 4,500 different labels, amounting to 70,000 bottles.

These are worth an estimated €5 million, according to its head sommelier, Herman Lankmaier, who tells me that he regularly opens rare and valuable bottles during the ski season for a set of regulars who come to the hotel every year from around the world.

Within his cellar, which has a tasting table for customers, is an extensive collection of first growth Bordeaux and wines from Domaine de La Romanée-Conti, along with the largest bottle of Masseto in Austria.

Whatever you choose, Herman, like others in Lech, will serve it in the finest Austrian stemware – be it Riedel or Zalto, the leading glassmakers are from this nation.

Back in Lech itself, where I’m based as part of the Arlberg Weinberg symposium – which you can read more about here – I soon find out that there’s a similarly high standard of wine offering as witnessed further up the mountains.

According to Willi Balanjuk, Austrian wine critic and sommelier, one of the top places to find a wide array of great labels is Hotel Almhof Schneider, while he also highly rates the extensive and, in his view, relatively affordable list at Hotel Gasthof Post – a fantastic Relais & Châteaux famous for its high-profile guests, such as the Dutch and Norwegian royal families.

When I dine there as part of an Austrian Wine Marketing Board dinner, lined up outside one of Post’s private dining rooms are bottles of Hermitage La Chapelle, 10 years apart, with 2011 and 2021 sitting open. They’ve been decanted, ready for a hotel guest, who I’m later told is Delphine Prost Frey, sister of Domaine de la Chapelle’s president and winemaker, Caroline Frey

Meanwhile, Clemens Riedl, an Austrian IT entrepreneur who has his own fine wine business in Vienna called Trinkreif is also in town, and attending the Arlberg Weinberg event, and when I ask him what he rates in terms of fine wine dining, he mentions Griggeler Stuba in Oberlech’s Burg Vital Resort as a favourite.

As for the best place to eat in Lech, both Balanjuk and Riedl are agreed – that’s Rote Wand, a hotel and restaurant which has an outstanding wine collection too.

But even the outposts on the slopes serve serious wine. During a day’s skiing ahead of the symposium I stop for a coffee at a lone wooden building just visible above the snow. Called Kriegeralpe, the bar and restaurant situated at 2000m is serving the usual carb-rich dishes, but a wine list on the bare wooden tables catches my eye – and it’s extensive, with for example, alongside a bottle of Austrian Zweigelt for €45, the 2006 vintages of Masseto and DRC Richebourg for €1,280 and €3,680 respectively.

Later I find out this gem of a piste-stop is in fact owned and operated by the same team behind the Hotel Burg – the Lucian family – which explains the presence of such serious wines in this high-altitude hut.

Keeping these restaurants filled with high-spending wine enthusiasts are the impressive array of top-end hotels, with Lech offering as many 12,000 beds in winter (which drops to 3,000 in summer).

Speaking about the resort, Dorli Muhr, who heads PR firm Wine and Partners, which promotes the Arlberg Weinberb symposium, tells db that Lech is especially well set-up for the gourmand winter sport lover, “with wonderful wine cellars”, and now a new convention hall, which, it’s hoped, will bring more people to the resort for business, as well as pleasure.

Commenting that Lech also attracts many from the wine trade, she says that the resort is not far from the German, Swiss and Italian borders, and, she jokes, “closer to Burgundy than Burgenland” – referring to the Austrian wine region in the east of the country that’s famous for Chardonnay and red wines.

“Strategically it is in a good place, and there are fantastic restaurants with fantastic wine collections,” she says of Lech.

For this reason, she hopes to make the Weinburg Symposium in the first weeks of December “a fixed date for the trade”, giving wine professionals a chance to learn about the emerging trends in the production and handing of drinks, surrounded by the steeply-rising mountains of the Austrian alps.

And, when they are not learning about wine, there’s the chance to indulge in Lech’s wine dining scene, as well as ski in the morning on the vast network of Arlberg’s pistes.

If there’s one small complaint about Lech’s high-end drinks offer, it comes from some of those producing Austrian wine – they want the top somms of Lech to be as proud pouring the local produce as they are the great wines of France, Italy and the US.

Having said that, this year, when Lech’s top 14 hotels and restaurants were asked to put forward samples for the Best Bottle Award, all but two of them were from Austria.

As for the winner, it too was from the host nation: Tement’s Ried Zieregg Vinothek 2017 Styrian Sauvignon Blanc, entered by Hotel Sandhof.