“It became clear to me that owning a vineyard is something very special.”

While we are talking, Elisabeth Born’s phone rings. Someone wants to book a vineyard tour and a tasting. Anyone who has walked up the steep vineyard and back down again will have a rather different relationship with the wine sparkling in their glass in the sun, as the Born family knows. Their father used to give guided tours of the vineyard and Jochen and his wife Elisabeth are the fifth generation of the family to grow vines here. They took over in 2010 from Günter Born. Until 1990, Günter was an electrical engineer at the Buna plant in Schkopau and then he founded his vineyard. He was the first member of the family to go into winemaking full time. Elisabeth Born remembers it being a lot of work. While she was growing up, there was very little free time and hardly any holidays. Why did she still decide to continue the family business?

“I was crowned wine princess in Höhnstedt,” she explains, “and for the first time I met girls f my own age who came from winegrowing families. I realized that owning a vineyard is something very special, particularly as this wasn’t even possible in the days of the GDR.” Private winemakers had to give up their vineyards to agricultural cooperatives or supply their grapes to the winemaking cooperative in Freyburg. The wines went to delicatessen stores and luxury hotels in the former East Germany, but were rarely available to ordinary people. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, winemakers like Günter Born found it hard to put their quality wines from Germany’s northernmost winegrowing area on the market. But the Saale-Unstrut region is now well known for its 1000-year history of winemaking. If “Saale-Unstrut-Wein” appears on the label, it means the content of the bottle is something special — from lively, fruity whites to soft, velvety reds.

Echtzeit - Online Magazin - “Our wines are full of positive emotions”