Site and soils
The vineyard sits at about 360 to 375 meters of elevation on a gently pitched, south-facing slope, with an incline the records place in the single digits to low teens of degrees. It belongs to the alpine flysch zone that runs beneath Vienna's western hills. The bedrock is a sequence of dark, quartzitic flysch sandstones, variably weathered and variably calcareous, interbedded with clay- and marlstones. These were deep-sea sediments that tectonic uplift later folded into the Alps. They weather to mostly stony soils that hold and shed water well and carry comparatively little limestone. Proximity to the Wienerwald and the Danube gives the site warm days and cool nights, a diurnal swing the grower credits for the wine's fresh fruit aromas and retained acidity.
Classification and name
Seidenhaus is classified as a 1 ÖTW, an Erste Lage of the Österreichische Traditionsweingüter, Austria's grower-led ranking of top vineyards. In Vienna the classification is administered through the WienWein group, whose register lists Seidenhaus among the Erste Lagen of Grinzing; the site first appears on the association's vineyard maps in 1997. The name predates the classification. The land once belonged to the Cobenzl castle estate, where guests were received in a room hung with silk (Seide) wall coverings, and the vineyard took its name from that silk house.
The wine and its grower
Weingut Wien Cobenzl, the estate owned by the City of Vienna for more than a century, farms Seidenhaus and is its sole bottler, which makes the site effectively a monopole. The single wine is a dry Weißburgunder matured in small oak. In Cobenzl's own account it shows baked apple, pear, and almond over a citrus-edged finish, at around 13.5 percent alcohol and with roughly a decade of cellaring potential. Because one estate holds the entire hectare, the wine is a single house's reading of the flysch rather than a composite of many growers, as at Vienna's larger sites such as the Nussberg.