Austria's Oldest Wine Cellar Hides in a Bishop's Castle

The wine cellar is not the best-kept secret at Schloss Seggau. The wine cellar is the reason there is a Schloss Seggau at all. I did not know that when I drove up the wooded hill above Leibnitz in April 2024, bag on my shoulder, expecting a pretty castle hotel with a cellar tacked on for the tourists. The Sauvignon Selection by Concours Mondial de Bruxelles had brought me south that week to judge Sauvignon Blanc, and Schloss Seggau was our home on the hill. Two nights later I understood I had it backwards. This is not a castle that happens to own a few vineyards. It is a wine estate that spent nine hundred years quietly turning itself into a castle.

Here is how a castle taught me to tell its story back to front, in the order I actually met it: a bell, a cellar, a wall full of Romans, and a view that explained the lot.

A bell the size of a small car opens the evening

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1. Schloss Seggau Brut Österreichischer Sekt, the first glass in the courtyard, poured the moment the bell stopped ringing. 96/100
2. The Seggauer Liesl, cast in 1688, still opens the evening in the courtyard.

On the first evenings there, the aperitif was called not by a waiter but by a bell. I was standing in the upper courtyard, glass in hand, when the Seggauer Liesl began to swing above us, and the sound reached my chest before it reached my ears. She is the largest historic bell in Styria, cast in 1688 in this very courtyard, well over five tonnes of bronze that still takes four strong people to set moving by hand on Sundays and feast days. Nobody had warned me. One moment there was polite chatter in the low evening sun, the next the whole hill was ringing and every conversation stopped mid-sentence to listen.

The glass that opened my stay was the estate's own sparkling: a Schloss Seggau Brut Österreichischer Sekt, fine beaded and bone dry, all green apple and citrus pith, the kind of pour that makes you stand up a little straighter. I scored it 96 out of 100. A castle that opens the evening by ringing a bell the size of a small car over your head, then hands you its own sparkling, is not trying to be subtle, and I loved it for exactly that.

The cellar that refuses to go underground

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1. The vaulted cellar, laid for a Styrian Night, exactly where the wine has always been made.
2. Wolfgang Schauer, the winemaker, in the green of Styria, in the cellar that funds the whole castle.
3. A little bunny, painted on a rock in the old Roman wall by the Weinkeller.

Every serious wine cellar I had visited before Seggau had one thing in common: a staircase down. You descend into the cool and the dark, because that is how you hold wine at temperature. Seggau ignores this completely. Its enormous Baroque episcopal wine cellar was built standing free in the open ground between 1693 and 1697, under Prince-Bishop Rudolph Joseph Count of Thun, and it sits above ground to this day. The clever part is on the outside: builders later piled roughly 1.5 metres of gravel and clay against the southern wall, so the earth insulates the room without ever burying it. It works. Walking in from a mild spring evening, the temperature drops the way it should, only you have not gone down a single step.

Then the scale hits you. The room runs 75 metres long, 8 wide and 8.5 high, a brick barrel-vault that disappears into the distance like a cathedral nave lined with wine. Thirty-six historic oak barrels stand along it, the largest holding 12,000 litres on its own, and somewhere in the half-dark there are bottles still resting from 1929. It is counted among the oldest episcopal wine cellars in the world and the largest in Europe and standing in the middle of it you stop thinking about architecture and start thinking about time.

While I was walking down the wall towards the Weinkeller, on my way to the Styrian Night, I stopped to call my grandfather. It was his birthday, and I know how much he loves Austria. Still on the phone, I was wandering the last stretch before the cellar door, looking at the vegetation grown over the old Roman wall, when a little bunny on a rock stared right back at me. I smiled. It gave me a small lift; the same one I got from telling my "Opa" where I was and what I was about to walk into.

We were there for a Styrian Night, and it is the correct way to meet a cellar like this. Fifteen or twenty Styrian wine houses set themselves up along the vault between the barrels, each pouring their own bottles, candlelight doing half the work and a band playing traditional Austrian music somewhere behind the casks. I roamed from grower to grower with a glass in my hand and a few bites to keep me upright, and though I wasn't hungry yet, they were too good not to touch. Wolfgang Schauer of Weingut Schauer worked the room in the green loden jacket that is practically the regional uniform, though the exact green is specific to his family, a bit like a crest, the way each house here cuts its own Lederhosen style. You cannot recreate that in a tasting room. The cellar is the story.

Down the hill to dinner, and a soprano in the Schlosskeller

Not every meal happened up in the castle. One evening the judges' dinner was held down the hill at the Schlosskeller Südsteiermark, and getting there meant walking down from the Schloss past the Wirtschaftshof, the low working buildings where the whole estate was once run. Long before Seggau was a hotel, this was where the wine was stored, the horses were stabled and the supplies came in, while the bishops entertained their dignitaries in the rooms above. In the last of the evening light it still looks like exactly what it is: the engine room that kept a castle fed.

The Schlosskeller is not the castle's own restaurant, and that is part of the story. It is a traditional tavern that sits just below Schloss Seggau on the road up the hill, taken over and restored by the Gady family and run by chef Markus Rath. What he has built there is really two restaurants under one roof: a Wirtshaus doing South Styrian classics like Backhendl and Bratl properly, and a separate gourmet room where dinner is a five or seven course surprise menu.* The cellar runs to more than 500 wines, most of them from the hills you can see off the terrace. For a place that translates as "castle cellar", it is worth knowing it sits above ground, with a view over Leibnitz and the vineyards rather than a vault.

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1. The Schlosskeller Südsteiermark, the tavern just below Schloss Seggau where the judges' dinner was held.
2. An amuse to open, poured during the walk-in tasting before we sat down.
3. Asparagus with char and peas, the first of the four courses.
4. Chianina beef with morel and nettle.
5. Rhubarb with quark and violet, to finish.

Our dinner turned into the kind of night you do not forget. Wein Steiermark had built a four-course menu around its own wines: asparagus with char and peas to open, then a soft-boiled egg with potato, spinach and Stollen cheese, Chianina beef with morel and nettle, and rhubarb with quark and violet to finish. Each course arrived with two Austrian wines chosen to sit beside it, from an Albrecher Südsteiermark DAC Sauvignon Blanc through to a Kracher Red Roses Rosenmuskateller Trockenbeerenauslese for pudding. Halfway through the meal a soprano stood and sang, opera drifting between the courses. One of the wines poured that night was a Blauerwildbacher Blanc de Blanc called Sopran, which nobody seemed to have planned and everybody was glad of. After a day of spitting Sauvignon Blanc into buckets, this was the region quietly reminding me what all that wine is actually for.

* Updated on revising this piece in 2026: since that dinner the Schlosskeller has earned Michelin recognition, a star for the gourmet room and a Bib Gourmand for the Wirtshaus, plus six Gault&Millau toques between the two kitchens. None of it existed when I ate there, as the Michelin guide only returned to Austria in 2025, but worth knowing if you are booking now.

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1. Albrecher Südsteiermark DAC Sauvignon Blanc, poured beside the opening course. 95/100
2. Kracher Red Roses Rosenmuskateller Trockenbeerenauslese 2021, the sweet wine for pudding. 95/100
3. Friedrich Blanc de Blanc Sopran, the sparkling that shared the soprano's name. 92/100

Wine did not decorate this place. It paid for it.

Here is the part visitors walk straight past while they photograph the barrels. The cellar is not old because Austrians happen to like a drink. The cellar is old because wine was the money. Grapes have grown on this hill for more than a thousand years, and for most of that time the vineyards were the estate's working engine: the income that paid the clergy, the workers, the repairs, the whole apparatus of a bishopric. Viticulture was never a charming sideline added once the tourists arrived. It was the balance sheet. The bishops kept a castle because the wine let them, and the estate still farms around 8 hectares of its own vineyards today, which means the arrangement that built the place has never actually stopped.

Once you see it that way, the whole castle rearranges itself in front of you. Every hall, every restored ceiling, every metre of that ridiculous cellar was, at some point, paid for in Sauvignon Blanc.

Three castles that learned to share a hill

Seggau does not feel like a single fortress, and there is a good reason for that: it never was one. The upper castle was built by the archbishops of Salzburg in the 12th century as an administrative stronghold, and in 1218 Archbishop Eberhard II founded the diocese of Seckau and made Seggau its episcopal seat. Over the centuries three separate fortified complexes, the Salzburg castle, the Seckau bishops' residence and neighbouring Schloss Polheim, gradually grew into one another until they became the sprawling thing you walk through now. That is why it reads more like a small stone village than a tidy medieval castle. When you lose your way in the corridors, and you will, it helps to remember you are wandering through what were once three buildings slowly agreeing to become one.

A courtyard wall that is also a Roman graveyard

I turned a corner into the upper courtyard and stopped, because the wall was full of faces. Roman faces. Long before any bishop, this hill looked down on Flavia Solva, one of the most important Roman towns in what is now Austria, and its cemeteries left the ground thick with carved stone. When the old castle tower was taken down between 1815 and 1830, builders kept finding Roman funerary monuments that had been reused centuries earlier as ordinary rubble. Rather than throw them back on the pile, they saved them: Kaspar Harb catalogued the stones, and Bishop Roman Zängerle had the finest of them arranged into the courtyard walls between 1828 and 1832, modelled deliberately on the Vatican's own lapidarium.

The result is one of Austria's great open-air collections of Roman stone, more than a hundred monuments set where the weather can still touch them. Some show whole families. Some show soldiers. Some carry Latin that records a life lived here nearly two thousand years ago. Nobody hands you a headset or a velvet rope. You simply walk past forty generations on your way to dinner, which is a very Seggau way to treat the extraordinary: leave it in the wall and let the wine be the headline.

A chapel built to be felt, not admired

The castle chapel does not do restraint. Step inside and the Baroque decoration comes at you from every direction: white stucco worked into clouds and angels until the solid stone seems to move, painted panels overhead, gilding catching whatever light gets through the tall windows. It should be too much. It is exactly as much as it was meant to be. The Baroque church wanted worshippers to feel heaven rather than politely observe it, and Seggau's chapel still delivers that the moment you cross the threshold, no belief required. I stood in the doorway far longer than I meant to. It is emotional storytelling, carved into plaster three hundred years before anyone put the phrase on a marketing slide.

The view that explains the whole castle

Walk out to the terrace and the reason for all of it opens up below you. Schloss Seggau is not perched on a knife-edge cliff like the fortresses in the storybooks. It sits, broad and comfortable, on a wooded rise above the Sulm valley, and from up here you can see exactly why the bishops chose it: the vineyards, the trade routes, the soft green approaches from the south, all of it laid out and legible. This was never really a military position. It was a seat from which to watch over the land and one of Austria's most productive wine regions at the same time. The castle looks the way Südsteiermark itself feels, less about grandeur and more about the long, patient marriage of the church, the hill and the grape.

I drove down the hill two days later still turning the same thought over. We tell the story of places like this back to front. We lead with the walls and the bishops and the Baroque, and we mention the wine last, as if it were the gift shop. Seggau taught me to flip it. The walls are magnificent, the Roman stones are humbling, the chapel is a genuine gasp. But the vineyards are why any of it survived. Strip out the wine and this is a ruin with a good view. Keep the wine and it is what it has been for a thousand years: a working estate that happens to wear a castle.

This is not a castle with a wine cellar. It is a wine estate that never stopped being one.

So, if you are building a route through Südsteiermark, do not file Seggau under sightseeing. Book a night, save up for it, it is not cheap, let the bell open your evening, and go down, or rather along, into the cellar. It is the rare wine destination where the history and the wine turn out to be the same story. And if you want the rest of that story, the wineries, the vineyards and the wines I met on this trip, they are waiting in the other stops of this Südsteiermark series.

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Margot van Lieshout DipWSET FWS RV

Wine marketeer, sales expert with over 20 years in the trade, public speaker and international wine judge. Thousands of wines scored from Steiermark to Ningxia, and a trade she knows from the inside out. Wine with Margot is where she helps wine brands tell the stories that sell them.

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