Friday, April 25, 2025 – Sunday, April 27: Spring is usually well underway by the time the Ruster winemakers open their cellars at the end of April—the perfect time to combine wine tasting with a lakeside vacation. This event is in high demand, so be sure to secure your accommodations early, because “Weinschätze” is one of the few—and therefore highly prized—opportunities to sample a wide variety of wines in a completely hassle-free setting. Nearly 30 Ruster winemakers—many of whom are often inaccessible without advance registration for tastings—open their cellars and offer their wines for tasting. For just under EUR 30, you get a wristband (like on a club vacation) and can taste as much wine as you like for three days. The winemakers pull out all the stops, and some even offer, for example, a vertical tasting spanning several vintages of their most famous wines. It’s a good idea to keep careful notes on which wines you particularly enjoyed so that on Sunday (which is usually the day most guests make their purchases), you’ll still know what you want to buy. However, there’s no obligation to buy. The actual tastings take place on Friday and Saturday; on Sunday, many winemakers don’t open their doors to the public but are available only for wine purchases—so you can pick up the wines you tasted on the previous days.
In addition, there are, of course, wine-themed tasting menus, and by the end of April, it usually feels like early summer—so you can head out onto the lake from my lakeside cabins in an electric boat or pedal boat and enjoy the gentle rocking of the waves in the sun. It’s therefore a good idea to stay for 3 nights so you have enough time for the wine tastings while still stilt houses a taste of the lake and the Burgenland atmosphere at the stilt houses . For me personally, April and May are the most beautiful months at the stilt houses because nature is in the midst of awakening. The frogs and birds are loud, there are no mosquitoes, and the weather is almost always early-summer-like without being too hot.