🍇 St. Georgen

St. Georgen is a white Vitis vinifera grape variety from Austria. The International Variety Catalogue VIVC (Julius Kühn-Institut) lists it under the prime name Mater Veltlinis, with St. Georgen as its only synonym. VIVC gives Austria as the country of origin and white (blanc) as the berry skin colour; it lists no breeder, no pedigree and no year.

The variety is known from a single old vine found at St. Georgen near Eisenstadt, at the Leithagebirge in Burgenland. According to the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture (BMLUK), the vine was submitted for genetic analysis in 2000, and the geneticists Regner and Hack concluded in 2009 that it is the previously unknown second parent of Grüner Veltliner, whose other parent is Traminer. The ministry states that the alleles of Grüner Veltliner and St. Georgen do not match perfectly at every locus, but that the descent is clearly recognisable on all 19 chromosomes.

The ministry describes the multiple, partly dead trunk of the vine and the assumed last planting of the plot, which suggest that it stood there for several centuries. The plot was last used as a vineyard in the Middle Ages and later served the farmers of St. Georgen as pasture. Comparisons of its genetic profile with databases in Hungary, Italy and Croatia have so far found no match, so the ministry regards it as an ancient native variety found until now in this one vine only. It adds that the find says nothing about the former distribution of the variety.