An uninterrupted swathe of white stretches out before me down a long, meandering slope abutting a chair lift. There are no other skiers to be seen as I set off down the mountain, carving clean, broad turns through fluffy powder, letting out a whoop as it crackles beneath my skis. The run ends at an empty chairlift queue and I climb aboard, travelling up over empty pistes to create fresh tracks again; pretty much all day, in fact. Well, until lunchtime, that is, when we have a near-compulsory rosé tasting at 10,660ft above sea level. Yes, really.
I’m in Sölden, Austria, skiing over 90 miles of slopes across three mountain peaks and two glaciers in an almost-shut resort. The bulk of the mountain’s operations celebrated their closing party last week, and just myself and a few guests at Das Central hotel are skiing here alongside a smattering of locals in between glugs of wine as part of the hotel’s Wein am Berg (or, Wine on the Mountain) festival. If it sounds like a treacherous combination, that’s because it is.
The infinity pool at Das Central's gorgeous Summit Spa
Celebrating top wine growers from across Europe, Wein am Berg brings winemakers and chefs to the iconic Sölden hotel for a weekend of pure gluttony, with tastings of everything from crisp, powder-pink Provence rosés to welschriesling from Burgenland and magnums of gruner veltliner from Langenlois. There’s even a representative from Ferrari Trento, the sparkling wine producer I visited in the depths of a heatwave last year. It makes sense, of course, given the brand’s vineyard is just two and half hours drive from here in the foothills of the Dolomites, but its presence, to me, is so connected with balmy days strolling the vines and crisp glasses by the baking hot tarmac of the Monza F1 race circuit that it takes me a second the relate the brand to this winter wonderland.
The hotel hosting Wein am Berg, Das Central, is something of a stereotype, like if you asked a five-year-old with very good taste and an intermediate grasp of architecture to draw the quintessential Alpine hotel. An exercise of two halves, the building recently underwent a thorough renovation in time for the 23/24 ski season. The crowning jewel of that is the summit spa; the capacious bastion of wellness that occupies the rooftop level of the hotel and stretches high above the town with a hybrid indoor/outdoor, fully heated infinity pool.
Celebrating top growers from across Europe, Wein am Berg brings winemakers to the iconic Das Central hotel
This, however, is not the only spa at Das Central. There is also a sprawling, subterranean Venetian Spa below the edifice that dates back to the hotel’s early days. Where the upstairs spa is all floor-to-ceiling windows, high-tech steam rooms and the pervading sense that James Bond might stroll in at any moment (the 24th film in the series, Spectre, was filmed in Sölden), downstairs things are a little less. Clothing, that is. In true Austrian style, the hotel’s original spa is a textile-free zone, welcoming the body in its naked form under the assumption that unhygienic sweat molecules accumulate in swimsuits.
Whatever the science behind it, it turns out that the aforementioned high-altitude rosé tasting provided just enough liquid courage that after my morning ski session I find myself standing outside the spa’s doors, white knuckles gripping the ties of my bathrobe, appearing about as garishly un-European as is physically possible. I tentatively walk in and look around without really looking around lest I risk being labelled a pervert and thrown out the door. Towels, it seems, are a permitted textile, so I find a quiet corner and disrobe, quickly sheathing the edges of the terry cotton around myself at breakneck speed. Padding around the corridors, I see a few, erm, appendages, but find a relatively empty sauna to settle into. To my right, a couple I recognise from lunch seems to have dozed off. Directly opposite me, a man appears to be following some kind of meditative heavy-breathing technique. Adopting the philosophy that if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them, I carefully drop my towel to my waistline. Unsurprisingly, no one bats an eyelid.
Wine tasting on the mountain
After five minutes of sweaty semi-nudity, I decide that that’s enough excitement for one lifetime and head out in search of the spa where I’m allowed to keep my clothes on. Slipping into the rooftop hot pool to soothe my screaming muscles from the morning’s 19 cumulative miles of skiing, I take in the surrounding mountains as thick, feathery snowflakes fall from the sky. The season in Sölden is one of the longest in Europe, thanks to its immense elevation. With three mountains reaching over 9,800ft, the resort is almost ridiculously snow-sure, and powder hounds are guaranteed skiing from October until May. Sitting among fresh snowfall in mid-April, it’s easy to see why – the region ended up averaging two feet of snow across the weekend I’m there.
Limbs suitably liquified, I eventually draw my pruny body out of the warm water and head downstairs for the ‘kitchen party’ where chefs from around the world including Andy Beynon from London’s one-Michelin-starred Behind – are cooking tapas-sized dishes throughout the dining room and, unsurprisingly, in the kitchen, too. Magnums of wine circulate, tiny ice creams on a stick appear, and the night ends with a fuzzy memory of a conga line, an ill-advised round of tequila shots and a host of new friends, including a self-professed arms dealer. All of them have been visiting the hotel for years, and many treat owner Angelika Falkner like family.
The glass box gives the effect of hanging in mid-air, it’s easy to see why it’s a key location in Spectre
Thankfully, there are few hangover cures more effective than fresh snow and a session sweating it all out in the privacy of my in-room sauna. A blizzard is flurrying outside the window as I sit and attempt to forget the evils of the evening before but, thankfully, it has cleared by the time I rouse myself for the 9.30am trip up the mountain. It seems I’m not alone in having overindulged the evening before – my new friends tip their vats of coffee at me from behind huge sunglasses as I make my way onto the bus.
Any lingering headache is sorely booted out of the way when the clouds lift as the gondola crests the peak to the first unloading station at Giggijochbahn. What had been a thick lid on the town below is completely clear at this elevation, the sun sparkling off clear, untarnished powder. Skiing without anyone else around is a revelation. We fly down the slopes, making it back up to our favourites in record time. We follow our own swooping S shapes, create new ones, and are still left with scads of smooth, uninterrupted corduroy. We traverse on a gondola across to the Rettenbach glacier and get lost in a cloud, cautiously skiing through a whiteout. I hit a lump of snow the size of a boulder and go flying, somehow keeping hold of all my limbs and avoiding a concussion. We navigate around a closed slope, ski a few miles in the wrong direction and eventually make our way to lunch at the astounding Ice Q restaurant just as they’re calling final orders. Panting and gasping, the inside of my helmet is slick with sweat and my legs are like jelly. It is comfortably one of the best days of skiing I’ve ever had.
Cooling down comes easy, though. On the terrace, with a glass of Pino 3000 in hand – the wine made by Das Central with grapes from Paul Achs in Burgenland, Dr Heger in Germany and St Pauls in South Tyrol, which gets its name from the 3,048-metre altitude at which it is aged, in the cellar below the restaurant I’m sitting at – I let the mountain chill cool my wearied bones and take in the view of the precipitous peaks beyond. The glass box of a restaurant gives the effect of hanging in mid-air, and it’s easy to see why they chose this as a key location in Spectre. It is, after all, remote, high up, and advantageously positioned so that you can see any enemy coming – yes, even Bond. At this moment, though, I’m grateful it’s a restaurant that serves wine rather than an evil genius’s clinic. Its painkilling effects are proving necessary, particularly because we have to relive all the fun and gulosity of the night before doing it all over again.
Fireworks at the end of the festival
Bigger and better, the ‘big bottle party’ launches things to new heights, taking place at 7,200ft above sea level in a restaurant at the top of the Giggijoch gondola and serving wine solely from bottles larger than magnum in size. Each chef has whipped up a trio of dinky dishes so you can walk around and try everything. Andy Beynon’s crab, turnip and tarragon is a revelation; rich, silky sauce hums with the flavour of brown crab meat, while sweet little flakes of the white meat bring the whole thing together. A deceptively simple char ceviche with rhubarb, apple, grape and pickled elderberry from Austrian chefs Michael Ploner and Oliver Mijic is as bright and delicious as the temperatures are low outside. There’s lamb belly with figs and buckwheat, leek heart and sweet bread with a genre-bending oat milk caramel miso, and a delicate tartlet of beef tartare topped with a carabinero prawn and kimchi.
For each plate of food, there’s a glass of wine from an impossibly large bottle – gruner veltliner from Bründlmayer, chardonnay from Kollwentz in Burgenland, and infinite refills of Domaine Ott’s rosé from the vineyard’s representative who, at some point in the night, marked me out as the group’s lush and topped up my glass from a magnum every time he walked past.
The evening culminates with an equally mammoth fireworks display, climaxing in a luminous crescendo that seems to blow the sky wide open. It’s a fitting punctuation to a weekend of highs, one that sought out all definitions of luxury, from the glut of exceptional wine, both on solid ground and at the tip of sweeping massifs, poured from bottles big and small, and the abundance of food cooked by chefs from across Europe, to the simple joy of an empty ski slope and fresh snow, and the bare joy of marinating in the sauna in the buff.
