Romanée-Conti by the glass

‘Many guests come to us because of the wine list,’ he says today. He offers 2,500 wines in the two-star Ösch Noir restaurant alone, many of which are absolutely top-end: ‘There isn’t a single wine on the menu that I don’t know.’ If you ask Häni what his three favourite wine regions are, the answer is: ‘Burgundy, Burgundy, and Burgundy.’ He sometimes serves rarities like Domaine Romanée-Conti by the glass. Last year, the figure was 220 bottles in total. He offers two wine pairings to accompany the menu at Ösch Noir: Altes Handwerk (old craft) focuses on the fashionable natural wine scene, while Grand Cru features fine and rare wines such as the 2014 Chambertin Grand Cru from Armand Rousseau or the 2012 Château Mouton-Rothschild from Bordeaux. In total, there are 3,000 labels in the luxury resort’s cellar, and Häni curates a separate menu for each of the four restaurants: sometimes purely Italian to go with brick-oven pizza in the Hexenweiher restaurant, sometimes with a focus on Germany and Austria for the Alpine hut-styled event location.

Häni, who grew up on a farm, discovered his love of wine at hotel management school in Lucerne. He deepened his knowledge over ten years at the Baur au Lac in Zurich, where he also learned French. He has the Öschberghof’s position as part of the Aldi empire to thank for his access to the whole world of wine when he shops for his wine cellar. The Albrecht family laid the foundation stone for today’s top-end resort in the countryside near Donaueschingen, at the foothills of the Black Forest, back in 1976. Schaffhausen is just 30 minutes away by car. ‘Forty percent of our guests come from Switzerland,’ says General Manager Michael Artner. ‘In the summer months, it’s even up to 70%.’ They appreciate the fairly priced wine list, although there are only a few Swiss winegrowers on it, most notably Gantenbein, Besson-Strasser, and Donatsch. Häni prefers to share discoveries with his fellow countrymen that are rare in Switzerland, such as Pinots from California’s Sonoma Coast or the extremely hard-to-get wines of the cult German winemaker Hans Erich Dausch, who cultivates just one hectare of land in the Palatinate region: ‘I’ve never drunk a better Pinot from Germany,’ he says.