About eight years ago we moved from Vienna to Gross-Schweinbarth, a village about 30km or 20mi north of Vienna. We had used Geraldine’s share of her parents’ estate to purchase a 30-year old house on 1600 sqm of land, as well as the attached, rather dilapidated “Presshaus” or wine cellar (empty, unfortunately). To the right (west) of our wine cellar were two others, and on the western border of our property one of our neighbours, a winegrower, produced his wines.
A year ago this neighbour approached us and said he wanted to buy our winecellar as well as the other two next to it, as he needed more space for his wine production. We declined, as we did not want the view from our kitchen window to be obstructed, so he ended up coming to terms with the owner of the other two cellars and has just started construction, by demolishing the two cellars.
I thought I would share how things are changing around here, so here are some pictures of how things looked last week. First, here is our house, and in front of it our “Presshaus” or wine cellar:
And then to the right are the two other cellars, one without a roof and the other one still reasonably intact, which until recently belonged to a woman in the village; the yellow building on the right is our neighbour’s current wine making business;
Then, early this week we woke up to construction noise outside our kitchen, and by today the two cellars were already mostly gone:
We’ll se what sort of building he puts up there; since the only real window in our house facing the street is our kitchen window above our cellar, whatever he builds there is not really going to obstruct our view.
Photos: Google Streetview