Houston, by way of Austria — and love
Volker Donabaum’s path to becoming a Houston-based wine importer began with what became a perfect online meeting with his future wife, Sarah. But that just accounts for the geography part. Donabaum had arguably been on his career path since he was a child, sneaking sips here and there from wines that had been made by his family in Austria since 1833. His mother, Ernestine, specifically remembers young Volker, 5 years old at the time, helping himself to the little bit that was left in a bottle he found on the dinner table one evening.
“You can definitely say I have wine in my DNA,” he said, noting how his father, Sighardt, had been the first of his generation of farmers in the Wachau region to focus strictly on viticulture. Donabaum’s brother, also named Sighardt, runs the eponymous winery today, although Volker’s company, launched only in 2018, isn’t the American importer. Why? Because relationships are everything to Volker, and he didn’t want to create problems between his brother and the Donabaum’s longtime New York-based importer, which has served the business well.
But it was through that import company that he landed a job with another importer in New York, the first of a series of Big Apple gigs that gave him the experience and confidence to strike out on his own. Pre-New York and his other global destinations, he had served as a cellar rat for winemakers in his hometown of Spitz, then moved to Vienna at 22 to take a job in a wine shop. There, he became fluent in English “mainly by watching (the TV series) ‘Friends’ in English with English subtitles, after having watched it many times before in German.”
How did Houston come to fit into the picture? The woman he met through an internet dating service became his wife in 2019, and she happened to be from here, having graduated from Kingwood High School in 2003, attended Vanderbilt as an undergrad and earned a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin.
After he and Sarah married in 2019 — by then working as a corporate attorney, she’d been transferred to New York by her firm, Baker Botts — they concluded that her hometown would be more conducive and far less costly for starting a family. Baker Botts assisted by transferring her back (although she has since gone to work for Cheniere Energy).
Their son, Theodor, was born almost a year ago, and the three of them now live in a century-old Heights bungalow with their 2½-year-old beagle Heidi, who, the 40-year-old Donabaum said, “can’t wait to become a winery dog.” Toward that end, he is cautiously optimistic a new warehouse with a tasting room/retail shop about a mile north of the Saint Arnold Brewery can be ready for visitors by the end of 2022.
“I’d been trying to finalize (the purchase of the property) for some time,” he said. “It’s been difficult, but we’ve got it under contract now. With COVID, everything was delayed about a year. We’ll never go through anything like this again … hopefully.”
The Volker portfolio is Austria-centric, which sets him apart from the other small importer-distributors based in Houston, but he has an open mind about wines from everywhere, having worked harvests and helping make wine during his formative years in France, Italy, California, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It’s almost easier to list wine regions he hasn’t experienced firsthand.
Arriving with modest expectations, Donabaum has been blown away by Houston’s vibrant food-and-wine culture.
“It’s incredible, really,” he said.
These days he makes a grüner veltliner in partnership with a friend, although he intends to stay focused on building his import business rather than investing too much time and capital on the production side. He said local restaurateurs have resoundingly embraced his wines — besides Austria of course, France, Italy, California and Washington state are in the mix — and many are available at the Heights Grocery, Light Years wine bar and Houston Wine Merchant. Heights Grocery owner James Havens has been particularly supportive and can handle retail orders from the Volker portfolio.
Though many of the wines are biodynamic or organic producers, it’s not a requirement for Donabaum. What is?
“That I like them,” Donabaum said, laughing.
His Austrian suppliers — Claus Preisinger, Hager Matthias, Martin Muthenthaler, Christoph Hess and the Strehn family — aren’t just clients. They’re special friends. And he’d surely say the same about the vintners he works with elsewhere.
“It’s about the people who make the wine, too,” he said, “and my personal connection to the families. People sometimes think of me as an Austrian importer, but I like good wines from everywhere.”
To peruse his full portfolio, check out volkerwines.com.