Norbert Franz Josef Tischelmayer was born in April 1945 during the last weeks of the war in Mühlbach am Manhartsberg in the Weinviertel(Lower Austria), surrounded by vineyards, so to speak. His father was employed for decades by a large winery, August Sutter in Hohenwarth. In his childhood he regularly helped with the grape harvests. At that time there were still the "Hiata-Hütt'n", where the "Hiata"(vineyard keepers) stayed two to three weeks before the harvest time and kept a strict watch that nobody touched the delicious grapes. For the boys it was a test of courage and a prerequisite for acceptance into the "Club of the Greats" to steal grapes despite the danger of being "caught". These were the first impulses to get involved with wine.
According to his own words, he spent a meagre but beautiful childhood in Mühlbach. The parents were already satisfied at that time if they could feed their children sufficiently. There was a lack of many things and even oranges or bananas were true luxury goods, which were only available (if at all) at Christmas. About this time the author published the book "Damals in Mühlbach". It describes the living conditions of the small village with only 300 souls from 1945 to 1959. The topics end of war, school, leisure time & games as well as church & religion are illuminated and underlined with many pictures. The descriptions in the book are representative of life in Austria especially in the rural areas after the terrible Second World War, when the young Second Republic began to live.
When he was 14 years old, he moved back then as a so-called "Rucksackl-Weana" to Vienna and completed an apprenticeship as a commercial clerk in the delicatessen shop Artaker on Stephansplatz, just opposite the main entrance to the "Steffl"; at that time this was the number 1 in Vienna in this branch, comparable to today's "Meinl am Graben". Among other things, he sold wines from the Sutter Winery there, but also wines from France, Italy and Spain. At that time, foreign wines were only bought by the particularly "wealthy". After completing his military service with the Austrian Armed Forces with (voluntarily longer obligated) 12 months of service with training as a radio operator, he made a radical change of profession after one year and entered the then still young electronic data processing (EDP).
At that time, the punch-card oriented computers were still called "electron brains". Today's smartphone has about 100 times the power of the computers of that time, although it is difficult to compare. Norbert Tischelmayer then worked for 35 years in a computer service company for banks and savings banks in the areas of computer centre, internal audit, training, process organisation and project management. During this time he managed several major projects in the areas of company mergers, rationalisation, process organisation and change management.
Due to a traumatic childhood experience he came relatively late to wine. As a test of courage, so to speak, he and his brother and two friends emptied a Doppler (two-litre bottle) that had been stolen from his father's wine cellar. For decades he could therefore not even smell wine. Then in the early 1990s he was invited to a wine tasting at the Weinrieder winery (Kleinhadersdorf-Poysdorf). There he made the experience that wine can be enjoyed not only with the palate and tongue, but also with the nose and eyes, and (before the first glass was drunk) can be talked about. Through this positive experience his interest was awakened and he began to deal intensively, both practically and theoretically, with the "divine drink". In 1999 he was invited to the wein.plus wine website of Utz Graafmann and offered him his wine glossary with 800 keywords at that time. This was the beginning of a long-standing cooperation.
With a few wine seminars, about 100 read books about wine, visits to wine tastings, wine fairs and wine events as well as last but not least practical work in vineyards and cellars of winegrowers' friends, the basis for the journalistic occupation with the topic of wine was laid. In 2001, he fulfilled a childhood dream and published the book "Wein-Glossar - 2,777 terms about wine". Norbert Tischelmayer is in charge of the wein.plus wine platform's most comprehensive wine lexicon, with over 23,000 keywords worldwide. It is updated almost daily.
