Zur welcome first a Testarossa. Even if you arrive almost two hours late on skis, in fog and heavy snowfall from the other end of the Arlberg in the Hospiz Alm in St. Christoph, the manager Alexander Pale gives a friendly welcome and squeezes the red glowing drink with the humble name into the new arrival the hand. “Your table is gone, you’ll just have to wait,” says the young restaurateur with his urbane Tyrolean friendliness. He filled the glass with Prosecco with raspberry pulp: “Our house drink since it opened in 1988.”
Pale leads to the bar, Wolfgang Ambros echoes through the speakers, in the background the fire crackles in the huge open fireplace. Coming and going skiers rumble past in full gear. And from the kitchen, the waiters make their way through the crowd, laden with Tyrolean Gröstl, Kaiserschmarrn, Brettljausen the size of full-grown stone pine. It’s high noon in the Alm at half past one. Gigantic wine bottles find their way into the cozy parlors, arranged around the open fire, where the national and international snow society gathers at the long wooden tables.
Ski hut at noon, gourmet restaurant in the evening
If you come back to the legendary Hospiz Alm after five years, whose reputation has been carried out into the world for decades by crowned heads, heads of state, big industrialists and top models, then at first glance nothing has changed: fun ski hut at lunchtime, fine dining in the evening gourmet restaurant. At second glance it’s different. But for that you have to go into the basement – and later telephone the new co-owner and CEO Erwin Soravia in Vienna. To find out that everything is changing in the background. Because the successful real estate developer and hotel owner Soravia, who operates throughout Europe, will then explain how he intends to lead the Hospiz Alm, the Hospiz Hotel, into a new era. How he, as the new co-owner, actually wants to wake the whole of St. Christoph, his “hideaway” at 1800 meters above sea level, with just 20 residents and yet worldwide fame, from its slumber. With an investment volume of 200 million euros. His entry with 51 percent in the traditional company Hospiz was sealed in February 2022.
In the evening gourmet restaurant: Hospiz Alm
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Image: Oliver Helbig_Hospice Alm
So now the basement. The way down is as usual. It goes past all the photos with princesses and duchesses, kings, politicians and A-Plus actors, to whom Adi Werner, soon to be 87 years old, toasted in his Alm over the decades. He has strategically expanded his wine cellar, known as the most impressive Bordeaux collection in the Alps, since the opening of the Hospiz Alm in 1988, and has negotiated with the most important chateaus on the French Atlantic coast. Result: The most respected winemakers bottle exclusively for him. Even if hoteliers from the neighboring towns of Lech and Zug say today that there are now more important cellars on the Arlberg, the collection of large wine bottles of around 10,000 pieces between 1.5 and 27 liters in a container is definitely considerable.
And yet the senior had to watch as his empire more or less went down the drain. In 1964, he and his wife Gerda took over the hotel in the second generation, breathed new life into the Brotherhood of St. Christoph at the same time and made a mark with his luxury hotel in this historic location for a long time to come. However, his son Florian had less commercial success: the sale of his newly built luxury chalets was more or less at cost price, and the construction of a 26 million euro art gallery seemed understandable to only a few. However, Erwin Soravia does not want to hear the word “company bankruptcy”. He has been close friends with the Werner family for decades, values them as great hosts and prefers to speak of an “investment backlog” rather than bankruptcy. And that’s why he takes on the matter, the conversion and the design, more than just passionately. “The planning phase with the architects is like playing ping-pong,” says the 55-year-old businessman and laughs. “There’s already a lot of heart and soul in it.”