Sarntal / Val Sarentino, Italy

Bad Schörgau Health & Food Retreat (Familie Wenter)

A 22-key health, spa and food retreat at 980 m in Val Sarentino, two kilometres south of Sarnthein and about 20 km from Bolzano, built on top of one of South Tyrol's historic farmhouse baths. Bad Schörgau is first documented in 1533 and first named as a Bauernbadl with bath rooms, a healing spring and an inn in 1689; it became a well-visited cure resort in the eighteenth century, was destroyed by a storm in 1846, and was rebuilt from 1897 with 20 beds and 10 tub cells. The Wenter family took it on as tenants in 1975 and bought it in 1986. After Sepp Wenter died suddenly in 2002 his son Gregor ran it with his mother Rosi and his sisters Sabine and Steffi; Gregor Wenter took it over outright in 2017 and has driven the spa and culinary repositioning since. All 22 rooms were fully renovated in 2017/18. The operating company is Bad Schoergau K.G. des Wenter Gregor Hannes, a società in accomandita semplice with VAT number 01509630214, REA BZ 202731, CIN IT021086A1HZ77RPNA and share capital of EUR 10,000. The South Tyrol Open Data Hub records the house as a four-star hotel at 980 m under the name 'Bad Schörgau Health and Food Retreat'. Accommodation is split between the Stammhaus and a timber-built Holzhotel on the same site, in five categories: Scharten-Zimmer at 36 m² (barrier-free, one with a four-poster), Badl Zimmer at 41 m² with an oversized bathroom, Schörgau Premium at 43–49 m² with a private loggia, a 63 m² Suite, and a two-level 136 m² Art Studio that extends to 172 m² with a second bedroom. Published rates run from EUR 155 to EUR 410 with breakfast included, with a 10% high-season and weekend surcharge and a 15% midweek discount for three nights or more. Dinner is priced separately: the four-course half-board menu is EUR 55 per person. Every room carries Trehs care products. The wellness offer is the reason the house exists. The Bauernbadl uses the property's own spring water and combines saunas, a rest room, a Kneipp course, a bathing house, a whirl tub and an outdoor pool. Alongside it sits a clinical-style cure business — hydro-energetic and hydrotherapeutic treatments on clinically tested equipment, vacuum and infra-therapy, an Iyashi dome, a Nuvola float tub and a Charcot hydrojet shower — sold as Detox, Revitalization and Regeneration retreats of one to seven days, from EUR 300 for a single Experience day to EUR 3,111 for a seven-day Complete programme with the detox menu. Spa director Milo previously worked in a private clinic in Lugano and at Henry Chenot's operation at the Palace in Merano, and has led the spa here since 2017. A Day Spa at EUR 120 per person and a Health Experience Day at EUR 300 per person are sold to people who are not staying; both are bookable by telephone only. Treatments use two cosmetics lines, Trehs and Philip Martin's. Food is the second pillar and it has changed hands twice in recent years. The kitchen held a Michelin star under Egon Heiss, then ran as La FuGa under Mattia Baroni, and since April 2025 has been led by Matthias Kirchler. There are now three eating places: the Alpes Wirtshaus-Veranda, open Wednesday to Sunday for lunch and dinner and explicitly open to non-residents; ALPESSENZ, a reduced tasting format served Thursday to Saturday evenings by reservation; and the Stube 1988. A historic wine cellar holds more than 600 labels, roughly 35% of them from young South Tyrolean growers, with rarities and unfiltered natural wines. The house builds much of its cooking around fermentation, and a separate detox menu supports the cure programmes. Two further businesses grew out of the site and both now trade under their own names. Trehs is an alpine natural-cosmetics brand built on Sarner Latsche mountain pine, Sarner Mondholz stone pine, Bergheu hay from the Seiser Alm and vine water from Manincor's biodynamic vineyards near Lake Kaltern. It trades as Sarner Natur S.r.l. (VAT 02593760214, incorporated 2008, registered at Reinswald 87, run by Andrea Bortolameotti with Franz Georg Gruber as legal representative) and filed FY2024 turnover of EUR 555,913 with 3–5 employees under the wholesale-cosmetics ATECO code. Its home, the Trehs-Haus, opened in 2017 in the carefully restored historic Stadl on the hotel grounds and is open to visitors on weekday mornings; the brand also runs its own Magento shop with customer accounts and supplies more than 27 named stockist hotels plus retail partners in Italy and Germany. LaFuGa, the Laboratory for Future Gastronomy, was co-founded at Bad Schörgau by Gregor Wenter and Mattia Baroni and now runs as an international food-research movement with summits, workshops and festivals. The Seppl-Stodl, converted from the historic bath house, is rented out for events: a 75 m² seminar room with terrace access for up to 30 people and a 150 m² hall with a five-metre cooking island seating about 130, used for courses, tastings, corporate meetings, concerts and weddings, with catering and accommodation packaged on request. The technology stack is small, agency-run and split across the two brands. The hotel site is a REDAXO installation built and hosted by Kreatif GmbH of Bolzano with design by W13 Designkultur, also of Bolzano. Reservations run through the Booking Südtirol widget operated by the HGV hoteliers' association; deposits are taken through the HOGAST purchasing cooperative's payment widget; gift vouchers are sold through an ADDITIVE+ voucher shop embedded on the vouchers page; consent is managed with iubenda, and the privacy policy names SendinBlue and Mailjet as the email and marketing-automation services. Trehs runs on an entirely separate stack: Magento with PayPal and a Mailchimp newsletter, built by the Sarntal agency hantha. The result is that the guest who sleeps in the hotel and the customer who buys the cosmetics made on the same site are held in two different databases with two different email lists, and the highest-margin non-resident products — the Day Spa, the Health Experience Day and a restaurant open to the public — are booked by telephone and leave no customer record at all. Memberships and listings include Healing Hotels of the World, Charming Places, HIP Hotels, the Michelin Guide, Falstaff, Falstaff Travel (Spa Awards 2023) and Gambero Rosso.

Hotel website ↗