Austrian Wine Bargains
Luscious, affordable reds from this underappreciated wine country
Austria is the only country I know of where the wine is consistently better than the food. Desserts and breads aside, Austrian cooks seem to favor safety over creativity and everything you eat there will be very thoroughly cooked indeed. No danger of some little bug or worm surviving the cooking process and rising up to attack you. The wine, on the other hand is outrageously delicious and constantly surprising.
There is a lot of local variation, each region having its own character:
Burgenland: There is no place likely to make a winelover weep with joy like Burgenland. In the southeast corner of the country, it shares a large shallow, temperature-moderating lake with Hungary. Widely appreciated for its sweet wines, it is home to the astonishing Blaufraenkisch. This red grape has the spicy signature of a grenache and the lush fruitiness of good ol’ Zinfandel. Prices are astonishingly low.
(By the way, one of the important wine towns in Burgenland is called Rust. Contrary to popular opinion, Rust does sleep and in fact, it goes to bed early and draws in the sidewalks when it does)
Lower Austria (which includes The Wachau): is the largest and commercially most important region.. Look for white based on riesling and the fleshy, luscious gruener veltliner.
Vienna: Austrians are fond of pointing out that Vienna is the only capital city in the world that makes its own wine. They are right to be proud. The wines of Vienna are serviceable, but the greatest contribution the Viennese make to the wine world is the peculiar institution known as the Heurige. Heurigen (plural) are the outgrowths of small winemaking establishments around the city. They sell the wine they make and some have a very simple menu. Viennese congregate there for the inexpensive rustic sociability as much as for the wine.
Styria: best known for exporting governors of California, Styria is also recognized for exotic specialties like schilcher, a white sourball of a wine and uhudler a rough little rose made from grapes grown on ungrafted American rootstock. Styrian pinot blanc can rival the products of Alsace.
Vintages: 2003 was a great year in Austria and there’s not much ’03 left around. ’04 was disappointing and some winemakers tried to cover the lack of ripeness with the tang of new oak-results were variable. The current vintage-’05, looks promising and winemakers are cautiously optimistic about ’06.
Having said all this good stuff, I have to admit that these wines are not easy to find in the US and Canada. Big producers like Kacher make it here and you can sometimes find stellar reds under ten euros from the Vitikult co-op. Be sure to look for names like Nittnaus, Umathum and Heinrich.
If your local wine merchant can’t help, well, Austria is pretty this time of year.
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