Austrian Wines

Austria makes wonderful white wine, in all styles from bone dry to superbly sweet but sadly, there isn’t enough Austrian wine!

Austria is a country with a strong and historic wine-drinking culture, but it only produces as much wine as a middle-sized region of France, for example the Loire. Export isn’t necessarily a priority for many growers, but fortunately some of the top producers do want to see their wines on a world stage, where they have proved they can shine.

The vineyards all lie in the east of the country, around Vienna, downstream along the Danube to the west, and in a wide band south to Styria. Best known are white wines, particularly from Riesling - which here becomes a dry, high alcohol wine much more in the Alsace style than the German - and Gruner Veltliner, the latter grown in Austria since Roman times and now taking a third of the country’s vineyards. The top examples of both these varieties make very food-friendly wines, with the weight and structure to accompany rich or spicy dishes, and both can age superbly, with the best examples of the latter taking on the minerality and complexity of fine white Burgundy.

Austria is also the source of some of the greatest sweet wines in the world. Key to this is the Neuesiedlersee, an enormous shallow lake south-east of Vienna, which creates a perfect micro-climate for the development of noble rot in the surrounding vineyards through long, warm and dry autumns.