A wine lover’s guide to Austria
Stephen Brook has been visiting Austria for more than 40 years, following its rollercoaster ride through damaging scandals and breakthrough blind tastings. Here he offers a glimpse into the country’s bright future, highlighting the producers and the wines
LAsT yEAR I researched a book on Austrian wine, which was published in the autumn. For me it was a sheer pleasure to write, since I have been following the wines for four decades, with growing admiration for the swift progress in quality and diversity.
From the mid-1970s I have been a regular visitor to Austria, and ended up writing two books about Vienna. The friends with whom I stayed were keen on wine, and each evening we downed copious quantities of thirstquenching Grüner Veltliner, and at weekends made excursions to the wine regions. My very first article submitted to a wine magazine was on Austria; the piece was rejected, no doubt for good reason.
My visits gradually convinced me that Austria was producing some of Europe’s greatest white wines. Tastings with the top producers of Wachau (Pichler, Knoll, Jamek and more) and Kamptal (Bründlmayer, schloss Gobelsburg) exposed me to magnificent, mineral-charged Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners.
Even the reds were becoming more impressive, unlike the grim, fruitless reds of the 1970s. At that time, Austria’s leading wine college in Klosterneuburg was still advising against allowing red wines to go through malolactic fermentation. No wonder the wines were hard going.
Much was made of the wine ‘scandal’ in 1985. some producers, mostly Burgenland wholesalers, were adding diethylene glycol (an antifreeze agent) to bulk wines so as to make them taste sweet. As scandals go, it was minor: no one got ill, let alone died. Nonetheless, adulterating any drink is utterly unacceptable, even in the cause of providing the German market with oceans of blandly sweet wines. And although only a few companies were guilty of doctoring wines, many others knew what was going on but said and did nothing. The authorities were swift to react, introducing what were then the strictest wine laws in Europe, but years would go by before it was possible to find a bottle of Austrian wine on British retailers’ shelves.
Of course, I was not alone in my growing admiration for Austria’s wines. Decanter contributor Giles MacDonogh wrote two pioneering books, and other British writers also took a keen interest in the wines. But they remained little known, as almost all of it was consumed within the country.
Fighting back
The Austrians fought back after the 1985 wine scandal. Two producers, Willi Opitz and the late Alois Kracher, defiantly took stands at European wine fairs. In 1993 Kracher, with sublime chutzpah, organised a blind tasting in London of his Trockenbeerenauslesen alongside the great sauternes, yquem included. The aim, he told me, was not to argue that his wines were ‘better’ than top sauternes, but to demonstrate that they could be spoken of in the same breath. The strategy worked, and wines from Opitz and Kracher