The hills are alive…

…with innovative winemaking. And there's more to Austria than grüner veltliner

Austria makes wines that are sappy and thrillingly precise: perfect for spring

Argentina has malbec, New Zealand has sauvignon blanc and Austria has grüner veltliner. In each case, a grape so successful and so predominant in one country that the wine it makes has become an international symbol of that country.

Or has it? Grüner veltliner isn’t as big in its supposed homeland as malbec or savvy B are in theirs, and it doesn’t have quite the name recognition they do, even if the words are recognisably Germanic. Sure, most of the world’s grüner veltliner is grown in Austria, and most Austrian wine – almost half of all the white grape vines in the country – is grüner veltliner. As a result, the grape has become a “brand” – the downside to which is that Austria doesn’t benefit much from the halo effect of people who love “gru-vee” deciding to explore other Austrian wines.

Now might be a good time for that to change, though. Austria makes white – and red – wines that are sappy and refreshing, and can be thrillingly precise: perfect for spring. They’re also unusual: whites that are hard to find outside the country, such as welschriesling, riesling and weissburgunder (aka pinot blanc); and reds including zweigelt, blaufränkisch and St Laurent (I’ll come to these later).

Another incentive to try more Austrian wines is that they’re becoming easier to find. Most supermarkets, and discount stores, too, now sell a sub£10 grüner: it’s such an easy style to love – all grapefruit and radish, the perfect fridge-door white. Waitrose now stocks 11 different Austrian wines, including a St Laurent and a zweigelt; The Dot range from the producer Weingut R&A Pfaffl (available in independent merchants) offers a brilliant, accessible introduction to Austria’s key grapes; The Wine Society has a good range of grüners and zweigelts; there’s even an Austrian specialist, Kipferl, a north London café based on the Viennese coffee house that also has a boutique selection of Austrian wines for sale in its online shop.

It’s worth taking a moment for some historical context. At the start of the 20th century, Austria-Hungary was a huge wine producer. The peace treaties at the end of the First World War inevitably fragmented its vineyard empire: when Austria’s boundaries were drawn, it lost the southern Alpine region of Südtirol (or Alto Adige) to Italy, and Lower Styria to what is now Slovenia. After the Second World War, more vines were planted, building to a peak in 1980, but the wine industry was a very different beast, focused on cheap mass-production.

Then came an incident that Heribert Altinger, then mayor of Rust in the state of Burgenland, called “the worst disaster to hit this region since the Second World War” – the infamous antifreeze scandal. The affair came to attention in 1985 when German laboratories running quality-control checks on wines detected that a bottle of Austrian wine on sale in a supermarket contained traces of diethylene glycol, or DEG, a substance also found in antifreeze. It emerged that several Austrian wine producers had been using the chemical in difficult vintages to add sweetness and body to thin, underripe wines. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of wine were doctored with the lethal chemical, which causes damage to the kidneys and nervous system, and while no one is known to have died from drinking it, the fallout was catastrophic.

In Germany – one of Austria’s big export markets – “glycol” was nominated as word of the year. While the rush to dispose of tainted wine caused one man to dump 4,000 gallons of it into the town sewer – where it apparently killed the microorganisms that ought to have cleaned the waste, so that raw sewage was pumped into nearby streams. In the minds of a generation of drinkers, Austria’s wine reputation was trashed.

There was a silver lining, though: the rebuild, which was intensely quality rather than quantity-focused, and very determined. Today, more than 15 per cent of Austrian vineyards are organic – one of the highest figures in the world.

Austrian wines have gained the standing they now have by coming in at the top, as a sommeliers’ favourite, and filtering downwards, rather than by love-bombing the supermarkets. They often have a very fashionable quality known as “tension”, which is hard to translate but is an attempt to describe the dynamic feel of a wine with pert acidity and a fine structure. You certainly find it in the white pepper and radish notes of grüner veltliner, a grape that can be a beautiful match for sushi, white fish or chicken cooked with lemon grass and chilli (not to mention the classic Wiener schnitzel).

Another interesting shift over the past few decades has been the change in the balance of white and red wines. In 1951, almost all Austrian wine was white. While plantings of white grapes fluctuated first up and then down, those of red steadily increased so that red grapes now account for almost a third of Austria’s vineyard area.

Austria’s red grapes are a bit more esoteric than the whites, but they’re just as good. Zweigelt is the one you most often see. A cross created in Austria 99 years ago, zweigelt makes very precise wines with a taste of cherries, a slightly sour edge and a suggestion of pepper.

It’s also worth checking out blaufränkisch (aka lemberger, in Germany, and kekfrankos, in Hungary), which is a parent of zweigelt and makes thicker, slightly hairier wines with a mass of fruity berries but also a refreshingly tart edge; and St Laurent, a lighter and more aromatic red.