AUSTRIA

This just in—Austria is not Germany.

By and large, this well-known fact is not yet widely acknowledged by buyers or drinkers of Austrian wine.

That’s understandable. Because Austria makes both dry and sweet white wines, from grapes such as Riesling, and bottles them in tall green glass bottles, with labels that read totally Teutonic, many folk assume that Austrian wine is either a lot like or just like German wine.

Well, it isn’t. Or, to make things perfectly clear, es ist nicht.

About the only thing that German and Austrian winemaking share in common is a predilection for Riesling (and those tall green glass bottles).

Overall, Austrian wines own their own individual character. Austria’s drier whites are fuller, richer, headier and bolder in flavor than Germany’s lighter, leaner and more elegant whites. Austria’s whites are always dry, save for those that the country purposively produces sweet (only 3% of total production, but those, like Germany’s, are some of the more delicious sweet wines in the world).

And Austria produces wine from grapes that Germany doesn’t even know about, especially Austria’s famed white wine grape, Grüner Veltliner, perhaps the globe’s only grape with its own nickname—“Grü-Vee” (or GrooVy).

Austria also makes much more red wine than Germany does, which in character resembles Austrian whites: fatter, brawnier and juicier than Germany’s light, ephemeral reds.

Because Austrian wines came into their own only lately—just in the mid-1990s—these misperceptions exist. But, as with all good wines, the truth isn’t in the perspective, it’s in the glass—and there Austrian wines make things very clear very quickly. They are terrifically delicious.

The land
Austria resembles all of its sibling European winemaking countries—vines planted by the Celts around 400 B.C., cultivated by the Romans, improved by medieval monks and beset by war, phylloxera and greed in the modern age.

A wine-tainting scandal in 1985 utterly devastated the country’s winemaking reputation and decimated production of the mass of Austrian wine—at the time, inexpensive, everyday tipple. But the clean slate also allowed for a complete regeneration and renaissance—and that is what we enjoy today.

All of Austria’s several winemaking regions form a crescent that embraces Vienna, in a reversed C, in Austria’s extreme eastern quarter. (Vienna itself is the only major world city to be a viticultural area.) Though contiguous, each region differs from the others in weather and soil, hence in wines.

Grapes
Austria raises 30-plus different wine grapes, but these five are key:

Blaufränkisch: a red grape (called Lemberger elsewhere) that makes a dark, finely tannic, slightly peppery wine with strong cherry and currant flavors.

Grüner Veltliner: the white grape of Austria, for wines that begin richly textured and creamy, ending with scents and flavors of fresh rain and white pepper.

Riesling: as elsewhere, but in Austria with more oomph, a more expansive aroma of peaches and cooked apples, and greater staying power.

Sauvignon Blanc: especially successful in Styria, where it makes heady, herbal whites.

Zweigelt: Burgenland’s big grape, making for Zinfandel-like brawny reds

Districts
Austria’s wine land is chopped up into too many districts to remember. The significant ones, and their important wines, are: Wachau [vahc-HOW] for elegant, piercingly flavored whites, categorized only in Wachau in an esoteric, but signal, way as federspiel (like a German kabinett) and smaragd (like a Spätlese);

Burgenland for sweet white wines and gutsy reds; Styria for Sauvignon Blanc and Morillon (Chardonnay); and Weinviertel for Grüner Veltliner.

Eats
Around the world, chefs and gourmands increasingly consider Grü-Vee the most versatile white wine for food—of every stripe, weight, preparation and flavor. They assert this because Grüner Veltliner comes in various weights or intensities, and because it has distinctive aromas and tastes—pink grapefruit, vanilla, peach, white pepper, lentil, dill, celery and mineral—that accompany a wide range of foods.

Lighter Grü-Vees are great starter wines, with olives, smoked salmon or lightly dressed salads, and with foods that have some acidity to them. Medium-weight Grüners are for Wiener schnitzel, sausages, sushi and moderately spicy Thai food.

For reds, Blaufränkisch is meat-friendly, of course, but especially if tomatoes, herbs and spices are involved.