No Kangaroos in Austria

My ongoing love affair with central Europe's top wine country

Noble Rot asked me to write something about Austria’s top wines. Of course this is a very personal take. So don’t shoot me please.

Originally published in Noble Rot issue 37.

Apologies to regular readings for banging on about Tscheppe’s Blaue Libelle 2021 yet again. But it really is that good.

Love took me to Austria in 2013, and I spent most of a year living in the small town of Eisenstadt. No, I had to keep telling my friends back home, there are no mountains here, no kangaroos either – never ceases to amaze me how many people hear the name of another continent in place of the heart of central Europe. Burgenland – the bundesland or county - is rather flat, close to Hungary and stupidly hot in the summer. It also produces some sensational wine.

An obsession with all things orange preceded my move to Austria, but Burgenland’s vignerons took the category in a totally different direction to the tannic, dark-amber beasts I knew from Slovenia or Georgia. I discovered that orange wine can be juicy, fruit focused and joyful. There are a dozen or more outstanding growers in the region who excel with this style. It is recognisable enough that it deserves its own appellation. Imagine the love-child of a tropical fruit cocktail and a camomile tea, Steiner school educated of course. They range from the more frivolous or funky to the supremely elegant and profound. If you want refinement, Heinrich’s Graue Freyheit is right at the top of my list – a bottle that could turn even the staunchest orange wine hater with its delicacy and charm.

I don’t want to imply that Burgenland is just about orange wine. I quickly fell head over heels for its noblest red grape, Blaufränkisch. For someone whose first love in wine was left-bank Bordeaux, it was an easy sell. I am a sucker for tart, sour cherry acidity and proper grippy structure. Blaufränkisch can do both in spades, whilst at the same time tasting nothing like Cabernet Sauvignon or fucking Merlot. BF (I’ll spare the umlauts) has a kind of autumnal, gamey quality that reminds me of everything from bay leaves to blood. It can do serious and brooding, but also fresh and moreish. And despite what everyone thought in the late 1990s, it needs little or no help from barriques or any other kind of wood to create an ageworthy and structured wine.

Ironically, no-one in Burgenland thought that BF was their BF until Ernst Triebaumer began his quest to promote the variety as something noteworthy in the 1980s. His family continues the good work, and a bottle of their Marienthal (the top single vineyard bottling) is really all you need to be convinced of the variety’s majesty. But I have more than just one BF. I’ve always had a crush on Gut Oggau’s wines, and Joshuari is the favourite son. Eduard and Stephanie might be natural wine rockstars now, but when I first visited in 2013 almost no-one had heard of this newish biodynamic estate in the tiny village of Oggau. Their winemaking has steadily and consistently evolved to its current zero-zero precision, and Joshuari is perfection to me: expressive, with that wilder more gamey twang acting as a perfect foil to the fruit. These are wines you can easily age for a decade or more, but conversely they won’t rip your gums out if you open them young.

---

If I started out in adulthood as more of a red wine drinker, bigger more textured whites helped broaden my tastes. So the Viennese speciality Gemischter Satz felt like it was tailor made. Field blend isn’t the literal translation but it sounds better than ‘mixed stuff’. It’s a specific recipe, now enshrined in appellation law. Take 600 hectares of vineyards co-planted with a miscellany of white varieties, all within the city limits. Harvest and ferment everything together to create a widescreen, punchy result that should taste like more than the sum of its parts. The small print states that a Gemischter Satz must be made of at least three different varieties, the truth is that many contain ten or more. There’s a great deal of fun to be had in trying to identify some of the more obscure components. You may glimpse Muscat or Traminer in a floral cameo role.

My favourite example of this outgoing style is Fritz Weininger’s Ried Ulm, a mouth filling, salty wine that overflows with generosity and that super satisfying chalkiness. The Nussberg hills where its grown make most people do a double-take the first time they visit. The rows of vines gradually blend into cityscapes and tower blocks as your eye skirts the horizon. It’s surreal.

While I was living in Burgenland I also got to know the other end of the country as it was where my in-laws lived. Styria is Austria’s south-easterly extremity, bordering Slovenia. Its steeply plunging hillsides and bucolic taverns charmed the pants off me, but I initially struggled to orientate myself around the wines. This is the region that bet the farm on Sauvignon Blanc, a variety that admittedly has more than 200 years of history in Styria’s vineyards. It helped when I discovered that Southern Styria was also the birthplace of Austria’s natural wine movement, thanks mostly to a couple of now iconic growers – Sepp Muster and his two brothers in law Andreas and Ewald Tscheppe. If you thought you knew Sauvignon, think again. Andreas Tscheppe’s Blaue Libelle 2021 is a wine that literally took my breath away during a tasting last year. In fact it silenced our whole table of winemakers and sommeliers into contemplation and awe. This is about as far away from the kiwi cat’s piss cliché as you can get, with an enticing gunflint and sage thing going on in the nose, before the sheer concentration and beauty of the palate envelopes you in a warm embrace.

---

If you know a thing or two about Austria, you’ve probably pegged me as an heretic by now – I haven’t made so much as a mention of the nation’s most hallowed wine regions, the Danube hugging Wachau, Kamptal and Kremstal. They were the final piece of the puzzle for me, the parts I got to know years later. Their generally more classical approach and the focus on two very well known grape varieties – Grüner Veltliner and Riesling – didn’t immediately draw me in. But I realised that Rieslings in this part of the world can be uniquely beautiful. They are also invariably bone dry – no flustered moments trying to guess whether wine-x identifies as off-dry or downright sweet. There are considerable advantages over the Mosel or Alsace.

Every wine region seemingly wants to brand itself as cool climate these days, and it’s a struggle to understand how that could possibly describe northern France, Germany and Austria. But if Rieslings from lower Austria generally show a bit more flesh than their more northerly cousins, that doesn’t mean they lack elegance. Try something like Jurtschitsh’s Heiligenstein. OK, this is Austria’s most famous single vineyard site, interpreted by one of the Kamptal’s most outstanding growers. It ought to be amazing, and it is: a wispy delicate little thing with electric acidity and beguiling nooks and crannies that demand you keep sipping.

Still no Wachau recommendations? Look, I’ve nothing against the place. Go for a boat ride. Have a schnitzel and a glass of Grüner Veltliner. It’s just a bit lacking in Blaufränkisch or orange wine for my tastes. I heard it’s infested with kangaroos too.

---

Did I miss your Austrian wine faves? I’d love to hear them in the comments.