Winelingo
Austria's vineyards sit almost entirely in the east of the country, away from the Alps, in a band running from the Danube valley down towards the Hungarian border. It is a cool place to grow grapes and that shows in the glass: the wines are dry, precise and high in acidity, and most of the vineyard is planted to white varieties. Grüner Veltliner alone accounts for close to a third of it.
Modern Austrian wine really begins in 1985. Laboratories in West Germany found diethylene glycol in Austrian bottles — a handful of producers had been adding it to make cheap wine taste sweeter and fuller — and exports collapsed almost overnight. What followed was a complete rebuild: stricter law, lower yields, and a decisive move away from bulk sweetness towards dry, estate-bottled wine. In 2002 Austria introduced the DAC system, loosely modelled on the French appellations, which ties a name to a region's typical style rather than to a grape alone.
What Austrian wine tastes like
Austrian white wine is dry, brisk and clean-lined. There is very little oak in the picture and almost no tropical-fruit richness. What you get instead is citrus, orchard fruit, green herbs and a firm acidity that keeps everything upright.
Grüner Veltliner is the signature: green apple and grapefruit, a herbal note somewhere between celery and lentil, and a twist of white pepper on the finish. Riesling here is nearly always fully dry, with peach and lime over a stony core — drier and a shade fuller than most German Riesling.
The reds are lighter than you might expect. Zweigelt is juicy and soft, full of sour cherry, and takes a slight chill happily. Blaufränkisch is the serious one: dark berries, black pepper, firm acidity and real tannin, closer in spirit to a peppery Syrah than to anything soft and jammy.
