Austria Homes in on Terroir

A heightened focus on place is resulting in the country's best-ever Grüner Veltliners and Rieslings 

-  KRISTEN BIELER

On the face of it, Austrian wine hit its modern stride decades ago. Following a transformative quality reboot in the late 1980s (spurred by a 1985 scandal that some wineries were adding glycol, an ingredient in antifreeze, to sweeten their wines), Grüner Veltliner, the country's signature grape, went on to achieve international celebrity. The best versions, along with Austria's top Rieslings, became staples at the world's finest restaurants.

After a fling with a more flamboyant wine style through the early 2000s, the country's vintners changed tack, going after balance and precision. The result: Austria is making its greatest wines ever particularly in terrific vintages such as 2019, 2020 and especially 2021 as this tasting report of nearly 150 Austrian wines attests.

Until recently, though, missing from this trajectory had been a fully formed mapping of terroir. However, in June of this year, a 20-year-long project to construct an appellation system in Austria, the Districtus Austriae Controllus (DAC), was finally completed. While the concept of terroir has long been codified in most of Europe's fine wine regions, Austria had placed more focus on grape ripeness, developing tiered categories of quality based on sugar and alcohol levels (comparable to Germany's prädikat system).

The country's new DAC regime upends that model, bringing origin to the forefront and diminishing the importance of ripeness. Wines are organized in a Burgundy-style hierarchy, designated as gebietswein (regional), ortswein (village) or riedenwein (single site). For Austrian vintners, this new winemaking ethos represents a break with cultural heritage (as it also does in Germany, where a similar movement is afoot).