Austria wine

Austria’s signature grape, Grüner Veltliner, is grown almost nowhere else in quantity. At its simplest it is a peppery, citrusy dry white; at its most serious it is dense, structured and long-lived.

The DAC system, introduced from the early 2000s, ties a regional name to a defined style rather than merely to an origin, so the name on the label carries information about what is in the bottle.

The country’s reds — principally Zweigelt and Blaufränkisch — have gained substantial international attention, with Blaufränkisch in particular producing structured, peppery, high-acid wines that reward age.

The 1985 diethylene glycol scandal is the pivot of the modern industry. A small number of producers had adulterated sweet wine with the compound to fake body and sweetness; the discovery collapsed Austrian exports almost overnight and led to what was then the strictest wine law in Europe.

What followed was a deliberate rebuild around dry wine, low yields and small estates, and it worked: Austria now sells almost entirely on quality rather than volume, and its exports are worth several times what the sweet-wine trade ever was.

The DAC system, introduced in 2002, is unlike the French model in a specific way. It certifies that a wine is typical of its district — the right varieties in the right style — rather than simply that it came from there. A wine from a DAC region that falls outside the expected style is labelled under the wider federal state instead, which means the designation carries information about the wine and not only about the place.