“Lesezeit” is finally over, the last Riesling has been picked from the vines, the last Sturm sips have been drunk. Being a proud Part-Time-Wachauer-Girl, it is only natural that the months of wine harvesting September and October are being filled with weekends where you do nothing but cut beautiful grapes from its vines, fight yourself through almost golden leaves, and start appreciating latex gloves once more (wine harvesting is a sticky business).

It’s easy to romanticise the world of a winemaker, beautiful views, wonderful wines, tasting everything, touching produce with your hands, and in the end, having your own bottles that you will be able to proudly drink and, more importantly, serve your friends at dinner parties or intellectual Salons (wine is definitely a driver that makes us first more ineffectual at our HEIMAT Salons, but also the opposite the more wine there is and the more empty wine bottles there are).

Speaking from experience, after harvesting for six hours in the hazy rain picking grapes, standing in wet socks, carrying buckets up and down steep terraces and hills (90% of the Wachau terraces are so steep no tractor can handle them), nothing is romantic anymore. They call it fun family time, I call it free labour with a view. You might be able to take a girl out of Vienna every weekend and put her in wellies, but you can’t shut her need to complain about something quintessentially beautiful.

Every weekend the Viennese residents split in half, dividing themselves across our Autobahnen, and convincing themselves that 48 hours in fresh air is the answer to all their problems. My weekend escape happened to be Wachau, but the Viennese tend to spawn all over the various regions of Lower Austria. The amount of secondary residences in the region is astonishing, in 2022 over 360,000 people had one registered, presumably most of those are Viennese seeking refuge in Vienna’s not-so-secret hinterland. It’s offering grounding gardening work, escape from their busy week, fresh air, village life and is usually, not far from a vineyard. After all, someone needs to work on the roughly 150 million bottles of wine coming just out of Lower Austria each year.

We picked up this weekend fleeing habit a long time ago, even the Habsburgs were known to flee the smoky cafés and cobblestones for breaks in Lower Austria, although modern transportation makes the weekly weekend escape much more simple than going there by horse-drawn coach.

Living the busy city life during 9-5 hours makes you appreciate wine and its meanings even more though: for most people who drink wine, it’s either something they pick up at a shop, or they order in a restaurant. For me it’s the background of my childhood memories, the vineyards of Wachau are the places I drove my bicycle through as a rebellious teenager, listening to Marilyn Manson and Flogging Molly (I agree the irony is not lost on me that these two don’t have anything to do with each other, but if we start trying to find logic within a teenager we might be sitting here a while).

Wine means family time, dinners together, time well spent. It teaches you how time passes through the year, how much rain is needed for it to grow, how much sun is good, how much is too much, and how much the sugar level, and therefore the alcohol level, changes at the end. A sunny year? A more depthful wine. Rain just before harvest? Waters down the grapes. Letting them hang too long? Sweeter more developed grapes, but also higher risk of them starting to mould (which you need to pick out by hand before adding it to your collection bucket, no one wants mould in their wine after all). The minerality of the soil, the steepness of the terraces, the way the stone terraces are storing the heat from the day before, and the way the Danube reflects sunlight back onto the vines - all of it decides the grape’s complexity and the wine’s final tone.

Of course Vienna has its own wine as well, basically on all the outskirts you’ll find those little almost village-like areas with Heurigen and direct access to vineyards (gosh we really do love our wine, don’t we?). The boundary between city and wine is often one that’s easily missed - they are very much in seamless transition. Grinzing, Nussdorf, Heiligenstadt, are just a few of the wine areas of one single Viennese district, Döbling. In total there are 700 acres of vineyards, just within its city borders. Vienna wouldn’t be Vienna without our deep history and connection with wine. We are in fact the only urban city in the world with a city-owned winery. Vienna’s wine culture is so deep-rooted it even found a way to bottle its identity crisis. Gemischter Satz is a unique blend of various different grapes, which started as a lazy back-up option for Viennese winemakers - just in case one of the grape varieties failed due to bad weather, they could always rebalance the composition.

And in fact, Vienna has already learned to drown its sorrows in wine long before we ever cultivated coffee - the Romans didn’t call us Vindobona for nothing. Archaeologists actually date some of the vineyard ruins they found back to the first century, showing that our commitment to day-drinking is truly part of our cultural heritage.

Where Vienna shines with Gemischter Satz, the true favourite of most of us, Wachau shines with grapes such as Grüner Veltliner, Riesling or Neuburger throughout the whole world. Spending ten years in London, and traveling through many other places in the world, I cannot recall the number of times I saw a wine bottle from my home village on an overpriced wine menu. It made me proud to be able to say, hey, that wine grows across the window of my childhood bedroom. There is something strangely heartwarming (heartwarming? In my cold Viennese heart? I know, who would have thought…) about the fact that Austria is so well known for such few, such specific things - wine, Mozart, ball culture, our lovely President Van der Bellen, and the inability to keep a functioning government.

Somewhere between the steep terraces, the sound of the tractor being rolled back into its garage, the empty buckets stacked away, and the exhaust fumes of the weekend escapees on their way back to Vienna; between the steady flow of the Danube and the grapes now left to ripen in their barrels, you come to the realisation that wine isn’t just about flavour, alcohol, or pretty labels - it’s about patience and waiting. Waiting for something beautiful to develop with time and much care.

Growing up in the Wachau taught me that time doesn’t pass evenly - it ripens. Growing up in Vienna taught me that in all of us there’s a tiny bit of Gemischter Satz, complex, contradictory, and somehow better together. Wine is best enjoyed together - preferably under a Heuriger grape canopy, before the city swallows us up again.

Favourite Indoor Heuriger in Vienna for the colder Months (Summer Heurigen deserve their own post one day):

Eleonore Marie Stifter - Resident Viennese. Writes about culture, taste, and the art of complaining beautifully.