November 2024 – Power Tasting – The Wine Tasting Experience

Weinbau Prinz

Before we introduce you to this particular winery, we’d like to say a few words about how we got there. We visited Vienna for the first time and fell in love with the city. Our purpose was not wine tasting, but as long as there was an opportunity to see some vineyards, we couldn’t resist (of course). Quite frankly, we don’t usually like to take a tour for wine tasting purposes, but in this instance, we thought it was the best choice. Not every winery we visited was worth reporting, but Weinbau Prinz (www.weinbauprinz.at) was a very pleasant experience so we’re pleased to share it with our readers.

Weinbau is a German word for viticulture or wine growing, what we would call a winery. This particular one is owned by Roswitha and Martin Prinz, who are from winemaking families stretching back for centuries. Their small (3.1 hectares) vineyard is located in the village of Stetten in the winemaking district known as the Weinviertel, the largest in Austria. The Weinviertel (“wine quarter” in German) abuts Vienna and this winery is only a 45 minute drive from the city center.

The village church in Stetten, Austria rising over the vines of Weinbau Prinz.

The wine tasting experience at Weinbau Prinz is highlighted by the setting. Your party is seated at a long table right in the vineyard, with the steeple of the village church looming over you. If, like us, you have seen scenes like this in the movies and were ever-so-eager to do it yourself, you’re hooked before you even take the first sip.

Tasting in the Weinbau Prinz vineyards.

The wines are poured by Roswitha Prinz herself. (Martin is the cellar guy.) Besides owning the winery, she is a lecturer at BOKU, which we gather is the Viennese university for viticulture. She seems unfazed at answering questions from those who know little about Austrian wine or wine in general, as well as from wine snobs. You get all kinds in the wine business, we guess.

Weinbau Prinz is proud to proclaim that they have been fully organic (or bio as they say in Europe) since 2018. For a small vineyard, they make quite a wide variety of wines, ranging from the inevitable Grüner Veltliner, through a white blend they call, simply enough, Cuvee Weiss to some sparkling wines known in Austria as sekt. Weinbau Prinz has a number of wines made from unusual (to us) white grapes, including Blütenmuskateller, Donauriesling, Cabernet Blanc, and Sauvignac. Although the Weinviertel is primarily known for white wines, they also offer a few Zweigelts, a red grape more frequently found in Western Austria.

We’ll leave it to others to discuss the subtleties of aroma and taste of the wines at Weinbau Prinz. Power Tasting is all about the wine tasting experience, not wine reviewing. If your objective is an enjoyable hour well spent, in scenery that seems to come from the winemaking Tourism Bureau, we recommend Weinbau Prinz without reservation. Oh, maybe a reservation would be a good idea, since they welcome tours.

Café Central and Others

Vienna is a city that was built to be the capital of a vast empire, one that had reigned over great swaths of Central Europe for centuries. Then the Austrians fought on the wrong side in two disastrous World Wars. The empire disappeared but the imperial grandeur of Vienna remained. What was a good Viennese to do in these circumstances? The answer is obvious: stop for a coffee and have some cake.

Dotted throughout the city are cafés and konditorei (bakeries specializing in pastries, as opposed to bread). Many of them were built more than a century ago and continue to serve strong coffee, often with steamed milk or mit schlag (with whipped cream). If you want the 50-50 coffee and steamed milk, ask for a mélange.

Café Central in Vienna, with the usual line of tourists waiting to be admitted.

The most noted of Vienna’s coffee houses is Café Central, located in an elegant building that once housed the Stock Exchange. The interior seems more like a movie set than any Starbucks would ever dream of. With its marble columns, vaulted ceilings, globed chandeliers and parquet floor, Café Central looks like a little bit of an idealized 19^th century that just decided not to go away. Which it is.

The interior of Café Central, with one of its pastry cases and Peter Altenberg waiting up front.

Today you are as likely to hear American accents at the table next to you than German ones. But there’s an echo of Grand Dukes, intellectuals, revolutionaries, movie stars and spies that you can imagine you can hear. Andy why not? Café Central was frequented by many other influential minds of the last century including Stefan Zweig, the novelist; Artur Schnitzler, the dramatist; Sigmund Freud; and Leon Trotsky, who was evidently a demon chess player before he got back to Russia. One of them, the poet Peter Alternberg, was such a Café Central habitué, that there is now a statue of him sitting by the door, waiting for a table no doubt.

You can get a meal in many coffee houses, including Café Central, but there are better places to eat. It’s the pastries that are the pride and joy of Vienna. Chocolate! Crumble! Mousse! Jam! Nuts! All spun together in miraculous inventions and fantasies of sweetness. Desserts stand alone as a reason for living in Vienna, so it seems, and it’s very easy for a visitor to get right into the swing of things.

Perhaps the best known Viennese pastry is apple strudel, with its flaky crust and a hint of cinnamon. Then there’s something called kaiserschmarrn, which translates roughly to “the emperors mess”. It’s a thick, chopped-up pancake served with powdered sugar and preserves. Evidently Emperor Franz Josef loved it, as did we.

Service at Café Sacher.

The pastry most closely identified with Vienna is called Sachertorte, invented at and still proudly served at Café Sacher. It’s a two-layer, dense chocolate cake with apricot jam between the layers and a thick fudgy icing. Served mit schlag, of course. Don’t leave Vienna without trying it.

Both Café Central and Sacher are very popular with tourists, so there’s often a long line outside waiting to get in. It’s worthwhile to make a reservation and skip the line, but it’s not that easy to book a table at the times you might want. You won’t do badly at any of the hundreds of other cafés in town, but patronizing the best known ones is part of the charm of a trip to Vienna.

Wine Tasting in Restaurants

The best way to get to know the wines of any section of Wine Country is to travel there and taste those wines in view of the vineyards. Essentially, that’s what Power Tasting is all about. But most of us don’t have the wherewithal to jet off around the globe, just to check out the latest trends and vintages.

So, you can go to your local shops and buy a bottle from a region you may have read about. There are a number of problems with that approach. You’re at the mercy of the distributors who supply that shop and may not have a good selection from the region you’re interested in. (Since this issue is focused on Austrian wines, let’s use that country as our example.) The wine store may have two Grüner Veltliners, a Blaufränkisch and that’s it. You don’t know too much about these wines either, so it’s a crap shoot that you’re not likely to win.

Wallse in New York, our favorite Austrian restaurant. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

Another alternative is to visit a restaurant that specializes in the food from the region you’re interested in. It surely has some of the wines you’re interested in and someone who knows a bit about them. But it’s not that straightforward, either. So here are a few tips for doing your wine tasting in a restaurant.

Choose the right cuisine. This should be obvious, but it’s worth stressing. If you don’t enjoy the food, you probably won’t be thrilled with the wine either, no matter how well-chosen the list. So if wiener schnitzel and goulash aren’t your thing, maybe wine tasting in an Austrian restaurant won’t work out well for you.
Sit at the bar. Even if you do like the cuisine, it’s a bit much to have to pay for a meal just to sample the wines. Most restaurants have a by-the-glass list; this is a good way to take a preliminary tour across the grapes and vintages that are made in the restaurant’s native country. There are some drawbacks to this approach, however. The wines on the by-the-glass list are generally not the best and are often among the least expensive of their types. So while you may taste a broader variety, you may not get to sample the qualities that are associated with a particular type of wine.
Don’t taste alone. This is good advice for wine tasting in general, but where you’re interested in an introduction to the variety of a particular region, you shouldn’t be knocking back full glasses, much less whole bottles. Of course, those quantities are how restaurants sell wine, so if you’re with someone with whom you’re comfortable sharing, you’ll try more and drink less.
Get help. If you don’t know anything about the wines or the labels, ask the sommelier or the bartender for the one wine that would serve as a good introduction to what that country produces. It’s a good question, not easy to answer. (Could you pick just one wine that typifies California, for instance?) The sommelier might be able to give you a few sips to help him or her understand your taste in wine, thereby giving you a broader sample right up front. More important, you’ll get your feet – er, your lips – wet right at the start.
You can come back. If you find you like what you’ve tried, you can always dine or drink at that restaurant again. And if you are tasting at a restaurant far from home, you’ll have a basis for sampling at some other restaurant near you.

Discovering Austrian Wines

There are many ways to become acquainted with the wines of any particular nation that contains a section of Wine Country. Some countries are so large that it is meaningless to talk in any specific way about, say, American wine or French wine or Italian wine. These nations produce so much wine and distribute it so widely that we are more likely to sip specific regions such as Napa or Bordeaux or Tuscany, with many subdivisions within them.

Then there are countries that are so small that almost all their wine production is consumed at home. For example, Power Tasting recently featured wine tasting in Croatia, a country that clearly fits that model. It isn’t that they make bad wines; in fact there are many excellent ones. It’s just that their grapes and their wineries are too poorly known to justify international distribution.

There is a small group of countries in the middle, with a long history of winemaking and the quantity and quality to send their wines overseas. Some have gained renown in recent years, including Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Others have just begun to garner some attention. Austrian wines are among these.

There are many Central European countries that make wine. Sadly, many of these fell under Soviet domination after World War II and found their native vines torn out and their winemaking facilities converted to Russian tastes. Austria adopted neutrality then and were spared. Still, Austria is only 32,000 square miles, with much consisting of mountains, and its population is only 9 million. Still, their wines are catching on in the US.

Photo courtesy of Vivino US.

In our experience, Austrian wines were essentially unknown in the United States until a craze for Grüner Veltliner began around the turn of the millennium. And why not? Here was a white wine that wasn’t quite like anything else most people had tasted. Maybe just as important, it was everything California Chardonnay wasn’t. It was light, refreshing, unoaked, not very expensive and went well with almost everything except a rare steak. We Americans couldn’t quite pronounce it, but we liked it. (It’s more like greener velt-leaner than grooner felt-liner, as many of us said it.)

With that initial experience, many Americans, ourselves included, sought opportunities to try other Austrian wines, particularly the reds. We are fortunate that there is an excellent Austrian restaurant, Wallse, in our neighborhood, with an extensive wine list. [There is more in this issue about wine tasting in restaurants.] Our first try was Zweigelt, which some people describe as a lighter red but we’ve always found quite dense. The wine is named for a Dr. Felix Zweigelt, who created the grape by cross-breeding two other varietals.

Those two varietals were Blaufränkisch and Sankt Laurent. The former grape translates to French Blue, but it doesn’t seem to have any French derivation. It makes rich, tannic wines, often vinified in a style evocative of Northern Rhônes. It quickly became our favorite Austrian wine, perhaps because it complements wiener schnitzel so well. We recently got around to trying Sankt Laurent and find it very much like Pinot Noir. We’ve read that DNA studies confirm that parentage.

It’s fun to discover a whole new world of taste sensations, and having a source of so many fine examples of Austrian wine just up the street makes it even more enjoyable for us.