Getting Your Teeth into Austrian Wine
Posted: 6th June 2022
I am well aware that wine tasting is perceived as a huge joke by many people, an excuse to get pissed and bandy a lot of descriptive terms about figuring a cornucopia of fruits and flowers, but I can assure you that it is actually hard work and requires considerable stamina and healthy teeth.
It is perhaps best compared to a sport. If you get out of condition and do not practise, you will rapidly lose your ability to get through major tournaments. The Covid plague meant that most wine tastings were either scrapped, or took place at home with sample bottles large or small delivered to your door. As with everything else that happened those two years, life was on the back-burner, slow and sedate; there was no need to bust a gut. Several magazines went under and there were precious few opportunities to write.
All major events were cancelled or postponed. One was the biennial VieVinum Fair in Vienna, which I have been attending since it was created in the nineties. This May, it was back on the calendar, and once again I had to gird my loins at the prospect of tasting up to a dozen wines from around two-hundred producers. Given that it would be impossible to taste two to three thousand wines over three days I decided that I would drop in on key producers whose wines I knew, taking the temperature of the vintages I had missed.
