Though Vienna’s vineyards are within city limits, they can feel a world away. Among the rows of grapes on the edges of the Austrian capital, the sounds and action of 1.9 million people are replaced by rocky paths, the chatter of crickets and a general calm.
That is, until September begins.
As fall and the harvest season arrive, the city’s residents grasp for one last bit of summer and head by the thousands to the vineyards to spend just a few more weekends drinking and eating in the sun. There to host them are wine taverns known as heurigen — a word that refers to both young wine and to the establishments themselves — and buschenschanken. The latter have to serve their own wine, made from local grapes, and they have to identify themselves by including a pine, spruce or fir branch in their signage (this tradition supposedly goes back to the Middle Ages, when a “wine crier” would mark the cellars where townspeople could get wine by pinning a pine branch to them).
“The heuriger is like the Wiener schnitzel,” said Laura Scheybal, who took over the management of a heuriger called Der Hirt this year with several partners. “It has a place in the heart of the Viennese.”
There are about 580 hectares of vineyards in Vienna and 145 wineries. Until the 1970s, people trekked to the heurigen with their own food. These days, they can instead purchase carefully selected products — cheeses, meats, pickled vegetables and more — to soak up the wide selection of Viennese wine.
Once the domain of the older generations, heurigen have begun to attract more and more young people. “In the 1980s, the average customer was 60,” said Paul Kiefer, the sales manager at Mayer am Pfarrplatz Winery, which counts the composer Ludwig van Beethoven as a one-time customer at its heuriger. “In the last 10 years, we have had so many young people coming to the heurigen, who are 20, 22 years old. They pregame in the heurigen and then go out to the club.”
Paul Erker, 35, a physicist, tries to go to the vineyards with friends a few times during the season, from the middle of spring to the middle of fall. “There are good views and good wine, combined with light physical activity,” he said. “It’s the perfect combination. You can sunbathe a little bit, and get drunk, which Viennese people always like.”
The archetypal heuriger visitor does not exist. “There is a professor from university, a farmer from two houses to the left and the unemployed guy who sits there…
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