T’s monthly travel series, Flocking To, highlights places you might already have on your wish list, sharing tips from frequent visitors and locals alike. Sign up here to find us in your inbox once a month, along with our weekly roundup of cultural recommendations, monthly beauty guides and the latest stories from our print issues. Have a question? You can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com.
Compared to the designer-swathed slopes and luxury boutique-lined streets of more widely known Alpine destinations like Gstaad and St. Moritz, Austria’s mountain towns are refreshingly low-key. “There are very luxurious places here,” says Alice Liechtenstein, an Italian-born design curator who relocated to the east Austrian hills two decades ago, taking up residence in her husband’s ancestral castle, “but it’s not ritzy glitzy.” Instead, Austrian resorts center on serious skiing and deeply traditional culture — which, for Austrians, are practically one and the same. “Skiing is our version of football or baseball,” says New York-based sommelier, restaurateur and winemaker Aldo Sohm, who grew up outside of Innsbruck. “It’s who we are.”
Stretching from the border with Liechtenstein (the country) in the east to the Vienna basin in the west, Austria’s Alpine region covers over 20,000 square miles. Depending on which peaks they’re targeting, visitors often fly into Zurich or Munich and then rent a car or take a train into the mountains (Munich to Salzburg is about a two-hour train trip). Sohm prefers to connect through Frankfurt to the Innsbruck airport, which is “small but very efficient,” he says. For a ski vacation here, there’s not much need for a car, notes Liechtenstein. “You walk out of your hotel and you’re at the lifts,” she says.
From November through March, winter sports are the main draw. Many vacationers also come to soak in the area’s natural springs, which are clustered in historic spa towns like Bad Aussee. “Checking into a hotel with thermal baths, soaking and eating and going for walks is the Austrian ideal of a perfect weekend,” says Liechtenstein. There are also several notable places to see art and design and explore local crafts like glassmaking and woodworking. And once the snow melts, the region is “basically paradise” for hikers and bikers, says Sohm.
With so many opportunities to build up an appetite, it makes sense that food here tends toward the hearty. (“You can at least find fish…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at NYT > Travel…