Frost, hail, heat and high water—nature threw everything at winegrowers in Lower Austria in 2024. A warm March led to some of the earliest budbursts ever, making vines vulnerable to late spring frosts in April. Heat and drought posed a challenge in summer, while torrential rains in mid-September caused widespread flooding. Some estates had dramatically lower yields, some were lucky to escape relatively unscathed, but all were worried about what the rain would do to their fruit. Quality is thus more mixed in 2024, yet there are highlights and coups de coeur nonetheless.

The renaissance of German and Austrian Sekt continues apace. After last year’s paean to the revival of bottle-fermented Sekt in both countries, this is the second report on all things German-speaking and bottle-fermented. While the holy trinity of sparkling varieties, namely Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, shines in both countries, we will also take a closer look at Rieslingsekt.

The 2023 growing season kept winemakers in Austria’s east on their toes. Rain that had been so sorely missed in 2022 came in abundance, as did heat. However, a golden autumn ensured long ripening and yielded reds and whites with bright acidity and aromatic nuance. Producers who specialize in nobly sweet wines were able to pick concentrated fruit with super-clean botrytis. What’s more, Austria’s east was spared from frost and hail, as well as from the many flood events that did so much damage throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

In 2023, all the signs pointed to a long growing season with a late harvest, but rains after a hot summer with record temperatures sped everything up. These August rains provided some relief from dry stress but also turned into devastating hailstorms in places. Coolish and sunny weather allowed hail-damaged grapes to dry, preventing what could have been a complete rot-fest. In the end, growers could harvest ripe grapes. Overall, Lower Austria and Vienna delivered exquisitely clean wines with vivid fruit expression and welcome crunch and contour. If recent comparisons serve, 2023 tops 2022 but does not quite reach the level of 2021 in all respects – even though some wines get there.

Rosé remains in full swing. Ever the popular quaff as the weather warms and the dog days of summer approach, there’s more pink wine on store shelves than ever. However, new releases, mostly from the 2023 vintage, are a bit more variable than usual.

The landscape of Austrian and German sparkling wine, or Sekt, has changed beyond recognition – at long last. What began with the heroic and often lone efforts of a handful of determined individuals in the 1970s and 1980s is finally in full fizz. It took decades of legal changes and challenges to create this new category, but even more so, it took years of cultural re-assessment to rehabilitate the historical term “Sekt”. Traditional method Sekt is now a serious, exciting and growing category in both countries. The ambition is palpable. This inaugural Sekt report covers bottle-fermented Sekts from Styria to the Weinviertel in Austria and Baden to Saxony in Germany. The revival was slow, but today, you can hear corks popping everywhere.

Austria’s central and eastern wine regions produced as much red wine as white. Tasting and thinking about the wines I encountered, it is clearer than ever to me that Blaufränkisch deserves a much wider audience. Moreover, it deserves to be planted far and wide in various corners of the globe. It is one of the last red sleepers out there. My estate visits in November 2023 yielded more tasting notes from the stunning 2021 vintage than from 2022. Because many wineries release wines with delay, this report also includes notes for a sizeable amount of 2020s, 2019s and 2018s – all of them current releases.

Two thousand twenty-two in Austria is a vintage that had the misfortune of following a stellar year. With the spectacular 2021 vintage still fresh in producers’ memories, nobody was waxing lyrical about 2022. It is one of those years that will live in the shadows and eventually be quietly reassessed, especially since the combination of slightly more moderate alcohol levels, with not-quite-as-much stuffing provides surprising drinking pleasure. But, talking about stuffing, there is plenty of that in the best wines.

Rosé has never been as exciting as it is today. This year's Rosé coverage takes an in-depth look at the wines of Italy, France, Spain, the United States and Austria. Recent tastings unveil a stunning array of regional styles and flavors. Watch this space as we add more selections from our team of editors in the coming weeks.

As the reality of a prolonged lockdown started to settle-in this past Spring, I thought it would be fun to do something different, to write an article on regions and estates I don’t usually cover and that have been missing from our pages. I hope you enjoy this tour through some of my favorite properties.

Pichler’s 2006 Riesling Smaragd Unendlich (the name translates to ‘unending’) is one of the most remarkable wines – white or red – I have tasted in a long time.

In canvassing Germany’s precarious vintage 2000 for The International Wine Cellar in early 2002, I led off by observing: “The decade of the 1990s was an extraordinary one for German vintners. At its midpoint (back in Issue 64), I wrote: ‘We are in the midst of a streak of vintages utterly unprecedented in the history of German viticulture.’ And I hadn’t seen or tasted the half of it....!"

The tension and excitement (in a single German word, “Spannung”) that attended the 2016 growing season for Austrian Riesling and Grüner Veltliner, as well as the resulting wines, were predictably nowhere more evidenced than in the Wachau and Kamptal. Lovers of Austrian Riesling and Grüner Veltliner are likely to discover much joy in investigating and drinking the finest 2016s.

A growing season that presented enormous challenges also harbored opportunities, on which Austria’s top practitioners of Grüner Veltliner and Riesling capitalized to make sleek, invitingly fragrant wines of intricacy, charm and alcoholic moderation. The best are often more exciting than their 2015 counterparts.

The weather extremes experienced in so many recent vintages have been accompanied increasingly by years featuring remarkably similar meteorological and growing patterns that stretch from the Mosel to parts of Austria nearly 400 flight miles distant. In the end, ironically, the drama that preceded it led to a 2016 Riesling harvest as stress-free as many Austrian and German growers could recall, and to grapes whose very gradual ripening and modest eventual must weights would have seemed more familiar to growers of the mid-20th century.

It seems as though the climatic changes that help explain so many 21st century Riesling growing seasons of unprecedented extremes in weather are having this additional effect: For the third year in a row, in 2017 one can characterize the growing season for Riesling in Bernkastel on the Mosel in very similar terms to that in Krems on the Danube, exactly 400 crow-flying miles distant.

Two thousand-fifteen, a stress-free vintage for growers, overflows with generous, lovely wines that belie mid-summer drought and record-setting heat.

At several stages, the 2014 growing season in Austria’s Riesling and Grüner Veltliner-dominated growing regions offered a near mirror image of conditions in 2013. Yet, meteorological opposites though they often seem when viewed on a month-by-month basis, each ended-up delivering wines comparatively high in dry extract, pronounced in acidity and low in alcohol. The deviations from the norm in 2014, though, were extreme. And only very selectively could growers achieve ripeness and depth of flavor—not to mention aromatic and textural allure—that could be compared with the norms of downright sensational 2013.

Despite a growing season marked by a dry summer that was statistically among the five hottest of the last century, Austria’s 2013 Rieslings and Grüner Veltliners display exceptionally bright acidity, clear flavor definition and uncanny complexity.

I found growers in high sprits when discussing their 2013s. After extremely low yields in both 2012 and 2010 caused commercial difficulties for many estates, the more bountiful 2013 also brought relief in terms of production levels. Given that 2014 will again be very short in volume and largely mediocre in quality, consumers should carefully scout the available selection of 2013s at their local wine shops in order to buy the best bottles while they are still to be found.

Although he prefers cooler vintages, Lucas Pichler from Oberloiben in the Wachau is pleased with 2012

Listening to Gerhard Kracher talk about his family can only be described as emotional. Kracher’s grandfather, Alois Sr., was chronically undernourished and was thus mistaken for a boy and spared by the Nazis during World War II. Kracher’s father, Alois Jr. ‘Luis’, was one of the most beloved figures in the world of wine. Luis Kracher put his estate on the map with a series of stunningly beautiful and rich dessert wines that showed the world what was possible with meticulous viticulture and inspired winemaking.

In many respects, Austria’s 2008 vintage follows 2007 seamlessly.

After a vintage like 2006, which brought so many potent white wines, wine lovers should be pleased about the moderate alcohol content, vibrant acidity and elegant fruit of the 2007s.

Austria’s 2006 vintage frequently brought quite powerful white wines, particularly in Lower Austria (Niederösterreich).