Austria

Austrian wine as it exists today dates from 1985. A small number of producers were found to have added diethylene glycol to sweeten cheap wine, the export market collapsed almost overnight, and the country responded by writing the strictest wine law in Europe and abandoning the sweet bulk trade entirely. What emerged was a producer base focused on dry white wine of high precision, sold at home and to sommeliers abroad.

Grüner veltliner is the signature, planted on about a third of the vineyard and grown almost nowhere else. At its simplest it is a brisk, citrus and white pepper wine for drinking young. From the terraced loess and gneiss sites of the Wachau, Kremstal and Kamptal it becomes dense, long-lived and closer in weight to a fine white Burgundy.

The reds are underrated. Blaufränkisch, from Burgenland on the Hungarian border, gives dark fruit, firm acidity and real tannin, and it ages. Zweigelt, a 1922 crossing of blaufränkisch and st laurent, is the most planted red and makes a lighter, juicier wine. Around Lake Neusiedl the autumn mists reliably produce botrytis, and Austria makes some of the best sweet wine in Europe there.

Austria's own quality ladder, DAC, works differently from most: each DAC defines a style typical of its district rather than simply drawing a boundary. Wachau producers use a separate private scheme with three ripeness levels, Steinfeder, Federspiel and Smaragd, in ascending order of weight.