Thanks to both Jamie and Jon for posting while I was gone. Go check out Complaint Hub for your D.C. related blogginess and Marketing, Finance, and Obama for your effervescent marketing analysis.
For the past two weeks I’ve been gallivanting through Central and Eastern Europe with The Wife. Our trip took us through Prague, Budapest, and Vienna.
Prague, as many know, is quite a drinking town. You can get half-liter mugs of beer for 10 Czech Crowns (around 60 cents). Compared to most other European nations, there isn’t much of a wine industry to speak of. You’re not going to find Wine Spectator scrambling to update their vintage charts on Czech Republic. But, wine is around and the local pubs like to sell the local wine. Typically the wine is poured out of taps (sort of like beer) and sold to locals in two-liter bottles like soda. The whole thing had a garagiste feel to it, like the jug wines that we found in Umbria. Wine made by the people, for the people.
The more traditional 750ml bottled wines weren’t bad. They grow all sorts of grapes that I’d never heard of and couldn’t pronounce, so tastings were that much more of an adventure. Most shops were more than happy to help us along with tasting, grapes, and linguistics. Across the board the quality is comparable with Virginia, perhaps a little better. The wines there don’t feel like they’re out to prove something as they so often feel over here in the U.S.
All this isn’t to say that Prague isn’t home to fancy, refined wine bars fit for a gentleman such as myself. The picture above was taken in such an establishment which looks the part and could fit into the Russian Hill neighborhood in San Francisco.
For all the drinking that is done in Prague, there isn’t much in Budapest. Hungary is home to Tokaj, a region (town?) producing some of the best sweet wines in the entire world. Much of the country is filled with wine appellations, but this doesn’t translate into lots of wine being available in town. Many restaurants have nearly identical wine lists with the same label images and same fonts, clearly all done by the same distributor or wine authority. We had to hunt down a by-the-glass Tokaji offering just so I could check it off my list.
Vienna, ah Vienna. The Austrian wine industry may take a backseat to its neighbor Germany, but some of the whites there were very, very good. We were lucky enough to stay at the Hotel Rathaus, a swanky hotel in the city center that is all about the wine. Each room was themed with wines from a separate winemaker that the hotel is partnered with. Our room re-defined the mini-bar (pictured above), with full bottles of good wines from the featured winemaker, available at prices that were quite reasonable. The staff at Hotel Rathaus walked us through the recent vintages of Austrian Gruner Veltliner and Sauvignon Blanc, explaining the differences and nuances of each year/varietal combination. The 2006 Gruner Veltliner, we learned, is a superstar.
We ate at a Heurigen in Grinzing. Hurigens are wine taverns, essentially small restaurants that sell wine made from the owner’s vineyards. The big Heurigen towns are close to Vienna, some even within the city limits. It’s local Austrian cooking (meat, pork, Schnitzel) with local Austrian wine, can’t be beat on the authenticity meter.
In all, quite a trip with three cities in twelve days. The wine was great, always better to drink wines made locally than to get a bottle that has been shipped across the ocean in some inhospitable shipping container. A few bottles slipped into my checked luggage and we’ll look forward to popping those sometime down the road.
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