Right across from Mautern
From Mautern it is only a few minutes over the Danube bridge to Stein and Krems, and to the south we see Göttweig Abbey on its hill every day. So the Kremstal is not a distant wine region for us but the immediate neighbourhood. Its history is closely interwoven with the Wachau's and yet its own: here it was never only about growing wine, but about trading it too.
According to Austrian Wine, the Kremstal today has around 2,242 hectares of vineyards. Grüner Veltliner covers 59 per cent of them, with Riesling and Zweigelt following at around 11 per cent each.
Early traces and the return of wine
People have lived here for a very long time. The State of Lower Austria lists Palaeolithic finds at the Hundssteig and the Wachtberg in Krems dating from around 30,000 to 25,000 BC. Terraces, climate and the location on a trade route along the Danube have drawn people here for millennia.
An early hint of winegrowing comes from the biography of Saint Severin, written around 511. It names a place near the Roman fort of Favianis, today's Mautern, called ad vineas, meaning at the vineyards. These beginnings faded during the migration period. Winegrowing only picked up again after Charlemagne's Avar wars around 800, when Bavarian bishoprics and monasteries received land here.
995: Krems appears, Stein becomes a trading post
Krems is first mentioned on 9 August 995 in a charter of Emperor Otto III as Chremisa. Its sister town of Stein follows in 1072. Stein was above all a toll and loading point for salt, wine and grain, and a Stein customs tariff from around 1200 names merchants from Passau, Regensburg, Cologne, Aachen, Swabia and Italy.
In 1305, Krems and Stein received a joint town charter. According to the State of Lower Austria, their prosperity in the late Middle Ages rested on winegrowing and on trade in wine, salt and iron. The princely toll house in Stein dates from 1536, and in 1548 King Ferdinand I issued a dedicated vineyard ordinance for the Krems area.
The monasteries and their harvest courts
Walking through the old towns of Krems and Stein, you keep coming across names like Passauer Hof, Kremsmünstererhof or Göttweigerhof. According to the State of Lower Austria, these are the Lesehöfe, harvest courts of monasteries and dioceses documented since the High Middle Ages. They were used to store the wine from their own vineyards and to manage their property locally.
Sources differ on exactly how many monasteries owned vineyards around Krems: the Kremstal wine committee speaks of 54 monasteries and abbeys over the course of history, Winzer Krems of more than 40. What is certain is that there were dozens, from large parts of Central Europe.
The closest and best known is Göttweig Abbey, founded in 1083 by Bishop Altmann of Passau. According to the abbey's winery, vineyards are already recorded in the founding charter. Göttweig set up its own harvest courts, among them in Stein and in Furth.
Guild, crises and inventions
The Krems winegrowers' guild, the Hauerinnung, is first documented in the 15th century: the City of Krems gives 1447, the State of Lower Austria 1477. It is considered the oldest known winegrowers' guild in Austria.
Not every era was golden. According to the Kremstal wine committee, in 1772 the town of Krems could not sell even ten per cent of the wine it held, partly because of customs restrictions at the time. The 19th century left a very practical legacy: in 1849, the Krems toolsmith Johann Keusch developed the Kremser Rebschere, a pruning shear for which he received an imperial privilege in 1850.
Since 1875 the Krems wine school has been training winegrowers. It celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2025.
The 20th century: cooperative and high-trained vines
In 1938 the winegrowers' cooperative in Krems was founded, today's Winzer Krems. Its history includes a dark chapter that the cooperative itself discloses: parts of the estate in the Sandgrube belonged until 1938 to the Jewish wine merchant Paul Robitschek and his mother Johanna. Robitschek fled, the estate was Aryanised and acquired by the cooperative in 1939. Restitution proceedings ended in a settlement in 1949. According to Winzer Krems, the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW) studied this history academically from 2018 to 2020.
From Rohrendorf, on the eastern edge of the Kremstal, came an innovation that changed winegrowing across Austria. In the 1920s Lenz Moser experimented on his father's estate with a higher training system for vines, the Hochkultur. In 1929 he founded his own vine nursery, and in 1951 he presented the system publicly in Rohrendorf. According to the State of Lower Austria, it allowed better light and airflow for the vines, mechanised cultivation and lower planting costs. Today it is widespread in Austria.
Why wine grows here: primary rock and loess
The Kremstal lies on the south-eastern arc of the Waldviertel and the Dunkelsteiner Wald, an upland of crystalline rock. North of the Danube, paragneiss with bands of amphibolite and granite gneiss dominates, along with Gföhl gneiss; south of the river, granulite prevails.
Because the area sits on the leeward side of this upland, widespread and in places very thick layers of loess have built up. That creates the typical split: according to Austrian Wine, the weathered primary rock soils around the town of Krems are ideal for Riesling, while the loess terraces in places like Rohrendorf and Gedersdorf tend to give rounder, fuller Veltliners.
Why wine grows here: climate
The incised river valley is well sheltered from cool northern winds, while the fringes of the warm Pannonian climate are still clearly felt from the east. Cooler continental influences come down from the Waldviertel plateau, and the Danube acts as a balancing factor in between.
That explains why the Kremstal is so varied in the glass: depending on whether a vineyard sits on a primary rock slope above the town or on loess further east, the same Grüner Veltliner can turn out taut or opulent.
From regional name to Kremstal DAC
The name Kremstal is younger than you might think. The region was simply called Krems until 1985, became part of Kamptal-Donauland under the 1985 wine law, and has been called Kremstal since the 1993 wine law amendment.
Since the 2007 vintage there has been a Kremstal DAC for Grüner Veltliner and Riesling, today divided into Gebietswein, Ortswein and Riedenwein, plus Reserve with at least 13 per cent alcohol.
What you can still see today
The nice thing about the Kremstal: its history is not locked away in a museum. The harvest courts stand in the middle of the old town, and the abbey looks down over Furth. Walking along the Steiner Landstraße, you move through a town shaped by the medieval wine trade.
Our tip: combine a walk through Stein and the old town of Krems with a glass of Riesling from primary rock and a Veltliner from loess. Then you can taste the split described above.