A valley with unusually clear borders
We live in Mautern, right where the Danube valley opens up to the east. From here you see every day what makes the Wachau: steep slopes, stone walls, vines climbing far up and the river in between. Living here, you eventually ask why so much wine grows in this narrow valley, and since when.
The Wachau is the Danube valley between Melk and Krems, just over 30 kilometres of river. The area is first mentioned in 830, when King Louis the German granted land in the Wachau to the Bavarian abbey of Niederalteich. The Vinea Wachau counts it among the most precisely defined landscapes in Europe, and its history is still visible in the landscape today.
Roman times: Favianis and Saint Severin
The Vinea Wachau traces the tradition of winegrowing back to the period of Roman settlement. The Danube was then the border of the Roman Empire. Our Mautern was called Favianis and was a fort on this Norican Limes, built on an old high terrace close to the water.
Saint Severin died in Favianis in 482. His biography by Eugippius is considered one of the most vivid accounts of late antique life on the Danube frontier. Since 2021, the remains of the fort have been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Danube Limes. The biography, written around 511, names a place near Favianis to which Severin withdrew, called ad vineas, meaning at the vineyards. That is an early hint of winegrowing in the area around 470. How large the vineyards were at the time cannot be read from it.
Around 800: monasteries build the terraces
According to UNESCO, clearing of the natural forest began as early as the Neolithic. The big change came only around 800, when Bavarian and Salzburg monasteries began to cultivate the slopes of the Wachau and laid out the pattern of vine terraces that is still visible today.
Under the Carolingians, Wachau viticulture had its first golden age, and in the Middle Ages the wines were already known far beyond Austria. Many of the vineyard names found on labels today can, according to the Vinea Wachau, be traced back to the 13th century. They often still speak of the nature of the vineyard, of former owners or of historical events.
The name Vinea Wachau has medieval roots too. According to the Vinea Wachau, it goes back to Leuthold I of Kuenring (1243 to 1312), who held the office of chief cupbearer in Austria. The core of his possessions roughly matched today's wine region.
Ups and downs over the centuries
The story was not as straightforward as the postcards suggest. UNESCO describes how the area under vine fluctuated over the centuries: with the climate, with the wine market and, in the 17th century, with acute labour shortages and rising wages.
In the 18th century, hillside viticulture was actively promoted where conditions were best. Other areas became pasture, and in the upper part of the Wachau winegrowing was abandoned altogether at that time. To this day, the shifting balance between vineyards and orchards, above all apricots, shapes the look of the valley, and it is still closely tied to the markets for both.
The villages themselves are old as well. The basic layouts of Wachau towns date from the 11th and 12th centuries, and the street patterns have barely changed since the late Middle Ages. The typical elongated winegrowers' farmsteads with gate walls and vaulted passages go back to the late Middle Ages and the 16th and 17th centuries.
Why wine grows here at all: climate
The Wachau sits on a climate boundary. From the east, the warm, dry Pannonian climate zone reaches into the valley like a tongue. At the same time, cooler, moister air flows down from the heights of the Dunkelsteiner Wald to the south and the Waldviertel to the north, through the small wooded side valleys known here as Gräben.
The result is almost constant air movement and a marked swing between warm days and cool nights. The Vinea Wachau sees this as one reason for the pronounced aromatics of Wachau wines. For us it also explains why a Riesling from a cool side valley can taste so different from one grown on a warm slope right by the Danube.
Why wine grows here at all: soil
The upper terraces sit on weathered primary rock soils, sparse and stony. Further down the valley, small islands of loess cover the rock in places and give way to light, sandy soils. On the terraces, the vines reach up to about 450 metres above sea level, some 250 metres above the Danube.
On these poor soils a vine carries only a few bunches. That is exactly what brings the density and clarity Wachau wine is known for. The Vinea Wachau therefore calls the soil the region's second secret, next to the climate.
Stone on stone: the dry-stone walls
More than 40 per cent of the Wachau's vineyard area lies on terraces. They are held up by around 2.5 to 3 million square metres of dry-stone walls, built entirely without mortar, mainly from paragneiss, marble and Gföhl gneiss. Without these walls, slopes with gradients of up to 60 per cent could not be farmed at all.
The walls do more than create flat ground. They hold the thin layer of humus on the hillside, which would otherwise wash away, and they store heat and water. They are also a habitat: according to the Vinea Wachau, twice as many animal species live in the walls as in the vineyards themselves, among them the European green lizard, the Smaragdeidechse, after which the Smaragd style tier is named.
The walls are still built by hand, mostly in winter, using stones from the surroundings or from collapsed walls. When you walk past a freshly laid wall next to one that is centuries old, you understand why work in these sites takes so much time.
1972: the Wachau fights a power plant
That the Wachau looks the way it does today was not a given. At the end of 1971, concrete plans were presented for a Danube hydroelectric plant between Dürnstein and Weißenkirchen, at the level of Rossatz-Rührsdorf. According to ORF, the water level would have risen by about six metres, with the backwater reaching 25 kilometres upstream towards Melk.
In 1972 the Arbeitskreis zum Schutz der Wachau, a working group for the protection of the Wachau, was founded. More than 60,000 people signed against the plant, and Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz spoke out publicly. As early as 1973, Bruno Kreisky's government agreed to have alternatives without a dam studied. The Danube power plant Wachau was finally abandoned only in 1983. Without that resistance, the riverside landscape that is now World Heritage would probably have changed considerably.
From the Vinea Wachau to World Heritage
In 1983, Wachau winegrowers founded the Vinea Wachau Nobilis Districtus. Since then its members have voluntarily committed to not buying in grapes or wine from other regions. From 1984, the brands Steinfeder, Federspiel and Smaragd were created, for dry white wine without enrichment and without noticeable oak.
In 2000, UNESCO added the Wachau Cultural Landscape to the World Heritage List. The reasoning: an essentially medieval landscape of architecture, settlements and viticulture that has grown organically and remained remarkably well preserved. The World Heritage area today covers 18,462 hectares, including the abbeys of Melk and Göttweig and the old towns of Krems and Stein.
Finally, the Wachau DAC added a legal origin system with Gebietswein, Ortswein and Riedenwein. One rule applies throughout: wherever Wachau DAC is on the label, the grapes were picked by hand.
What this means for your next visit
Once you know the history, you see the Wachau differently. The terraces are not decoration but the result of centuries of work. A vineyard name on a label is often a piece of the Middle Ages. And every wine sold as Wachau DAC must be hand-picked, even where a harvesting machine could be used.
Our tip: walk through the terraces once, ideally in autumn, and in the evening have exactly that wine from exactly that vineyard in your glass. You rarely get to taste this much history.