Wine with Leslie: A focus on Austria, a wine producing country that is often overlooked

A focus on Austria this week, a wine producing country that is often overlooked. Austria has transformed itself from a bulk wine producer in the 1970s and 80s into a consistently high-quality wine region with some of the strictest wine laws.

These days it is extremely rare to encounter a sub-standard Austrian wine, partly because you will need to pay at least €14, but also because the drive for quality was seen as a national project to recreate the country’s wine image after an unfortunate adulteration incident in the 1980s. Nobody got ill or even conceivably could have gotten ill from that scandal (unlike the much worse methanol sandal in Italy the following year where people died), but itbnevertheless destroyed the Austrian wine industry.