Grinzing and the Nussberg vineyards

Neighborhood · Döbling (19th)Vienna,Austria

A wine village inside Vienna with cellars under its houses and vine rows beginning where the street ends, a branch over a gate meaning open.

Grinzing is a wine village that Vienna grew around instead of over. The village kept its old shape, a line of low houses facing one another across a green, and nearly every one has a sixteenth-century barrel-vaulted wine cellar under it. Walk uphill and the houses stop and the vine rows begin. The slope above is the Nussberg, where growers set benches and long tables out among the working rows, so you drink with the city lying below the vines. These slopes have been worked for nine hundred years and they are still working: about 700 hectares of vines lie inside the city boundary, almost half of them in this district. Down in the village a pine branch hung over a gateway still means a grower is pouring, and that is the sign to look for rather than a menu. The taverns are thinning, though. Döbling had 281 of them in the mid-1950s and 44 by 2015, while the area under vine barely moved.

Worth knowing

HistoryWritten down in 1114, protected in 2018

Klosterneuburg Abbey's property register records vines on this slope in 1114. Austria's heritage office listed around eighty village cellars in 2018, as apartment conversions began taking them.

Good to know

Keep walking up Cobenzlgasse until the pavement gives out — The courtyards get quieter and smaller with every hundred metres, and the vineyard starts within a few minutes of the village fork.
Ask for a wine named after the slope, not the grape — Bottles marked Ried Steinberg or Ried Nussberg come off hillsides visible from the table, and growers will point out the row.
Come while it is still light — Coaches work the main street after dark, so the earlier hours are when you hear the courtyard rather than a microphone.
Look for crates and stained hands in late September — The steep terraces are too narrow for machines, so picking is done on foot, and the village smells of fermenting must for weeks.
Each grower posts its own stretch of open dates — the branch goes up only for those weeks, and the taverns out among the vines open only between spring and late autumn.

Things to do

1
Step through a gateway into a wine-grower's yard
The village houses are only one or two storeys, but many have an arched carriage entrance wide enough for a cart. Walk through one. Behind it you find a gravel courtyard with long shared tables, a chestnut tree for shade, and a cellar door set into the ground at the back.
2
Sit down inside the working rows on the Nussberg
Climb the lane out of the village until the last house is behind you and the vines close in on both sides. Growers put plain benches and trestle tables right in the rows here. Sit with your back to the hill and the city lies below you, seen between the wires and the leaves.
3
Find the stepped terraces of the Steinberg
Above Grinzing the hillside is cut into narrow steps, the only terraced vineyard in Vienna. This is the Steinberg, and it takes its name from a quarry that once worked the same stone. Stand at the foot and count the steps upward. Each is a separate strip, too narrow to farm with a machine.