Our theme for October’s meeting was wines from Germany and Austria.

We have not sampled wines from Austria for some time and were pleased to discover some unusual and different grape varieties, with some interesting names: The white gruner veitliner is the most planted grape in Austria and the zweigelt is the most popular red. We tasted five whites, one rose and two reds. Thankfully, nobody brought a bottle of Blue Nun!

We finished the evening with a piece of stollen accompanied by a delicious smooth dessert wine.

The Austrian wine industry has now recovered its reputation from the scandal in 1985 when, after a poor harvest, some Austrian wineries added anti freeze to their wine to make it sweeter and fuller bodied. The Austrian wine industry took many years to recover but with stricter wine controls and classification systems it has now recovered its reputation.