Fine Bright Red

The Orient, said Metternich, begins at the Ring. It is hardly surprising an Austrian statesman of the early nineteenth century should think the Near East was as close as the suburbs of Vienna. The Ottoman Turks besieged the Austrian capital at least twice and the favor was returned each time an Austrian army, arrayed boldly by batteries, besieged Belgrade.

Not that the symbiosis of the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires was all horror and confrontation. Even their hostilities had some cheerful consequences. After the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 (the year before Bach was born), the retreating armies left behind sacks of black beans the size and shape of rabbit droppings, though a good deal scrunchier. A Viennese entrepreneur ground them into a powder and opened Europe’s first coffeehouse. Can you imagine Vienna without Kaffee und Kuchen? Would you not think J.S. Bach just a polyphiloprogenitive sobersides (like Organ Morgan of Llareggub–it’s organ, organ all the time with him) if there were not those bubbly bits in his Coffee Cantata?

In any case, distinctions between west and east are always arbitrary–they vary as you go round the globe, whereas those between north and south are absolute. And this part of MittelEuropa, whether ruled by the Hapsburgs or the Turks, is a magnificent macedoine of ethnic eccentricity.

Read all about it in the trilogy of travel books by Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts, Between Woods and Water, and a third volume eagerly awaited by admirers. This is the record of a young man who set out, in 1933, to walk from Canterbury to Constantinople. He meets all sorts of men, from barons and rabbis to gypsies and the country gentry of the Pannonian Plain, who are said to enjoy the best partridge shooting in the world. The more spirit one has oneself, the more one finds other people original. The author is the same P. Leigh Fermor who kidnapped a German general on Crete during the Second World War and solemnly exchanged with him lines from the Odes of Horace as they passed by the snow-capped summit of Mount Ida on their way to a British submarine and safety. In Austria and points east, the Leigh Fermor liveliness matches that of the people whose land he was passing through.

For the Romans, it was certainly the north-south distinction that mattered. The beautiful Blue Danube was their frontier facing north toward Central Europe and its ferocious Iron Age warrior aristocracies. Romans, naturally, drank wine; the folk beyond the Roman border liked beer or mead (though they would do as Romans whenever they could get wine). Emperors and armies campaigned along the Danube to keep the empire safe. Marcus Aurelius, after a hard day’s soldiering, would come back to the stronghold of Carnuntum, withdraw into himself, and stoically compose his Meditations. (The opening scenes of Gladiator are as good an evocation as I know of the hard business of campaigning in these dank northern forests.)

Carnuntum today is the center of a thriving wine region, making both red and white wine from French varieties as well as from grapes that have grown in the long hot summers here since the Middle Ages. Production is protected by particularly strict purity laws, introduced twenty years ago, after it was discovered that some Austrian wines contained a chemical called diethylene glycol, added to increase body and sweetness (not to be confused with ethylene glycol, a substance that belongs in the radiator of your motorcar). I cannot imagine why anyone ever thought such adulteration desirable, given the excellence of what they make here naturally.

Try, for instance, a 2003 red from Weingut Glatzer made from the Blaufrankisch grape, available locally for about twelve dollars. Blaufrankisch is the grape Germans call the Limberger; its name comes from the blue of the berries and frankisch, a term used since the Middle Ages to indicate superior quality. The wine is lively, clear and bright with an initial bite like mild black coffee and a fine fruity flavor, concealing hints of that pleasing wateriness that comes from really ripe blackberries. One can imagine it in the company of anything you might eat with a rather alcoholic Pinot Noir–even a Thanksgiving turkey. Though perhaps it might feel more at home with a Pannonian partridge. Prost.