Vine focus vital

It takes years of back-breaking effort to bring critical mass to a small-scale wine industry. Its undoing can take just a single misadventure. For Austria's 50,000 vineyard holders, that single misadventure took the form of an infamous wine scam in 1985.

It became known as the anti-freeze affair, after it was discovered that seven wine exporting businesses were adulterating wines with diethylene glycol to enhance their taste and their texture. That brief but illicit use of anti-freeze as a sweetening agent brought the country's entire wine industry into disrepute. 

It's not something leading Austrian wine producer Bertold ('Bert') Salomon likes to talk about these days.

His family firm of Weingut Salomon-Undhof is one of the oldest privately owned wineries in Austria. It was founded in 1792, and is based in the picturesque town of Stein, overlooking the Danube River. 

Bert Salomon figures among the company's seventh generation of growers and winemakers.

Salomon-Undhof was just one of thousands of innocent parties hurt by the scandalous events of 20 years ago.

Decades later, Salomon would rather let his impressive range of Riesling and Grüner Veltliner wines speak on his behalf. 

And that's exactly what they did in Launceston last Friday, when the affable winemaker and marketer was the featured guest at a degustation dinner held at Country Club Tasmania's Terrace Restaurant.

Salomon's carefully chosen selection provided clear evidence that Austria's small-scale wine industry is in great shape today and has a bright future ahead of it. Its former scandal is regarded as ancient history now, thanks to the industry-wide cooperation shown by its 50,000 winegrowers. The country has set in place some of the strictest controls on wine quality seen anywhere in the world.

According to Salomon, around half those growers are similar in scale and production to those found across Tasmania. So he's not surprised when he hears that small vineyards on this side of the planet are struggling financially in the face of a world-wide glut of wine. 

The pressures to produce more and more wine for ever-decreasing returns are the same as those being applied in his home country. He sees no strategy more imperative for Tasmania than that being followed in his native Austria.

"You really have to look to your vineyards to maintain and improve the quality of your wines," he says.

"Producers in the New World have had miraculous success in Europe over the past 10-15 years. Their approach was always to question scientifically what was going on in making wine, rather than relying on tradition. 

"That success is fading now. Lots of European winemakers have learned to adapt to new ways of doing things, and I think that in the next 10 years or so there will be less revolutionary developments in the cellar than we will see in the vineyard.

"Wine quality starts in the vineyard, so you will have to look to your vineyards for the next measurable improvements in wine quality. There is still much to be learned about grape-growing. 

"If you don't try finding new innovations, you will soon see your industry falling back."

Salomon sees limiting vineyard yields as one way of ensuring ultimate control over wine quality.

"All the appellation controlled countries like Italy, France and Spain limit vineyard yields per hectare, and that's what you have to do here," he explains.

"Your winegrowers association could begin by saying, `we'll fix a limit of 9000kg a hectare'.

"If anyone produced more than that, their wine would not be labelled as Tasmanian, but would be declassified as South-Eastern Australian.

"That would not only control over-supply but control quality itself. 

"It would be a great marketing tool, and would give Tasmanian producers some very good publicity."

First published 2 March 2006: The Examiner

Last page update: January 2026