By Zhiyu Solstice Luo
Medill Reports

VIENNA — Moni Wagner still remembered the snow reaching to her knees in February as a child in Vienna.

Now, 61, sipping the wine she made in her own winery-cafe on Beethovengang on a reminiscently snowy day, she explained how the record-breaking summer heat in 2024 had caused irrigation issues, a change in grape variety and a resulting unpalatable aftertaste she actively tried to avoid in her own barrels.

“Pests. You know what I mean?” Wagner said. “They’ll get more, because they don’t die in winter. That’s what the problem is when it’s getting warmer now.

“Some tried the new grapes. They are more resistant against pests.” Wagner added. “Fungi-resistant. It’s new grapes, but we don’t like the taste very much.”

Wagner was facing a wager between quality and quantity. She was not alone in her dilemma.

A grape goes through four stages before being made into wine: budburst, flowering, veraison and harvest. July 2023 is the third hottest anomaly on record from 1850 to 2023 in Vienna, according to researchers at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU). Austrian Wine, the official agency that keeps track of wine production in Austria, warns of dwindling yield and worsening quality of grapes during heat waves, as both flowers and fruit are highly vulnerable to heat, wind and water stress.

This is difficult news to hear for Vienna’s avid wine lovers. In the 2022-23 fiscal year, wine consumption in Austria totaled more than 0.6 million gallons, around seven gallons per person, according to the Austrian Wine Statistics Report in 2024. And even for those who abstain from alcohol, the decline of local wineries represents the loss of a culture hundreds of years in the making. Though local wineries try to work with nature, the situation still presses for attention as Viennese wines represent not only a product, but also a traditional lifestyle.

The Viennese wineries, or Heurigen (meaning the latest vintage), have been unique social arenas since the early 1700s. Originally known as Buschenschanken for the bush of evergreen boughs hanging on village lanes to signal its availability, these vineyards were small, family-owned and reliant on its soil, according to Robert Rotenberg, Vincent de Paul Professor of Anthropology at DePaul University. Going to a Heuriger meant spending time with family, tasting locally sourced wine and cuisine, and looking out at lush hills of grapevines in leisure. It was for the urban middle class. It was for the old and young. It was chic.

Even the royals loved them. Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II proclaimed the right of winemakers to sell wine directly to the public in 1784, and the Habsburgs even had their own winery, which is still operating in the wine-growing area of Wagram and Großriedenthal, pumping out around 20,000 bottles of wine in 2020 alone, according to its website. In 2024, the city of Vienna boasted 664 registered wine types in 130 wineries scattered within city limits, according to Austrian Wine. For a city whose imperial apartments stand right in front of a Roman winery — whose ruins lie in the middle of Michaelerplatz, one of the busiest squares in the city — Vienna lives and breathes its wines with pride.

The concerns for the decline in wine production are therefore not only culinary, but also urgently personal. Georg Geml, a food historian from Koch Kultur Museum in Vienna, said families used to go to a specific Heuriger over generations. He compared going to wineries to Christmas.

“That is a special thing that you are waiting for, in a way,” Geml said. “The atmosphere is always very cozy because it also seems a little bit familiar, like you’re in the home of the vineyard owners.”

This coziness was, however, under threat. In July 2022, driving through Wachau — one of the most famous wine producing regions in Austria — Geml was shocked to see dead vines covering the hills, parched by heat and drought.

“Although the vine has really long roots and taking the water from really deep down, but it was too dry even for them.” Geml recalled, worried over the small Austrian wineries that, according to him, had cultivated their piece of land over decades, if not centuries.

“The soil is important for the taste as well,” Geml said, “That’s a problem for them as well because they need to get new vineyards. No one will buy the old ones as vineyards, so they don’t get the money for that.”

Geml’s remarks illustrate a difficult turning point in the career of Austrian winemakers, where traditions urgently need innovations that come too slow, with too many sacrifices. Changing locations takes capital, learning how to cultivate new grape varieties takes patience and making new wines takes trial and error.

And time is running out.

 

The reality of climate change

In 2024, the Copernicus Climate Change Service reported a temperature breach of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average. It was the first year to go over this limit, which could potentially trigger multiple climate tipping points, beyond which, according to findings by researchers published in Science Magazine, changes in the climate system become self-perpetuating, leading to irreversible damages on nature and society at large.

Herbert Formayer, a meteorologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna (BOKU), brought the climate emergency closer to home.

“We have now estimates that, compared to pre-industrial end of the 19th century, we have a warming of 3.0 degrees,” Formayer said. “So it’s more than double of the global mean warming.”

The past four decades have contributed the most to the city’s warming because of increased greenhouse gas emissions and reduced cloud cover in the summer months. Today, Vienna is an urban heat island that traps heat in its asphalt, glass and concrete. It can be up to 10 degrees Celsius hotter than the countryside, according to urban researcher Kerstin Krellenberg from the University of Vienna. 

Information from the Vienna Data Portal supports the researchers’ findings. In the 1970s, the average number of days with a temperature above 86 degrees Fahrenheit was seven. In 2022, the number reached 31. In the meantime, the average number of days with a temperature below 32 degrees Fahrenheit has decreased from 18.7 in the 1970s to six in 2022. While the number fluctuates each year, the general trend of warming is clear.

With a rising temperature and relatively stable precipitation, Formayer explained, evaporation increased, leading to droughts in vineyards. And since relocating a winery is costly and complex, some began to disappear.

While areas under vine had remained relatively stable in Austria — from 48,558 acres in 1999 to 46,273 acres in 2020 — the number of vineyard holdings experienced a sharp decline from 32,044 to 12,098 during the same period, according to a Eurostat analysis on wine-grower holdings by size class. Another Eurostat analysis that examines areas under vine in the EU from 2020 to 2025 notes most of these holding losses were from the smallest of vineyards. 

This trend is especially concerning if one considers the average Austrian winery cultivates only four acres of land, which can make it more vulnerable compared with big, corporate wineries. The number of traditional wineries in Vienna fell from more than 500 in the 1960s to about 125 in 2011.

With the disappearance of wineries, wine production dwindled. According to the 2024 Austrian Wine Statistics Report, the 2023 harvest in Vienna featured 22,900 liters of wine, 13% less than 2022 and 10% below the five-year average. While export data shows an increase in value, the quantity of exported wine also fell by 4.3%. Corresponding with increased sunshine and precipitation, the data shows a picture of a slowly declining industry — one in need of adaptation and reinvestment.

 

What next?

The Viennese wine culture doesn’t have to shrivel up in the increasing heat, however. Formayer sees a warming climate as both a challenge and an opportunity.

“For the wine growing, in general, climate change is a positive thing.” Formayer said. “We had a really, very high dependency on the individual years, and only the very warm and hot years were good wine years and normal and cold years were really a problem.”

Now, because the temperature is getting higher, these problems are diminishing. Winemakers do not have to worry about low sugar content and can experiment with new grape varieties, Formayer explained. Austrian winemakers have the opportunity to make new products, without the concerns to preserve specific flavors such as those of Bordeaux or Champagne. Areas under vine may also continue to grow, despite the issues with heat and sunlight in some areas, Formayer said.

“The changes that we will see in the next decades will increase the quality and the productive use of our wine areas,” Formayer added. “And in the areas where we have wine growing, we can diversify.”

At the same time, local groups have been pushing sustainable practices in the vineyards with tangible results. When launching the Sustainable Austria initiative in 2015, the Austrian Winegrowers’ Association expressed the necessity to encourage sustainable growth by assessing wineries with 380 measures in nine categories: quality, social factors, economic factors, climate, materials, energy, soil, biodiversity and water. The wineries would be audited by external, independent inspectors before they attain a certificate.

By August 2023, 655 wine producers who cultivated about 27% of the total area under vine in Austria had been certified. The list of certified wine producers is still growing. With sustainable practices, Austrian wineries were able to mitigate the impact of climate change by promoting biodiversity and optimizing water management, which strengthened their vines. 

International advocacy groups are also trying to help. The Austrian World Summit, organized by the Schwarzenegger Climate Initiative and held under the patronage of Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen, took place in Vienna in June. The summit brought climate activists, businesses, scientists and politicians together to address pollution.

Though Viennese winemakers are actively dealing with nature with acceptance, resilience and science, questions such as future-proofing remain as they face unprecedented changes in global temperature. 

Wagner, however, was optimistic. After all, winemakers and cooks have adapted to wines that taste less than ideal since the Middle Ages. Geml showed a cookbook from 1581 in which instructions abound on how to preserve, salvage and enhance natural wines — “take the best brandy that you have/ and put into it the following piece/ a quarter of galangal/ three lots (half ounce) of cloves/ four lots of ginger/ four lots of cinnamon rind/ two pounds of peach kernels/ a pound of cherry kernels/ that one should put all into the brandy/ then let it stand together eight days.” From the soil to the tastebud, the life cycle of a wine is unpredictable, but local winemakers are inspired to innovate precisely because of this unpredictability.

Sitting in her cafe, surrounded by conversations and laughter, Wagner shook her glass of Grüner Veltliner, her purple hair standing out defiantly in the soft light. When asked about whether she liked working with soil and grapes, she replied: “I like it because it’s real work with nature. And it’s grounding.”

Wagner had a small statue of Buddha on top of the fireplace in her cafe, memorabilia from her travels to Thailand. At times,  spirituality brimmed over to her craft; “I believe in the religion of love and nature,” she said, as she took another sip of her beloved, endangered wine. 

Zhiyu Solstice Luo is an Investigative Lab D.C. graduate student at Medill. You can follow them on Instagram at @solsticewrites.