Region & History

Until 1921, no Austrian map showed a Burgenland at all. For nearly a thousand years, the region belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary, as German-speaking Western Hungary with its own villages and its own winegrowers. Its language still echoes around the Neusiedlersee today. Only the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919 and the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 forced Hungary to cede the land, yet Hungarian irregulars put up armed resistance, and a plebiscite let the town of Ödenburg remain with Hungary. The actual handover to Austria therefore dragged on until the turn of the year from 1921 to 1922. The new capital was not the lost Ödenburg but Eisenstadt, where the Hungarian princely family of Esterházy had held large estates, including vineyards, since the seventeenth century.

One town in this young federal state had already written its own history long before. In 1524, the Hungarian queen Maria granted the market town of Rust the right to mark its wine casks with its own brand, the Ruster R. This exempted the wine from all tariffs throughout the Habsburg Empire, and it is still considered the oldest protected designation of origin for an Austrian wine. Trade flourished. In 1681, Rust used this prosperity to buy the rank of a free royal town, granted by Emperor Leopold I. The price: 60,000 gold guilders and five hundred buckets of the finest Ausbruch — nearly thirty thousand liters of sweet wine — thrown in as an extra.

Two world wars passed. Afterward, the region's reputation began to falter. For decades, Burgenland wine was sold mostly in bulk and cheap, without a name. That very anonymity opened the door in 1985 to one of Europe's biggest wine scandals. Traders had adulterated wine from Burgenland and Lower Austria with diethylene glycol, a mildly sweet antifreeze compound, to pass it off as premium Spätlese. On April 23, 1985, the fraud became public. Exports collapsed by roughly ninety-five percent within months, and overnight, Austrian wine came to be seen internationally as poison rather than pleasure.

Out of this low point came one of the strictest wine laws in the world. Since October 1985, every bottle of Austrian quality wine has carried a state seal with a control number, traceable back to the individual producer. Burgenland went even further, beginning to define its appellations one by one. In 2005, Mittelburgenland was recognized as the country's first red-wine DAC, named after its flagship grape, Blaufränkisch. Leithaberg and Eisenberg followed in 2009, Rosalia joined in 2018, and Neusiedlersee had already arrived in 2012. Most recently, in 2020, came Ruster Ausbruch — six protected appellations within a single small federal state, more than anywhere else in Austria.