Region & History

In 1114, Margrave Leopold III laid the foundation stone for a monastery above his castle overlooking the Danube. Wine had likely already been growing on these slopes before that. Klosterneuburg grew out of the monastery, and with it grew the reputation of winegrowing above the river. The first canons already planted vines on these slopes, long before anyone had even named the terrace edge to the north.

This terrace edge later gave the whole region its name. Wagram combines two Middle High German words: wac, meaning moving water, and rain, meaning slope or bank. It simply refers to the edge where the waves of a primeval sea once broke. For decades the region went by the blander name Donauland, squeezed between its more famous neighbors Kamptal and Vienna. Only in 2007 did the winegrowers rename their region. The new name was more honest: it described what truly shapes the wine here, namely the high ridge of loess above the river.

Klosterneuburg remained the intellectual center of Austrian winegrowing for centuries. In 1860, experts founded the world's first wine school at the monastery. Its first director was August Wilhelm von Babo. There he developed a device that every Austrian winegrower still uses today: the Klosterneuburger Mostwaage. It measures how much sugar is in freshly pressed grape juice, providing the number by which a winegrower decides whether to harvest today or wait until next week. That still holds true today.

A second, quieter trail leads to a nearly forgotten grape variety. At Wagram, individual vines of Roter Veltliner survived for centuries, a variety that had almost disappeared elsewhere in Austria. Winegrowing families around Fels am Wagram held onto it, even though yields were low and the market had long since moved on to other names. It nearly vanished from Wagram altogether.

This patience paid off, if belatedly, but it did pay off. On February 2, 2022, the Ministry of Agriculture signed the corresponding decree, making Wagram Austria's seventeenth DAC region, retroactively effective from the 2021 vintage. DAC stands for Districtus Austriae Controllatus, Austria's answer to the European designation of origin, which since May 2024 has been regulated union-wide under Regulation (EU) 2024/1143. Since then, Grüner Veltliner, Roter Veltliner, and Riesling from Wagram carry the designation on the label, tiered by region, village, and vineyard (Ried). The name is now settled for good.