This was a double celebration: Mark’s 50 years in the wine trade, and his and our first face to face tasting since the troubles began.
Wine has been made in Austria – mainly in the eastern regions bordering Hungary and Slovenia – since well before Roman times but until recently it was mostly consumed domestically or exported to Germany. The rest of the world took little or no notice until the ‘antifreeze’ scandal of 1985 made Austria briefly notorious when a few merchants (not growers it should be said) were caught using diethylene glycol in the bottling of sweet wines destined for the cheap end of the German market.
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