Origin
Austria
The shelf we are building: Tyrolean and Viennese glass, and fruit eau-de-vie from the Wachau
No lots held
Serving pieces from Austria
Nothing from Austria on the shelf yet. We would rather say so than pad the page out with things we do not have.
Not seeing it?
We buy from dealers and at auction worldwide, and most of what we handle never appears on a shelf at all. Tell us what you are after and we will go and look for it, say honestly whether it is worth the money, and agree our part before anything is bid.
Tell us what you are afterHow Austria came to make it
- 1756The Riedel family begins making glass, in Bohemia
- 1823J. & L. Lobmeyr is founded in Vienna, later glassmakers to the imperial court
- 1973Claus Josef Riedel's Sommeliers range: the first glass shaped to the grape rather than the table
Austrian distilling grew out of orchards, not grain fields. Farmers held the right to distil their own fruit, so instead of a handful of large houses the country ended up with thousands of small stills working through whatever the season gave them: Williams pears in Styria, plums and rowanberries in Tyrol, and above all the apricots of the Wachau, the stretch of Danube valley whose Marillen are now protected by name. The result is a tradition measured in single orchards rather than brands, which is why so little of it has ever left the country.
The one famous exception was born of scarcity. The Habsburg empire had no sugar colonies and therefore no rum, so in 1832 a distiller in Klagenfurt began flavouring neutral spirit to stand in for it. Stroh has been made there ever since and is still sold as Inländer-Rum, home rum, which is an unusually honest name for an imitation. Alongside it the country kept a serious eau-de-vie trade in Styria and Tyrol that is only now being noticed abroad.