Vinea Wachau (full title Vinea Wachau Nobilis Districtus), is an organization representing most wine estates (nearly 200) in Austria’s wachau region. Called into existence in 1983 by a quartet including the late Josef Jamek, who helped define the styles of dry, unchaptalized wine that came to characterize this region and eventually the wines of niederösterreich as a whole. The Vinea Wachau established three stylistic tiers—steinfeder, federspiel, and smaragd—imposing them on the region in the aftermath of Austria’s 1985 wine scandal. By the late 1990s, the Vinea Wachau executive board that featured Toni Bodenstein of Prager, Franz Hirtzberger, Emmerich Knoll, and F. X. Pichler had, together with burgenland sweet-wine pioneer Alois Kracher and kamptal vintner Willi Bründlmayer, come to represent increasingly prestigious Austrian wine on export markets. These founding members of the Vinea Wachau declared their independence from krems—traditionally thought of as the Wachau’s unofficial capital. Thus did the much-restricted viticultural sector upstream from that city come to define Wachau for a new generation of Austrians. The far more numerous vineyards around Krems and points immediately east had to create their own new identities, kremstal and Kamptal. In 2006, the Vinea Wachau strengthened its founding principles by publishing a Wachau Codex, unusual for the number of cellar procedures—including any form of must concentration or separation (such as dealcoholization)—that it proscribes, as well as for its explicit rejection of any new wood flavours. The Vinea Wachau has successfully deflected recent challenges to their members’ exclusive use of the terms Steinfeder, Federspiel, or Smaragd, and the few important Wachau growers who are not members—either by choice or because their degree of viticultural involvement in neighbouring regions disqualifies them—have to market their wines without those designations.
