“Traunfeld,” or, “this is a season of The Bachelor waiting to happen”

This is the last of my three posts about what all we did last Friday. Long day, believe me, but a good one.
After we left Klosterneuberg, we cut across the outskirts of Vienna on our way to Traunfeld, a small town in Lower Austria, where we got a tour of a vineyard and winery. This is apparently a traditional trip for the Linfield group, but this year was a bit different – the nice married couple, owners of the vineyard and winery we were touring, were out at a wedding, so their son would be giving the tour instead.¹

We started up in the vineyard, on the hills over the town. As one of our professors pointed out, it’s a somewhat ‘homey’ feeling for us – Linfield is in the middle of wine country.

A nice touch, in the vineyard – every row of vines has a rose planted at the end. There’s apparently no ‘farming’ reason for it, it’s just to look nice.²

From there, we headed back down into the town to see some of the wine-making process. This is an old wine press – these days, they use big stainless steel machines, which are a bit more sanitary than “open-air wood.”

And then it was down into the cellars, of which there were quite a few – the town used to be host to quite a few different wine-making families, but now it’s down to three.³

The cellars varied in size and age – this was one of the younger ones, only a couple hundred years old or so, and rather small.

This one was a good deal bigger, but still not the oldest of the cellars we visited. Interestingly, quite a few of the cellars were linked by tunnels, something that I assume was added after they were brought into the ownership of a single family.

Here’s where the title of the post really kicks in – part of the tour was a bit of a wine tasting. The mood for this was set by going into a dark wine cellar, with candles providing the only lighting for a table with bread, for cleansing the palate,⁴ and wine.

Friendly reminder that it’s really hard to take good pictures in the dark.

We ended up in the oldest of the wine cellars – this one dates back something like 700 years – and also the largest. It’s in active use today – those are the stainless steel chambers in which the wine is allowed to ferment, developing the alcohol and the unique flavors that make wine… wine.