The little train that carries you out of Vienna and into its vineyards

The train is not really a train. It is two open carriages behind a tractor engine dressed up as a locomotive, it seats about a dozen people, and it climbs out of Heiligenstadt station at roughly the speed of a determined cyclist. Nobody on board minds. The point of the Heurigen Express is not to get anywhere quickly; it is to be moving slowly enough to see where the city stops being a city.

It runs from April to October, which is also the season for the thing it exists to serve. A heuriger is a tavern where a grower sells the wine from their own vines, usually last year’s, usually by the jug, usually alongside a counter of cold food you point at rather than order. There are hundreds of them in Vienna. What makes them unusual is not that they exist but that they exist inside a capital city of two million people, on hillsides that begin about twenty minutes from the opera house.

The wine train climbing out of the 19th district — The Heurigen Express leaves Heiligenstadt and is among vines within ten minutes. The route loops through Nussdorf and Grinzing before turning back down the hill.Photograph by Ajith M

The arrangement is old and specific. In August 1784 the emperor Joseph II signed a decree allowing anyone in his lands to sell the food and drink they had produced themselves, on their own premises, at any time of year. Vienna took the offer more seriously than anywhere else and has not let go of it since. The taverns still hang a bundle of pine branches over the door to say they are open, which is the same signal a Roman wine seller would have used, and which is why the seasonal ones are called buschenschank — literally, bush tavern.

Under the hill

Most of what makes a heuriger work is not visible from the terrace. It is underneath: a cellar cut into the loess, cool without refrigeration, running back further than the building above it. In the older houses the cellar is the original structure and the tavern is the extension.

A cellar passage below a Grinzing tavern — The cellars hold at a steady twelve degrees or so all year. Several run back a hundred metres under the vineyard they draw from.

Barrels waiting to be racked — The cellars hold at a steady twelve degrees or so all year. Several run back a hundred metres under the vineyard they draw from.

About four fifths of what comes out of those cellars is white. Grüner Veltliner does the everyday work — peppery, dry, unfussy. Riesling turns up on the steeper, stonier slopes. Zweigelt covers most of the red.

The one that only really makes sense here is Wiener Gemischter Satz: a field blend, at least three grape varieties and sometimes as many as twenty, planted together in the same rows, picked together and pressed together. It began as insurance — if one variety failed, the others carried the harvest — and survived into a protected designation.

“You cannot separate the vineyard from the city here. The vines are inside the municipal boundary, and the people who tend them catch the tram home.”

A grower in Nussdorf

Three more taverns worth the tram

The train ends at a tavern, and most visitors stop there. It is a good one, but the ones worth the extra half hour are the ones the train does not reach.

A terrace above the vines — Mauer, in the south: fewer coaches, longer tables, the same vines.

The food counter — Mauer, in the south: fewer coaches, longer tables, the same vines.

The Nussberg slope in late afternoon — The Nussberg, looking back towards the Danube. The hill sits between the river, the Vienna Woods and the warm plain that runs east, which is most of the explanation for why any of this grows here.Photograph by Ajith M

I got off one stop early on the way back down, which turned out to be the right mistake. The walk into Grinzing takes fifteen minutes downhill through vines that stop dead at a bus shelter, and the transition from agriculture to public transport happens over about four metres. That is the thing worth coming for, and no train can show it to you at speed.

How to do it

Getting there: the U4 runs to Heiligenstadt, where the Heurigen Express leaves; the loop takes about an hour with a stop. Trams 38 and D, and the 38A bus, reach the same neighbourhoods year-round and cost the price of a normal ticket.

When to go: April to October for the seasonal taverns. Late September and early October are best — the harvest is on, the terraces are still warm at eight in the evening, and Sturm, the cloudy half-fermented juice, is briefly available.

Where to stay: anywhere on the U4 or U6 keeps the hills within half an hour. Döbling itself is quiet and residential, which is either the appeal or the drawback.

Being useful: check the pine branch above the door. If it is hanging, the tavern is open; if it is not, the grower is not selling this week, whatever the posted hours say.