Austria Countryside

Update: I thought this was lost in the upload from my iphone, but apparently it just got mis-filed under June 4, instead of July 7.  Werid.  So now there are two of the same post.  Oh well; it's fixed now.

Our trip into the countryside yesterday was very full. The agenda: the Styx company (a small but internationally distributed cosmetics firm), Melk Abbey (a monastery), the town of Durnstein, and a Wachau-region winery for dinner. Lots to do! It was a good time, but my phone battery totally died shortly after reaching to winery, so my documentation is incomplete.

The Styx company only employs 35 people, but it makes and sells all over the world. They buy rose petals from Romania, lavender from Provence in France, and the like, distill the components down to their fragrant essences and then make creams, shampoo, that sort of thing. They have a pretty nice little operation, and take pride in using only all-natural components that convert into a quality product.







Hopefully their stuff is as good as they claim: I picked up a couple things for the Admiral.

Next stop: Melk Abbey. Now, I've visited old monasteries before, but never one like this.



This is the first courtyard when you walk in. The monastery is a day's ride on horseback from Vienna, so lots of travelers, the imperial court included, would stop for the night or a day or two on the way two or from the city. The monastery is still in use. There are 30 Benedictine monks in residence. The do monk-like things: keeping up the library, studying and praying, and teaching. The monastery holds a private school that's attended by 900 kids from 10 to 18. The tuition is cheap, by US private school standards, just 84 Euro per month. But wow, this would be quite a place to go to school! Here's the view from the rear courtyard.























That view doesn't suck. What else doesn't suck? The library:
















And the ballroom:
















And the church:



















Not sure they used enough gold in there.

So that's Melk Abbey. VERY impressive. We had a great lunch there at a restaurant that the church owns, then moved on to Durnstein. To get there, we followed the Danube downstream a ways. Durnstein is right on the river. It's really a cool little village. It goes back a way, too:




Yeah, that building's been around since 1437. Just a short while. You know, I always heard about how different the European outlook on history and age is from the American, but it never really struck home until on this trip. Throughout, Gertraud, one of the Professors who is a native Austrian, has routinely made statements like "This is a new building, just 150 years old". Her sister, who owns the winery we visited, said that her family hadn't owned the winery very long, just 114 years. The walls of her wine cellar are brand new, just redone 350 years ago! To American ears, all of those are OLD. It's very interesting, the difference in mindset.

Getting back to Durnstein, it's a very cool, quaint town. And there's an old ruined castle in the hills above that we could climb to.




So of course we did. Great view!








After Durnstein, we crossed the Danube to Maurten. The Nicolaihoff Winery is there. Interestingly, it's owned by Gertraud's sister. Or rather, her husband. Their son, Nicholas has taken over the family business though. They started us off correctly, with a very good wine.





After a glass, we got a tour of the premises. Here is where my camera died, so I have just a few pictures.
















That last is Gertraud's sister. I didn't get a picture of it, but their press room is awesome. They don't use big modern grape presses like most wineries do; rather, they do it old school. They have a huge beam, the squared-off trunk of a really big tree. It's supported at the center at a pivot. The grapes get put into the press and covered, then the put planks atop the cover to hold it down. Once they're in place, they lower the beam, and the weight of the tree slowly crushes the grapes. The juice escapes through holes in the press, then runs through grooves in the floor to a funnel that leads to the wine cellar and their casks.

Their cellar is very cool also. The entire winery is built over Roman ruins. The cellar itself was actually made by the Romans over 1500 years ago. It's been updated a couple times, the most recent time 350 years ago, as mentioned above. Their casks are cool. They have a lot of them, but four special ones. Those are named, after the family children, and inscribed with their birthdays and a carving the relates to the kid somehow. Apparently the casks were bought on the day of each child's birth. Neat, eh?

Dinner was traditional Austrian, and quite good. They let us try 4 different wines, ranging from their baseline to a Riesling that was aged in the cask for 14 years. That was good! It was pricey, though. Or it would have been, but since it's owned by Gertraud's family, they did the meal at cost and didn't charge for the wine tasting. That explained how the University was ok with class fee funds going to a business owned by a Professor's family: they didn't make any money on it. A good thing they do that, too, because it would have been prohibitively expensive otherwise.

So it was a great day. After we got back to Vienna (just in time to find out that Germany lost the World Cup semifinal....there was wailing and gnashing of teeth around town), we decided to go out for a couple beers to close our last night in Austria. Then I called the Admiral over Skype (we can't seem to get FaceTime to work for us anymore) and called it a night.

Next.....Bratislava and the trip to Prague.