The Other Austria

Snow-capped peaks? Not here. That's the point.

Picture Austria and you probably picture the Tyrol: white summits, cable cars, a ski resort in a steep valley. Western Styria is the other Austria — three hours and a world to the southeast. The land here rolls instead of soars. Green ridges rise and fall across the horizon. Oak and pine forest covers the slopes where the angle is too steep to plough. Lower down, on the south-facing hillsides, vines grow in rows. Between the ridges: fields of pumpkins, their broad leaves spreading across the valley floors.

It is warmer than the Alps, gentler, and far less travelled. The Koralpe — the old massif at the border of Styria and Carinthia — has had 300 million years of weather wearing it down from jagged rock to a long, rounded spine of dark forest. No bare summits. No glaciers. The mountains here do not demand anything of you. You come to slow down on one, not to conquer it.

The geography in plain terms

Western Styria — locally called the Schilcherland — is a triangle of country in the southwest corner of Austria. Its northern boundary is roughly Graz, twenty minutes by car from the Mosthütte. Its western edge is the Koralpe ridge, which marks the Styria–Carinthia border at elevations between 1,600 and 2,140 metres. Its southern end reaches into wine country that shares a border with Slovenia.

The Mosthütte sits at 473 metres, at the foot of the Koralpe, on the road that the locals call the Schilcherstraße — the Schilcher Wine Road, which threads through the valleys connecting winery to winery from Stainz in the east to the Koralpe in the west.

The region is not one uniform landscape. Drive ten minutes east and you are in broad agricultural valleys. Drive ten minutes up the hillside and you are in dense pine forest with views across to the Slovenian Alps. Drive south for forty-five minutes and the terrain becomes steeper, the vineyards more dramatic — that is the South Styrian Wine Road, a separate region and a different day trip. The Western Styrian landscape you wake up to here is the gentler version: the rolling, well-tended country of small farms, pastures, and the occasional church tower.

Two things that make it unlike anywhere else

Schilcher wine

Schilcher is a rosé made from a single grape: the Blauer Wildbacher, an old and difficult variety that ripens late, holds its acidity, and is grown almost nowhere outside this valley. The wine it produces is pale pink to nearly crimson, bone-dry, and bracingly tart — "sour" is not an insult here; it is the house style, and it has been for centuries. You will not find Schilcher in most wine shops. It travels badly and the growers here do not produce enough to worry about exporting it. You drink it here, in the place it's made.

The best place to drink it is a Buschenschank — a farmhouse licensed, under a law dating to a decree of Emperor Joseph II in 1784, to sell the wine it grows. By law, a Buschenschank serves only cold food and only what the farm itself produces. The result is not a restaurant. It is a farmer's front room with wine, and an afternoon there — a Viertel of Schilcher, a wooden board of cured meats and farmhouse cheese, a view across the valley — is the thing this part of Austria does best.

See also: The Buschenschank Guide and What is Schilcher?

Steirisches Kürbiskernöl

The other thing that places this region on the map is pumpkin seed oil. Steirisches Kürbiskernöl is a protected geographical indication — the Austrian equivalent of a Champagne or Parma Ham designation — produced from the seeds of the Cucurbita pepo styriaca, a pumpkin variety developed here in the eighteenth century. The seeds are roasted and cold-pressed into a dark, almost opaque oil with a deep nutty flavour and a green tint in direct light.

You will find it drizzled over cheese, poured on salads, stirred into soup. The correct garnish for Kürbiscremesuppe — pumpkin cream soup — is a spiral of the oil across the top of the bowl. Do not mistake it for olive oil. Buy a bottle to take home; it keeps for months and nothing in a supermarket tastes like it.

Graz: twenty minutes from the forest

Austria's second city is not an afterthought here — it is genuinely twenty minutes by car from the Mosthütte. Graz has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1999, recognised for one of the best-preserved Renaissance and Baroque old towns in Central Europe. The Schlossberg — a forested hill that rises from the middle of the city — carries a clock tower that the city refused to demolish when Napoleon demanded it. The hill is free to climb; there is also a lift bored through the rock.

The Kaiser-Josef-Platz farmers' market runs daily except Sunday. It is one of the better markets in Austria: local cheesemakers, market gardeners, Buschenschank producers selling their Schilcher and pumpkin seed oil, bread baked the same morning. The city also has an opera, an internationally regarded design scene, and a university, which gives it an energy that medium-sized Central European cities don't always have.

Graz airport handles direct flights from London, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, and Zürich. If you are arriving by air, you are in the countryside within thirty minutes of landing.

The seasons

Spring — April and May

The meadows come into flower in sequence — cowslips first, then the deeper greens of May. The forests are full of wildflowers for a brief window before the canopy closes. The Buschenschänke open for their first sessions of the year, the new wine still depleted from the previous harvest. Days are long by May; evenings are still cool enough for the wood fire.

Summer — June through August

The warmest months, and the fullest. Everything is open: the Buschenschänke, the hiking trails, the outdoor swimming lakes. Graz is at its most liveable — the medieval courtyards of the old town turn into open-air dining rooms. The Schilcher wine is at its freshest from the previous autumn's harvest. Occasional thunderstorms roll in from the south in the afternoons; they clear quickly.

Autumn — September and October

Arguably the best time to be here. The harvest happens through September; by late September, the first Schilchersturm appears — the half-fermented, still-fizzing young wine of the new season, cloudy, slightly sweet, deceptively strong. The Buschenschänke put it on the tables and the roads get busy on weekends. The forest goes bronze and copper. Chestnut stalls appear on the roadsides. Go on a weekday if you can; the atmosphere is the same and the crowds are not.

Winter — November through March

Many Buschenschänke close or open only on specific Saturdays and Sundays — the pine-branch signal, ausgesteckt, comes down and goes back up unpredictably. The forest is quiet and dark green against any snow. Graz has Christmas markets through December and a quieter, more domestic character in January and February. It is a good season for walking the forest trails without other people on them, for the wood fire in the evening, and for eating properly at the few restaurants and Gasthöfe that stay open through winter.

Why Western Styria instead of the Alps

This is a fair question to ask. The Alps offer more dramatic scenery, better skiing, higher peaks, more established infrastructure for tourism. They are also considerably more expensive, considerably more crowded in high season, and considerably more like what everyone expects Austria to be.

Western Styria is not what anyone expects. The guests who come back describe it consistently in the same terms: the quiet, the green, the specific pleasure of eating and drinking something made within five kilometres of where you're sitting. There are no cable cars. The mountains are old and worn and covered in forest, not rock and ice. The pace of the place is set by farmers, not ski instructors.

That is the proposition. If you want the postcard, the Tyrol is eight hours northwest by train. If you want the other Austria — the one that Austrians go to when they want to eat well and slow down — you are already in it.