Students Travel to Austria

by: Brett Turner

Early Friday morning on March 23, 2007, 24 culinary students from nine Art Institutes all across the country boarded planes for a transcontinental flight to Austria’s capital city, Vienna. Hilary Henderson and I, Brett Turner, were the only students from the Pittsburgh chapter, and being that neither of us had traveled overseas before, we had no idea what was in store.

Both of us were interested in the trip due to the classes we had just taken– Henderson had just finished Classical and International Cuisines Lab while I had just finished Food and Beverage Management, where I became very interested in wines.

The trip consisted of five cooking classes, one and a half days of vineyard touring, wine tastings, five group dinners, and guided tours of all the major sights in Vienna; including a tour of the Schonbrunn Palace, walking tour of central Vienna, and many others. Although we had a lot of group meals and tours, there was still a fair amount of free time where we could go out on our own and explore specific sites that piqued our interests– such as the Vienna Boys Choir.

Our cooking classes were at two different locations: the first at the Vienna Culinary School, instructed by their teachers, and the second at the Drei Husaren restaurant where the sous chef was a middle aged man from Bosnia. At both establishments we learned how to prepare classical Austrian and Viennese dishes while getting a geography lesson of Austria and even a history lesson of Europe. We learned how the many bordering countries have affected its cuisine, mainly Germany and Italy.

Although the wine growing area is very small in Austria compared to other countries such as France and the United States, it still does not stop them from producing some of the finest wines in the world. Austria has two major wine growing regions: the first lies to the eastern part of the country, called Burgenland, which is famous for its red and dessert wines. The second region lies in the northern section of the country and is located along the Danube River Valley and is famous for its white and dessert wines.

At each tasting and tour the guides went into detail about the procedures of how they grow and harvest their grapes as well as detailed descriptions of each wine we sampled. The wine tastings were one of the most enjoyable events that took place on the trip, largely due to the fact that I was given the opportunity to sample dozens of wines where as I would have been unable to do such a thing in the United States.