Langenlois

Langenlois is Austria's largest wine town, and it wears the title the way other towns wear cathedrals. Vines climb every slope of the Kamptal around it — including the fabled Heiligenstein, a sun-baked outcrop of desert sandstone older than the Alps, whose Rieslings collectors pursue across the world — and the town's cobbled squares, Renaissance courtyards and vintners' houses have been organised around the harvest for eight centuries. The Kamptal's Grüner Veltliner and Riesling stand in the first rank of Austrian wine, and the dense ring of heurigen taverns pours them a few metres from where they grew.

The town crowned its vocation with a piece of architectural daring: the Loisium, where an angular aluminium cube by the New York architect Steven Holl hovers over the vineyards, leading down into a nine-hundred-year-old labyrinth of wine cellars — a subterranean cathedral of vaults, presses and fermenting silence turned into one of Europe's most original wine museums, with a design hotel alongside.

Culture keeps pace with the cellar: Schloss Haindorf, the neoclassical estate at the town's edge, hosts concerts, opera evenings and festivals in its park and riding hall, giving Langenlois a proper summer stage amid the vines. An hour from Vienna, at the mouth of the Kamptal's castle-studded valley, the town makes its argument gracefully: civilisation, poured by the glass.