Do teens like anything anywhere? One man investigates.
I
am an adventure traveler. For some, that means climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or rafting the Class V rapids of the Zambezi River. I, however, seek greater risks.
I took a teenage boy on a tour of wineries and classical music concerts in Vienna.
For my teenager, I chose a 16-year-old named Laszlo, who got that name when my wife and I chose it. Laszlo is not your typical teenage boy–he doesn’t like sports and sometimes doesn’t look at his phone. Still, he’s definitely a teen. And he definitely didn’t want to do all the things I had planned. He did, however, want to go to Europe, and thinks that we are excellent travel companions (in that we pay for him). So, when we checked into the impressive Imperial Riding School Hotel, he was excited.
Located right near Belvedere Palace and its Gustav Klimt-heavy Museum, and just a 15-minute walk to the city center, the hotel was built in 1727 as a military riding school. It still has a huge garden with fruit trees, including one of the oldest trees in the city. After closing for five years, it reopened as part of the Marriott Autograph Collection in 2025 and underwent a $50 million renovation. All of this interested Laszlo less than the Vegas-level breakfast buffet.
All of this interested Laszlo less than the Vegas-level breakfast buffet.
On our first full day, my wife and I eased into our quest by taking Laszlo on a 40-minute guided tour of the Renaissance-Revival-style opera house, which was built in 1869 and was the home to conductor Gustav Mahler. Laszlo felt very lucky to go backstage because it meant that the opera wasn’t in season in July and thus we couldn’t see a performance as I had hoped.
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We then gave the kid a break by taking him to Café Central, the 1876 coffee house where Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin could have enjoyed the same apple strudel with warm vanilla sauce and Sachertorte (chocolate cake with apricot jam, invented and served at the nearby Sacher Hotel) as we did.
The cakes were simply to drug him into a stupor so we could lure him into what was next.
At 3 p.m., we took a series of trams to Weingut Wieninger, a winery on the outskirts of the city. Vienna is the only large city in the world with a wine region (it’s about the same size as Barbaresco in Italy), thanks to a law preserving it. It’s made the residential neighborhood so beautiful that it’s one of the most expensive in the city. In fact, the real estate is so preposterously overpriced for agriculture that many of the vineyards have been bought by housing developers who hope the law changes; they currently can rent it back cheaply to the wineries that sold it to them.
Minutes after arriving, a handsome, friendly man in a blue polo shirt and jeans walked past a few tractors and greeted us. Fourth-generation winemaker Fritz Wieninger took over the family winery in 1987. Since then, he has radically expanded it and now owns 15% of the vineyards in Vienna. If you think this is too much information, imagine how Laszlo felt.
Fritz put us in his 2007 Land Rover Defender and zoomed down insanely narrow cobblestone roads that his grandfather had built in the area to prevent constant flooding. As he pointed out different varieties and explained how he brought back the popularity of Gemischter Satz (a field blend of white varieties), Laszlo somehow didn’t look bored.
“I was focusing on not throwing up,” he told me.
“Maybe not what I’d choose to do, but I can think of worse uses of my time.”
Fritz parked in front of one of the many vast vineyards where he owns specific rows. We pretended to admire his grapes, but really, we stared at the gorgeous city spread out below, almost exactly as it’s sketched on the Weingut Wieninger label. Again, Laszlo didn’t look miserable.
“I’m fairly interested in the farming part,” he said. “There were good views. Maybe not what I’d choose to do, but I can think of worse uses of my time.”
We headed to Hans and Fritz, the winery’s Buschenschank, or wine tavern. Open only in warm months, Buschenschank are the heart of the Vienna wine scene. Fritz’s is a little fancier than most, having teamed up with the chef at his nearby three-Michelin-star restaurant, Amador. But usually these are winery-owned, outdoor bars housed in sheds. People sit on tables or on the grass, buy cold food at the counter, and often order a “one and one” (one liter of white wine and one liter of soda water) to mix spritzers (except in September, when people almost exclusively drink Sturm, a daily-made, milk-colored, sweet “wine” that’s grape juice that’s started to ferment). The place was empty, since it was too early in the afternoon for weekday Buschenshank-ing.
Hiking or driving up to these outdoor bars was a tradition that was on the verge of dying out until the pandemic. Because Buschenschank were the only bars open in the city, young people started coming and still use it as a pre-party destination today.
Wine tasting, it turns out, is no worse than Algebra II.
Unfortunately, just as we arrived, it started to rain, which meant it would be a Buschenschank-less afternoon for all of Vienna. Laszlo looked relieved. But then Fritz drove us back to his winery to give us a tour of his winemaking production and his enormous caves. At his tasting room, he laid out about 20 wine glasses for each of us. Thus began the longest wine tasting of my life. For the first time, Laszlo seemed to have some regrets.
“When you guys are talking about, like, ‘Oh, this one’s got some raspberry texture and this one’s got a woody oak smell to it,” my brain shuts off, and I was thinking about other things. Which is what I do at school,” he said.
Wine tasting, it turns out, is no worse than Algebra II.
At least at first. The legal drinking age in Austria is 16, so Laszlo allowed Fritz to pour for him. A third of the way through the tasting, Laszlo learned that inebriation can be accompanied by queasiness, especially after a cobblestone ride in the rain.
“It was the first time I was buzzed,” he said. “It was interesting and kind of awful.”
“It was the first time I was buzzed,” he said. “It was interesting and kind of awful.”
To Laszlo and my wife’s shock, after five hours with Fritz, he told us he and his family were bringing us to a Heuriger. These winery-owned taverns have been around since 1784, when Joseph II ruled that taverns didn’t need a permit if they only served the owner’s wine. Traditionally attached to the wine owner’s home, they’re the main part of Vienna’s wine scene, like indoor, year-round Buschenschanks with hot food. They serve the entire community, including young and old, as well as the rich and the poor.
The one I most wanted to visit is Mayer am Pfarrplatz, located near the house in the vineyard where Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony. But Fritz, his wife, and his college-age son took us to one owned by his friend, the high-end H.P. Göbel, which is located atop a steep hill and features a garden in the back. For two peaceful hours, we ate charcuterie, breads spread with Liptauer (cheese with paprika and chives), and sausage. I was fascinated to see how the Viennese lived, and I assumed Laszlo felt the same way. But I underestimated how difficult it can be to be a self-aware teen.
“Those were the worst hours,” he said. “The food was great, but it was so awkward. There were times when he wasn’t speaking and you weren’t asking questions, and I felt like I had to do something, but I had no idea what to say.”
“Those were the worst hours,” he said.
The next night, we were upping our adventure travel by taking Laszlo to a touristy classical music concert at the Schönbrunn Palace, the venue where Salieri’s one-act opera beat Mozart’s. But even after the eight hours of listening to Fritz talk about wine, Laszlo was game.
“There’s a sharp cut-off as far as when it’s over. We’re probably not going to go out to dinner afterwards with the concert master,” he said. “I’m going to be bored, but it’ll be pleasant, sitting somewhere nice and hearing music. It’s more of a universally enjoyable experience.”
He did well at the concert, staying awake more than I did. So I wasn’t worried about how he’d do on the three-hour food tour the Imperial Riding School Hotel arranged for us with Rebel Tours, run by a young brother-sister team. Laszlo was excited for a food adventure that was less than eight hours long.
We ended the tour in a hipster district full of thrift stores and people Laszlo’s age, where we stopped in Vollpension, a café designed like a grandmother’s living room and run by actual grandmothers. It’s the newest addition to Vienna’s UNESCO-recognized coffeehouse heritage. We ate a strudel, another Sachertorte, and a Ribiselkuchen (sponge cake with red currants). Lazslo was the least bored he had been on the trip.
And to be honest, even at 54 years old, so was I.
