The history of Most in the Austrian Mostviertel

The Mostviertel takes its name from its drink. Farmsteads sat among Streuobst meadows planted overwhelmingly with pears — Mostbirnen, hard, tannic and acid, of no use as dessert fruit and grown for pressing. Standard trees at wide spacing left the grass beneath in full agricultural use for hay and grazing.

Pears suited the region for reasons that had little to do with taste. The trees are long-lived, they tolerate heavy soils, and they crop heavily once mature. That they take a long time to reach that point mattered less in a farming system in which land passed intact between generations.

Fruit-tree planting was encouraged by eighteenth-century agrarian policy across the Habsburg lands, part of a general improvement programme directed at making rural households more self-sufficient. Whether that policy created the Mostviertel landscape or accelerated something already present is not clear from the sources.

Most in Austrian usage is the fermented drink, distinguished from Süßmost, the unfermented juice. It was made on the farm in bulk, kept in the cellar and drunk daily by the household and by the hired labour, in a pattern that maps closely onto the English cider allowance.

As in England, the drink formed part of the remuneration of agricultural workers and was expected as a condition of hiring. As in England, it was often of poor and variable quality, drunk young because it would not keep, and its consumption at harvest was substantial.

It also carried a social meaning that became a liability. Most was the drink of a poor rural district, and through the twentieth century that association worked steadily against it as incomes rose and beer and wine became affordable.

The decline was steep and had ordinary causes. Standard trees obstruct machinery, and a field of pears cannot be worked with the equipment that made post-war farming pay. The labour that harvested them left agriculture. Demand for Most fell as the drink’s status fell, and the fruit had no alternative market of any size.

Removal was often subsidised or at least encouraged by agricultural policy directed at productivity, and clearing a meadow of its trees converted a difficult field into a straightforward one. Farmers who took the trees out were making a rational decision under the conditions they faced, and any account that presents the loss as mere carelessness misdescribes it.

The result was the loss of a very large proportion of the region’s standard pear trees within a few decades, along with the varietal diversity they carried. Many Mostbirne varieties are now maintained in collections rather than in working orchards.

From the 1980s the surviving landscape became the object of a deliberate regional programme. A signed route through the orchard country, an association of quality-focused producers, and the promotion of bottled Most as a regional product rather than a farm staple gave the trees an economic function again.

Alongside that came the conservation argument. Meadow orchards support species that intensive land use does not, and the Mostviertel plantings are recognised as a cultural landscape worth maintaining for reasons independent of the drink.

It is worth being precise about what has been revived. The extent of the orchards has not returned to anything like its historical level, and the drink has changed: bottled, cleaner, often single-variety, aimed at a market rather than at a farm household. That is a different product occupying the same landscape, which is the usual shape of these recoveries.