Region

Mostviertel

The south-western quarter of Lower Austria, where standard perry pear trees stand over grazed pasture on a scale found almost nowhere else, and where Most means a dry pear drink rather than an apple one.

Country: Austria
Parent region: None — a top-level region
Classification in use: No named scheme recorded
Protected designations: None applying here

Total phenols in fourteen Austrian Mostbirnen measured twice in the 2008 season — on the day the fruit was picked, and again on the day it was pressed after weeks in store.

Described in full

Shape: Fourteen rows, one per cultivar, ordered from the highest harvest figure down. Each row carries two bars on the same scale: a solid bar for total phenols at harvest and a dashed bar directly beneath it for the same fruit at pressing. Both are in milligrams per litre and both are labelled with their value.
The range at harvest: Grüne Pichelbirne 4 290 mg/L, Knollbirne 4 050, Stieglbirne 3 680, Speckbirne 3 460 and 3 050 in its two samples, Machländer 2 740, Kleine Landlbirne 2 680, Luxemburger 2 360, Dorschbirne 2 190, Grüne Winawitz 1 800, Rosenhofbirne 1 620, Schweizer Wasserbirne 660, Rote Pichelbirne 460, Gelbmostler 230.
The range at pressing: Grüne Pichelbirne 110, Knollbirne 130, Stieglbirne 110, Speckbirne 130 and 1 840, Machländer 280, Kleine Landlbirne 180, Luxemburger 190, Dorschbirne 1 000, Grüne Winawitz 90, Rosenhofbirne 300, Schweizer Wasserbirne 50, Rote Pichelbirne 180, Gelbmostler 170.
The size of the collapse: In the four most phenolic cultivars the loss is between 96 and 97 per cent. Grüne Pichelbirne goes from 4 290 to 110, Knollbirne from 4 050 to 130, Stieglbirne from 3 680 to 110. Only Dorschbirne and the short-stored Speckbirne keep a substantial fraction; Gelbmostler, which had little to lose, keeps most of what it had.
The control the trial supplies itself: Speckbirne appears twice because it was sampled twice. Held eighteen days it went from 3 050 to 1 840 mg/L; held forty-seven days it went from 3 460 to 130. The same cultivar in the same season, an order of magnitude apart on storage time alone.
What it is not: Not neglect and not spoilage. Storing perry pears before pressing is deliberate Austrian practice, the local analogue of English sweating, and the paper records the intended result: the tannin had been sufficiently broken down, so the musts needed very little fining. The cost is that a proportion of the fruit is over-ripe by then, which the authors also note.
Why it matters for reading any perry pear figure: A phenolic number for a perry pear is a number about a moment. Cited without its sampling point it can be wrong by a factor of thirty for the same fruit in the same year, which is larger than any difference between cultivars in this chart.
Method: Total phenols by Folin–Ciocalteu after solid-phase clean-up on C18, reported in milligrams per litre. Fruit from the Versuchsgut Haschhof at Klosterneuburg, Lower Austria, grown under organic rules on Quitte A interstem and Pyrodwarf rootstocks.

Climate and land

The first thing to know about a cider region, because it sets what the fruit can be. Ripening date, the acid that survives to the press and the sugar that reaches the vat are all decided here, and they are what makes one tradition's answers wrong for another's fruit.

The Mostviertel lies on the northern edge of the Alps, rising from the Danube plain to the limestone foothills, and its climate is genuinely continental in a way that no Atlantic cider region is. Winters are cold with reliable frost and snow, summers are warm and can be hot, and rainfall increases sharply towards the mountains. That combination gives a shorter but more intense growing season than the oceanic cider regions: fruit accumulates sugar more readily than in Normandy or Asturias, and pear must from here can reach a higher potential alcohol. Spring frost is the governing risk, because pears blossom early and the valleys hold cold air, and orchards accordingly favour slopes. The deep winter dormancy suits pears well, and the large day-to-night temperature range through late summer helps the fruit build both sugar and the tannin the drink depends on.

Soils

Deep loams and loess over gravel on the lower ground, giving way to heavier and stonier soils on the limestone foothills. The lower soils are fertile and hold moisture, which is what allows an enormous standing pear tree to carry a crop through a hot continental summer.

The orchards

How the fruit is actually grown here — tree form, planting, what else the ground is used for, and who owns it.

The signature form is the standard pear tree — Mostbirne — grown to full size on seedling stock over grazed or mown pasture, spaced widely enough to farm beneath.
Individual trees reach great size and age, and the resulting landscape of scattered giants over open grassland is the region’s defining feature rather than an incidental one.
Apples are grown alongside, but the pear is the region’s identity, and the pear population here is one of the largest concentrations of fermentation pears anywhere.
The economics are the same as in every perry region: decades to crop, a century or more of life, no return that a modern planting model recognises. Replanting depends on landscape programmes and on producer associations.
Orchard numbers fell heavily through the twentieth century, and the surviving trees are old; conservation of the landscape and conservation of the drink are the same project here.

The words used here

Each of these names something the tradition does. They are given in the local language because that is the form a reader will meet them in — on a label, on a cider-house door, or in a conversation about how the cider is poured.

Local terms and what they mean. A translation is given where one is honest; where the practice has no English equivalent, the entry describes the practice instead of inventing a word for it.
Term	Language	What it means
Most	German	In the Mostviertel, the fermented drink — most often from pears, or from pears and apples together. The same word means unfermented must in other German-speaking regions, so it must be read locally.
Mostbirne	German	A pear grown for pressing: hard, astringent, high in tannin, inedible raw and useless for the table. The equivalent of a perry pear in the English and French traditions.
Birnenmost	German	Pear Most specifically — the region’s characteristic drink, dry and tannic, and closer in kind to English perry than to apple cider.
Mostheuriger	German	A seasonal tavern at which a producer serves their own Most with cold food, on the model of the Austrian wine Heuriger.
Moststraße	German	The signed route through the orchard country linking producers, taverns and viewpoints — a modern framework built around a genuine landscape.
Mostbaron	German	A title used by an association of producers meeting agreed quality criteria. It is a marketing and standards institution created in the modern period, not a historic rank.

History

How cider making here came to take the shape it has.

Pear growing and Most making in the region are long established, and by the early modern period the pear tree over pasture was the standard agricultural arrangement of the area.
The drink was a farm and household product, made in quantity and drunk daily, in the same manner as Swabian Most and West Country farm cider.
The twentieth century saw both consumption and tree numbers fall sharply as the drink came to be regarded as an old-fashioned rural product.
From the 1990s a deliberate quality and identity project reframed Most as a regional speciality: a signed route through the orchard country, producer associations, and a body of makers presenting the drink in wine-like bottles and formats.
That repositioning is the reason the region is visible today, and it is honest to describe the current sector as a revived and reframed tradition rather than an unbroken commercial one.

Culture

What the drink is for here, and the occasions and rooms it belongs to. This is not decoration around the cider — in several of these places it is the part that decides how the cider is made.

Most is drunk in a Mostheuriger — a seasonal tavern where a producer serves their own drink with cold food, on the same model as the wine Heuriger of eastern Austria.
The drink is served from a jug into a glass or a small earthenware mug, and is expected to be dry, cloudy and firm rather than sweet.
A producer association awards a title to makers meeting its standards, which is a modern quality structure rather than a traditional rank.
The signed Moststraße through the orchard country connects producers and taverns and is the main way visitors encounter the drink.
Blossom in the pear orchards is a regional event in its own right, and the landscape is promoted independently of the drink it produces.

About Mostviertel

The Mostviertel is one of the three places on earth where pears are grown deliberately, at landscape scale, for fermentation — the others being the English and Welsh border counties and the Domfrontais in Normandy. Its version is the most visually dramatic: enormous standard pear trees standing singly and in loose groups across open grazed pasture, on a scale that makes the orchard the landscape rather than a feature within it.

The climate distinguishes it sharply from the western European perry regions. This is continental country on the northern edge of the Alps, with cold winters, hot summer days and cool nights. Fruit builds more sugar than it does in Atlantic Normandy or the Severn Vale, and Most from here can carry more alcohol and more weight than an English perry made from equivalent fruit.

The vocabulary is a genuine trap. Most in this region means the fermented drink and usually a pear one; in Switzerland Süssmost means unfermented juice and Suure Most the fermented; in parts of Germany Most means the must before fermentation. Three neighbouring German-speaking traditions use one word for three different things, and no amount of context-free glossary work will fix that.

The modern sector is a deliberate reconstruction. The drink was in steep decline as a rural product until a quality and identity project from the 1990s onwards — producer associations, an awarded title, a signed route, bottled presentation in a wine format — repositioned it. What survives underneath that framing is the real thing: an ageing population of standard pear trees, and a dry, tannic, sharply structured drink that has very little in common with sweet commercial cider.

As in every perry landscape, the binding constraint is time. A standard pear planted now will not crop meaningfully for a generation, so the maintenance of this landscape depends on landscape policy, producer organisations and people prepared to plant trees whose fruit they may never press.

The fruit grown here

Cultivars recorded as grown in this region, historically or currently. Each card says what the fruit is.

What is made here

Styles this region is where they come from, or where they are characteristically made.

Methods traditional here

Processes that belong to this region's practice rather than being applied to it from outside.

Protected designations that apply here

None recorded

No protected designation or national definition on CiderHQ reserves a name for this area. That is a fact about the register rather than about the cider: a great deal of excellent cider is made in places no designation covers, and a designation would say nothing about how good it is.

What people ask next

Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.

How does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
What is perry — Perry is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting the juice of pears, traditionally of specific perry pear cultivars rather than eating pears. It is to pears what cider is to apples, and has its own history in the three counties of England and in Normandy.
Can you make cider from shop bought apple juice — Yes, provided the juice contains no preservative — check for potassium sorbate or benzoate on the label. Pasteurised juice ferments perfectly well once yeast is added, because pasteurisation removes the organisms but not the sugar.
How are apples milled for cider
How is cider bottled
How is cider matured

Where to go next

Cider and perry in Austria — The national picture this region sits inside, including how cider is legally defined there.
All cider regions — The other traditions, each described in its own terms.
Protected designations — What the law reserves a name for, and what it does not promise.

Sources

What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.

European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV)
AICV · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
eAmbrosia — the EU geographical indications register
European Commission · designation authority · registered as competent for this subject
The single authoritative register of EU PDO, PGI and TSG names, carrying each product specification. Cider and perry designations across France, Spain and elsewhere resolve here.
Research on pear juice composition and sorbitol in perry
Various journals and institute reports · peer-reviewed literature · registered as competent for this subject
The evidence base for the single most important chemical difference between cider and perry: pears carry substantial sorbitol, which yeast does not ferment, so a fully fermented perry retains sweetness a fully fermented cider cannot.