Wine and Iron Curtain

Despite Burgenland (especially the area around Neusiedler See) always producing excellent wine, some vintagers in Burgenland added illegal substances to their wine in the mid-1980’s. When this was revealed, the wine export of Austria broke down completely. After recovering from that scandal, vintagers in Austria, not only in Burgenland, started focussing on quality and mostly dropped the production of poor quality wine.
In the summer of 1989, the foreign ministers of Austria and Hungary, Alois Mock and Gyula Horn, ceremoniously cut through the border defences separating their countries.

On July 27 1989, the Foreign ministers of Austria and Hungary, Alois Mock and Gyula Horn, cut the Iron Curtain (in German: “Eiserner Vorhang") in the village of Klingenbach in a symbolic act with far-reaching consequences. Thousands of East Germans used this possibility to flee to the West. Again, the inhabitants of Burgenland received them with great hospitality. Later, this was often referred to as the starting shot of the German reunification.

In 2004, the complete opening of the borders in conjunction with Hungary joining the European Union has brought back the historical denotation of Burgenland being a bridge between the western and eastern territories in Central Europe.