Beethoven Ludwig

The German composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a pronounced wine lover and passionate visitor to the Heuriger. He loved walks in nature and the wine bars in the wine villages around Vienna. He once remarked to his friend and fellow composer Carl Maria Weber: "I love these country parties and the Heurigen." He preferred Ofen mountain wine from Hungary in addition to the "Viennese wines". However, the red wine caused him problems, so his family doctor prescribed Gumpoldskirchner from the village in Lower Austria as medicine.

Beethoven regularly visited many wine taverns in the then Viennese suburbs of Heiligenstadt, Grinzing, Sievering and Nußdorf (today in the 19th Viennese district of Döbling). One of his many residences was in Heiligenstadt at Herrengasse 6, where in 1802 he wrote the letter addressed to his brother, but never sent, in which he expressed his despair over his progressive deafness, the so-called "Heiligenstädter Testament". Beethoven lived at the address Heiligenstadt Pfarrplatz 2 in the summer of 1817 and worked on the famous 9th Symphony. The 17th-century listed house has been preserved unchanged, houses the well-known Heurigen Mayer on Pfarrplatz and is called "Beethovenhaus" after its ex-resident. Beethoven spent his last summer in 1826 at the estate of his brother Johann in the Lower Austrian municipality of Gneixendorf in the Kamptal.