Kamptal is one of the wine regions of Lower Austria, which is the country's most important wine region in terms of size and its reputation for high-quality wine, lying in the north along the Slovakian border and taking its name from the lower part of the Danube.
Austria is a landlocked country bordered by the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy and Switzerland, and although its western cities such as Salzburg and Innsbruck are better known, the vineyards all lie in the eastern half: some 108,000 acres (43,700 hectares) forming a crescent along the eastern border, farmed by just over 20,000 growers, with approximately 6,500 wineries making and bottling wine.
There are four main wine regions — Lower Austria and Burgenland, the two largest, plus Styria and Vienna — and the larger two contain several smaller regions within them.
Austria's modern wine industry was rebuilt from the ground up by small family estates after the 1985 diethylene-glycol scandal collapsed the mass market for inferior wine, and the country now has the largest percentage of land under certified organic production of any European Union member.