Five fascinating facts about Vienna

Like foodservice consultants across Europe, we’re looking forward to attending the FCSI EAME Conference in Vienna. Here we highlight some of the more unusual facts about this beautiful city.

1. Vienna is most widely known as the ‘City of Music’. Formerly home to a host of famous composures including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Straus and Brahms, the city also has an interactive sound museum called the ‘House of Music’.

2. Vienna might be well known as the city of music but it’s also the only city in the world that produces significant amounts of wine within its city limits! There are no less than 1700 acres of vineyards in the city which produce white and also some red wines. The city has some lovely heuriger (wine taverns) as well as its own wine trail.

3. Continuing the food theme, Viennese bakers helped inspire the French croissant. Bakers made Austrian kipferls (kipferl means crescent in German) to commemorate Austria’s victory over the Ottoman Turks – whose uniforms featured crescents. When Maria Antoinette of Austria married King Louis XVI, she introduced the pastry to France and renamed it a croissant.

4. Vienna was home to the Father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud for almost 50 years and as a result, is sometimes called the City of Dreams. The Sigmund Freud Museum is housed in the apartment in which he lived.

5. In 1900, the snow globe was accidently invented by Vienna resident Erwin Perzy. Erwin was actually trying to invent a light bulb! The Erwin Perzy factory is still in business today and is run by Erwin Perzy’s grandson, Erwin Perzy III. Some of their more famous customers include US Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.

If you’re attending the FCSI EAME Conference in April, we look forward to seeing you there and hope you enjoy your visit to Vienna.