The area of Austria that Franz comes from is Burgenland, situated on the Austria-Hungary border, where his other winery and family home is situated. He drives across the border from Balf most days and remembers doing so as child sitting in the back of his parent’s car. Nowadays the commute is easy and the check points are almost always unmanned, so you just push on through. However, growing up Franz recalls waiting with his family for hours at the crossing where the Iron Curtain draped, as their passports were checked.

The Iron Curtain was both an ideological divide and a physical separation created after the end of the Second World War, which split Europe in two until the end of the Cold War in 1991. The most well-known of the borders was the Berlin Wall but the division also split Austria and Hungary, and affected the wine industry in both countries.

The border between Burgenland and Hungary – which since 1990 has again been recognised as a bridge between Western and Eastern Europe – was a danger zone pocked with unexploded mines and barbed wire up until the early 1970s, when the minefields were finally cleared to halt the continuous fatalities. Some say this was a strategic move by the Soviet Union to open its borders to the West, but the greatest act of reconciliation in the area was that of the Pan-European Picnic in Sopron, in August 1989 – a peaceful protest of some 600 East Germans who successfully crossed the Burgenland border, and which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall later that year.

(I think about the conflict in Israel and Palestine, where we will end up in a month’s time. If Europe could do it after the Holocaust, the Second World War and the Cold War, surely there must be a solution; a ‘Pan-Middle Eastern Picnic’ at the separation wall.)

We take a drive through this historic site, which is now a memorial ground of symmetrical lawned turf and stone icons gifted by the international community. In the distance there is a disused watch tower casting its shadow over the sterile commemoration. Like the peeling streets of post-Jewish Sopron, this survivor landmark better serves the cultural memory of the people trapped behind the Iron Curtain than the superficial monuments beneath it, void of flesh and blood.

We are passing to get to the Neusiedler See, Austria’s largest lake and an irrigator for the wine gardens, a habitat for wildlife, and a beautiful spot for walking, boating and swimming. There are buses filled with tour groups – one drunkenly spills out wearing lederhosen – who have come to take pleasure boats across the waters. We have come to go boating but upon arrival the office is closed due to the wet weather of the morning. So we walk.

We weave past banks of waving reeds, over floating jetties and across wooden bridges. The children go fishing with sticks as boatloads of tourists wave at them from the upper deck. Butterflies circle their heads. Across the water we see the epic painted set of an opera that was performed here last week against the backdrop of the lake: two gigantic flat lions prop up a gigantic flat neoclassical edifice. What with the lederhosen, it all feels very ‘Sound of Music’, much to the delight of the children.

The Hollywood Austria experience continues when we leave the lake and head to Rust, a charming chocolate box (or sausage box?) of a place. Although officially Austria’s smallest city, it’s simply a jewel-coloured village with a very pretty church and town hall, famous for its stork nests, wine and hueriger. Rudolph, the current lodger at The Mother-in-Law’s House, encouraged us to visit a heuriger, explaining that they are high-spirited wine-taverns in which wine-makers serve their first wines of the year (heurig means ‘this year’s’).

Open for 2-3 weeks at a time, when new wine has been produced, heuriger notify the public by hanging a buschen of conifer over the entrance. We find a place with a sprig above the door that Franz and Petra have heard is good, and seat our families at a large wooden table in the bustling vine-covered courtyard. Heuriger hold a specialist licence, which limits them to serve their own wines and, traditionally, locally-produced food; so we order glasses of the local tipple and delicious rose grape juice, schnitzel, pig ears in aspic, pumpkin-filled ravioli, sausage, and paprika-covered zander (a lake fish caught in the Neusiedler See). We eat and drink well, knowing that we will be killing a chicken at dusk.