Esterházykeller, Vienna

The claim

A cellar two floors under the Esterházy palace in the Haarhof, a lane off the Graben in Vienna, with brick vaulting the house dates to the fifteenth century and a water-cooled counter for bottled wine. It tells the siege of 1683 as its beginning, when the prince's men were given wine before the fighting. The city's own encyclopedia dates the cellar's opening to 1808 and wine by the glass to 1828.

What the records show

Two Viennese accounts of this cellar disagree, and the city's is the harder one. The house tells the Turkish siege of 1683, when Prince Paul Esterházy's men were given free wine before the fighting; the wall that ran past the Haarhof was not the one the Turks were shooting at, because the city's own archaeological map of the old town puts nothing later than the middle ages at this corner — the Reflertor gate, dated 1100 to 1529, and the wall of the Roman legionary camp, both within seventy metres of the door, and no line of mediaeval or later fortification here at all; that, it says, was the beginning of wine service here, and a Vienna daily repeated the 1683 in April 2026 when new tenants took the place on. The City of Vienna's historical encyclopedia, which is written from property and licensing records, says instead that the Esterházykeller opened in 1808, that nothing under five Maß of wine was sold at first, and that only from 1828 was it also poured by the seitel, a glass measure. A cellar that would sell you no less than five Maß was a wine store rather than a drinking house, so the date recorded here for wine by the glass is 1828 and the 1683 is shown as the claim it is. The encyclopedia adds that Adolph von Menzel painted the cellar in 1871. The house calls its vaulting fifteenth-century on one page and puts sixteenth-century patina on another. What trades today needs saying carefully. The cellar's own page has it shut from 12 January until further notice, while the Esterházystüberl beside it — the same business, address and telephone — opens daily from eleven to ten with lunch menus, beer and wine specialities and a pavement garden in summer; the Vienna weekly Falter lists the house open daily eleven to ten with the kitchen closing at nine, and that last hour is a drink served after the food has stopped. A Vienna daily reported the insolvency in 2025 and, in April 2026, that two restaurateurs had taken the house on and would clean the old brickwork through July and August. The City of Vienna's own building inventory was read on 18 September 2026 and it dates the house over the cellar rather than the cellar: Naglergasse 9, which is also Haarhof 1 and Wallnerstraße 4, is entered as the Palais Esterházy, five storeys, built in 1819, in the building period 1781 to 1848, surveyed in November 2000. The same map service shows why the vaults can be older than that. Its archaeological map of the old town carries four separate houses on this ground, numbered 161, 162, 163 and 164 in the eighteenth-century house numbering, where the present palace stands under one number, 276 — so the cellar the wine is poured in ran under houses pulled down to build the palace above it. Nothing read dates the brickwork. And this is the city speaking again rather than a second publisher: the encyclopedia, the map service and the protection zone are all the City of Vienna, while Austria's federal register of protected monuments is still published nowhere a reader can reach.

Dated evidence for Esterházykeller, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1683	Claimed founding	The pub
1828	First record of a drinking house here	esterhazykeller.at

What to look for inside

Adolph von Menzel painted the cellar in 1871
A water-cooled counter for bottled wine, rare at this size
Wine from the Esterházy estate on the Leithaberg in Burgenland

Visiting

Esterházykeller is in Vienna, Austria, at Haarhof 1, Innere Stadt, 1010 Vienna. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

esterhazykeller.at Directions in your maps app