Spirits Shop
Sporer has sold house-made punches, fruit schnapps, and Austrian spirits from Getreidegasse 39 since 1903. It is the narrowest shop on the street and one of the few remaining genuine specialists in an Altstadt retail landscape now dominated by chain stores and souvenir stalls.
Getreidegasse is the most photographed street in Salzburg. It is also, for much of its length, a commercial strip that looks like many other European historic streets: international brands, chocolate shops, and tourist merchandise. Sporer is the exception that proves what Getreidegasse once was.
The shop sits at number 39, in the narrowest building on the lane. The entry is vaulted, the interior is stone-and-timber, and inside the back room sit oak barrels that have been part of this business since the early twentieth century. Franz Sporer opened the shop in 1903 after apprenticing in Salzburg’s brewing industry. His family has run it for four generations. The current owner is Michael Sporer.
The speciality is house-made spirits: fruit schnapps distilled in-house, Austrian herbal liqueurs, pine schnapps, and punches made from the shop’s own recipes. The orange punch, whose formula dates to 1927, is the most recognised product. It is sold as a concentrate and appears every winter at the Salzburg Christmas markets; the recipe has remained unchanged for nearly a century. Bottles of the orange punch concentrate, along with other house spirits, are among the best Austrian food souvenirs available in the city: specific, locally made, and unavailable in any supermarket.
The production facility relocated to the Maxglan district years ago, but the Getreidegasse shop remains the retail and tasting address, where glasses of house schnapps can be tried at the counter for a few euros.
What to order
What Sporrer is a reliable address for.
The definitive alpine spirit. Distilled from yellow gentian roots harvested by hand above the treeline. Intensely bitter, herbal, medicinal in the best sense. Destillerie Grassl is the reference. Sporrer on Getreidegasse sells it. Not for everyone, but nothing else will do.
