Most Goes to Germany

Heribert Altinger, Rust's Mayor and a part-time winegrower himself, explained it this way: ''Suppose some creative local bottler decides to slip something into Coca-Cola so it sells better. Well, that's what we've got on our hands.''

''It is the worst disaster to hit this region since World War II,'' he added.

Austria does not rank with Italy, France or West Germany among the major wine-producing countries of Europe. But its light, sweet white wines and a handful of reds gained popularity after World War II, particularly in Germany, where Austrian vintners ship roughly two-thirds of their wine exports.

Nobody knows how, or when, the doctoring started. But the guess in the industry, according to Friedrich Huemer of the Wine Industry Fund, a wine makers' association in Vienna, is that wine traders signed lucrative contracts over the last 10 years with major supermarket chains and other outlets in West Germany and elsewhere to supply large amounts of sweet Austrian wines, the kind the Germans like to drink, at constant levels of quality.

Nature Fails the Winegrowers

But several recent harvests failed to produce the needed amounts, or when they did, as in the abundant 1982 harvest, the grapes were sour.

''What nature didn't supply,'' Mr. Huemer said with a sigh, ''they added themselves.'' [The scandal widened Thursday when the Austrian Health Ministry announced that glycol had been detected in a case of grape juice in Wiener Neudorf, south of Vienna, and in a bottle of a carbonated wine called Sekt. The exact origin of the Sekt was not immediately known. [Officials issued a warning against consumption of the beverages and began an immediate check of all brands of the beverages.] The scandal has split the industry, pitting traders against growers, and growers in tradition-laden winegrowing regions, such as Rust, against newcomers, like those whose vines march across fields beyond the lake between the water and the border with Hungary.