Journalist and Editor

Valerie Kathawala specializes in the wines of Germany and Austria. Her work appears in the pages of regularly in Noble Rot and SevenFifty Daily. She is the author of the "German Wine Scholar" (2025).

Similar Posts

  • ·

    German Lessons in the Finger Lakes

    ByNaomi Thorner

    Slopes tilting toward shimmering water; a long, cool growing season; and shallow slate soil — to a connoisseur of German wines, these features immediately evoke the storied Mosel region. Yet they also describe a much younger wine-growing area: New York State’s Finger Lakes, or FLX. Long dismissed as a producer of tourist-friendly sweet wines made from non-vinifera grapes, the Finger Lakes now give life to vintages that express grape and terroir with nuance and sophistication. These include wines created by German-born winemakers, such as Johannes Reinhardt at Kemmeter Wines and Peter Weis at Weis Vineyards, as well as those who trained…...

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  • Releasing the Power of Hidden Sweetness

    ByDavid Schildknecht

    “Dry” describes what wine drinkers overwhelmingly profess to desire. And “trocken” can only appear on labels of German Rieslings with less than 10 grams of residual sugar.  If one desires sweetness, there is no lack: Most of today’s Kabinetts are higher in sugar than were Auslesen of the 1980s. (Granted, the grapes were probably also higher in must weight.) Aesthetically as well as commercially, success in the realm of legal dryness—Trockenheit—as well as that of pronounced sweetness, can scarcely be denied. German Riesling growers have long since succeeded in proving that they too can render world-class dry wine, while simultaneously…...

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  • ·

    Terroir Trocken

    ByStuart Pigott

    The photos that German astronaut Alexander Gerst sent back from the International Space Station during summer 2018 were deeply shocking: Germany was no longer green, but brown. The only visible green in the entirety of many of the wine regions was in fact the vines.  RIP cool climate? While it was common knowledge that the summer of 2018 had been exceptionally warm, few people realize it was also the warmest ever recorded. The Average Growing Season Temperature (AVGST) registered at Geisenheim/Rheingau in 2018 was 17.8° Celsius, or 0.9° (1.6° on the Fahrenheit scale) above the previous record year, 1947. However, most were…...

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