Editors’ Note: Data open tantalizing invitations to speculation. Wine economist Dr. Karl Storchmann of the American Association of Wine Economists is a master at collecting information, presenting it in clear, compelling graphics, and stepping away to allow each of us to draw our own conclusions. When he looked at wine, beer, and spirits consumption in three of TRINK’s coverage zones over the past century, he found striking disparities and a surprising convergence. What story do they tell you?Per capita wine consumption in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland has fluctuated significantly since the late 19th century (see Figure 1). Switzerland has consistently…
Karl Storchmann has been a Clinical Professor of Economics at New York University since 2009. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Bochum in Germany (1998). Dr. Storchmann is a co-founder and the Editor of the Journal of Wine Economics, and the Executive Director of the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE). He has taught or held permanent or visiting positions at various universities, including UCLA, Yale University, and Bordeaux Sciences Agro (2014–present). He is an applied microeconomist whose research focuses on environmental and industrial organization issues related to agriculture and the wine market. His most recent work examines the effects of tariffs on the wine industry. He has published wine-related papers in academic journals such as Agricultural Economics, the American Economic Review, Economic Inquiry, the Journal of Wine Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Review of Industrial Organization.
Don’t let anyone tell you those rocks are a waste of time. Twenty-five years from now, sitting in a Koblenz classroom on your first day of wine school, you will be grateful for each and every one of them. Because there in the heart of German wine country, those stones and their secrets — though you don’t know it yet — will be the foundation keeping you steady among your more experienced classmates, those vintners’ sons and daughters who boast seven, ten, 15 generations in the business, and counting. All while you are still trying to locate the Mosel on…...
Known to his 18,000-plus Instagram followers as @soilpimp, Robert Dentice is a German wine collector and vinyl fanatic, founder of the Riesling Study event series, and a driving force behind a brand new project called sourcematerialwine that is set to spread his evangelical zeal for German wine to the wide world. Short of spending an evening at one of his legendary Riesling-, Silvaner-, or Weissburgunder-fuelled music events — and he’d sincerely love nothing more than to have you there — the next best way to get a sense of the radiant positivity he brings to German wine is to cue…...
At a time when some Mosel producers are shedding vineyards like snakeskins, Ernst “Erni” Loosen, who already has 90 hectares at his disposal, is trying on a new one. A few years ago, a cousin of Loosen’s called to say he was selling a parcel. Lammertslay, a steep, mid-slope, two-and-a-half-hectare plot within the Wehlener Sonnenuhr, is hallowed ground for Riesling. The vines were largely wurzelecht (ungrafted), planted around 1895 in pure blue slate soil on a south-facing slope. Loosen was sold. The parcel had belonged to his great-grandfather, Dr. Zacharias Bergweiler-Prüm. Loosen saw it as a rare chance to honor…...
