Better Spät than Never in the Ahr
How catastrophe proved a catalyst for change, and helped Germany’s Pinot paradise find a new way to farm.
How catastrophe proved a catalyst for change, and helped Germany’s Pinot paradise find a new way to farm.
Simon J. Woolf has been writing about natural and orange wine since 2011. He is the award-winning founder of "The Morning Claret" and author of the seminal Amber Revolution (2018) and Foot Trodden (2021), both named New York Times wine books of the year. Simon contributes to Decanter, where he serves as a Regional Chair, as well as World of Fine Wine and Noble Rot. Recently, he launched a consultancy guiding authors in self-publishing. Based in Amsterdam, he is a keen cook and lover of music ranging from Stockhausen to ClownC0re.
It was biodynamic wine that helped me to find my footing in Europe. Yet, as a Black American woman living in Europe, Rudolf Steiner's interests and views present a complicated and troubling legacy.
Sammie Steinmetz is one half of Weingut Günther Steinmetz, a mid-sized, family-run winery in Brauneberg on the Mosel. Born in Pensacola, Florida, Sammie came to Germany in 2007 as an enlisted member of the U.S. Air Force, stationed at Spangdahlem Air Base not far from the winery. She’d already planned on settling in the country when her term of service ended (“because Riesling,” she laughs). But a chance invitation to a wine-tasting introduced her to fifth-generation winemaker Stefan Steinmetz. Two weeks after meeting, they were dating and they married a few years later. In 2014, Sammie took early retirement from the…...
The power, pride and potential of old vines. And it turns out, the Mosel really could be where it all started..
It’s hard to believe now, but Germany was once a divided country, and the East was a strange microcosm of icons of that era: Sandmännchen, Jungpioniere, and FKK-Kultur. Not to forget its sparkling ambassador, Rotkäppchensekt. Also hard to believe: a destination for wine fans has now arisen in the area between Chemnitz and Cottbus, Magdeburg and Dresden. And yet, from Berlin, the trip takes you almost 200 kilometers to the south, past Dessau and Lutherstadt Wittenberg, to a place whose name sounds to German ears disturbingly close to “Lauch” (leek). Laucha an der Unstrut has roughly 3,200 inhabitants, a bell museum, and one…...
April arrived like a lamb and went out like a lion, leaving a swath of massive frost damage in its wake for the 2024 vintage.
In slanting early morning light, a shadow crosses a vineyard. The figure moves row by row, ripping out vines and casting them onto a large, burning pyre. The blaze stretches to greet the sun as it rises above a mountainous horizon. There is fire from all points of the compass. Death is in the air. The culprit is a phytoplasm fatal to Vinifera vines. Its spread is aided by the American grapevine leafhopper (Scaphoideus titanus), a dwarf cicada native to North America. As it feasts on the vines, it transmits the pathogen of what is known in German as Goldgelbe…...
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