Calling from the expansive, flat landscape that forms the western edge of the Pannonian Puszta steppe flatlands, Erich Stekovics is a lone voice in the tomato world. Where others seek high yield and hardy reliability, Stekovics makes the case for flavor and site. He and his wife Priska belong to the tiny share of Austrian farmers cultivating tomatoes without the cover of glass or foil, and without irrigation. At the eponymous estate in Frauenkirchen, the pair cultivate and safeguard several thousand varieties in the open, and in addition to chili peppers, onions, and garlic, their fields are surrounded by vines….
Ursula Heinzelmann is an independent scholar and food historian born, bred and based in Berlin, Germany. A trained chef, sommelier and ex-restaurateur, she works as a freelance wine and food writer, specializing in cheese. She has published a number of cookbooks, a food history of Germany, Beyond Bratwurst, as well as several books on cheese, and acted as area editor for the Oxford Companion to Cheese. She is the trustee director of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery as well as curator of the Cheese Berlin festival.
The sun blazes. The air shimmers. On the horizon four figures throw long shadows across the dry, crumbling ground. They are headed toward a city. Doors swing open. The four step from light into dark, their throats dusty and dry. Behind a deserted bar stands a man. He pushes four full glasses over to them. Out of the glasses sloshes a wine as red as the setting sun. If you aren’t thirsty by now, you should at least be hearing the melody of a harmonica. This is how the opening scene of a revival—the Rotling revival—could begin. The four men…...
Austrian wine splashed back into the headlines recently when four of its wineries were chosen by a leading U.S. wine publication for inclusion in their “Top 100” worldwide. Notably, three of the four made their names with red wines. What’s more — in a first for Austria — one is a woman. The woman in question, Dorli Muhr, has been a powerful catalyst for the rise of Austrian wine over the past three decades. But gaining international recognition for her own wines, particularly her strikingly finessed Blaufränkisch from a vineyard she was the first to champion, has been a long…...
The Wine Friend is a figure of great importance in the life of a wine drinker. They can take the form a kind benefactor, perhaps older, perhaps wiser, one whose personal cellar heaves with decades of collected knowledge and interest, and whose guileless goal is to share these experiences with others as a form of vinous karmic pleasure. I count myself as lucky to have a few such friends, which is how I found myself — on one of those chilly, foggy autumn San Francisco evenings — drinking a very smart coterie of wines among a small group of pals,…...
Though its name suggests otherwise, Roter Veltliner isn’t a red wine grape at all. Yet at maturity the grapes do take on a scarlet hue. And this juxtaposition is precisely what captivated Austrian winemaker Toni Söllner: “Even as a child, I was fascinated by Roter Veltliner. The grapes were red, but the wine they made was colorless.” Söllner’s organic estate is in Wagram, Roter Veltliner’s home turf. He has restored 2.5 ha to the old autochthonous variety. Söllner is not alone in his engagement on behalf of the rarity, but rather is one of 10 Austrian organic growers who have…...
For a Jewish baby boomer like me, the Holocaust was always part of my DNA. Yet, I was not the child of survivors. My Polish grandparents were safely in the United States by the 1920s. The family they left behind were mostly killed. In yeshiva, where I spent a dozen years splitting my curriculum between religious and secular studies, we were frequently subjected to footage of emaciated bodies, piled up for burning or disposal. Teachers didn’t hide the numbers tattooed on their arms. But the personal horror stories my cousins told of Polish concentration camps and ghettos were the images…...
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…...
