I’ve been a fan of B sides since, well, pretty much since there have been B sides. Record companies have historically used vinyl’s flipside as a holding pen for unreleased or less desirable concept material. Pieces that don’t fit the brand; supplementary songs with minimal hopes and lower aspirations. Filler. Yet, to me B sides embody the edgy and unpredictable, the vulnerable creative underbelly of both artist and medium. Let’s call rosé, the pink “wunder” of the last decade, our A side. Industry figures show that rosé now constitutes some 9% of the global wine market. Thirty-nine percent of wine drinkers in…
Paula Redes Sidore moves smoothly between the worlds of wine and words. In 2012, she founded Weinstory, a creative content and translation agency dedicated to transposing the world of German-speaking wine into English. TRINK is the natural extension of that pursuit. She is the German and Austrian regional specialist for jancisrobinson.com and a member of the Circle of Wine Writers. Paula has a Masters degree in fiction writing, and her work has been featured in jr.com, Sevenfifty Daily, Feinschmecker, and Heated. She lives on the northern wall of wine growing with her family in Bonn, Germany.
This article is adapted from Natural Trailblazers: 13 Ways to Climate-Friendly Wine, to be published on 21 October 2024 and currently available for pre-order. In the Swiss Alps, husband-and-wife Romaine and Hans-Peter Schmidt have created an island for humans and animals, insects and microbes to thrive in a sea of conventional vineyards. A combination of no-till, green manure, vitoforestry, and biochar makes their legendary winery Mythopia carbon neutral in the vineyard. I’m outside a bakery in Sion, with a view of the railway tracks and the snowy peaks on the horizon. It’s a surreal combination of nature and industry. A…...
The story starts with a pedicure and a camping van. Each year when the German wine queen visits New York City, Paul Grieco treats her to a pedicure. (If the queen’s mother is also visiting, she gets one, too.) Grieco is a sommelier, vocal Riesling advocate, and owner/manager of Terroir wine bar in New York. He is also part jester, reveling in the micro-tradition of the pedicure while also pointing toward the intellectual esteem in which he holds every queen he’s ever met. Grieco honors the queens, he said, “because we [at Terroir] are fans of history and culture and [the queens] are an…...
Just in time for the tropical temperatures of summer 2026, I made myself Som Tam Thai (ส้มตำ), a Thai papaya salad. At 30°C (86°F) or above, few of us have much of an appetite. But you have to eat something eventually. With no green papaya on hand, kohlrabi cut a surprisingly good figure. And the bold, intensely seasoned dressing did the rest. So, what to drink with it? They recommend you should consume an extra two liters of fluid at these temperatures, and who am I to argue? Off to the wine cellar to find a good bottle. Oddly, the…...
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…...
The future of the Mosel Apollo butterfly and its habitat of the Mosel terraces are endangered. Can a solution be found that allows both to continue to coexist?
Curing fish is a bit like baking cakes: unless one follows a particular recipe to the letter, the final result inevitably contains an element or three of surprise. Once in the oven, once in the brine, the window for intervention has passed – leaving time and temperature as the only remaining levers. I clearly lack the discipline to work with exact measurements (thus explaining my ban from baking birthday cakes), but I do enjoy the imprecise, historical art of preserving food with salt. Think: classic Sauerkraut, southern German Surfleisch, or – well – salmon. This particular side of freshly caught salmon…...
