But for that Umlaut

By

David Schildknecht

•

•

Volume 17, On the Verge •
AI image of an umlaut. Two dots on a white wine label.

The spelling of grape names can be fraught. Iconic viticulturalist Georg Scheu once delivered an address, accompanied by a poem, wittily satirizing those who would replace Sylvaner’s romance “y” with “i.” In 1940, that was risky. Scheu’s country had become a terror state, and those being spoofed weren’t known for their sense of humor. Pfalz vintner Rainer Lingenfelder long labeled his Sylvaner: “Ypsilon – Homage to Georg Scheu and his Rebellion against the ‘i’-dot Bureaucrats [i-Punkt Bürokraten]” — which gained hilarity in translation given the fatuous Nazi policy of enforcing “Germanic” spelling. (Even the “c”s in Cabinet and Bernkasteler Doctor…

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Writer

David Schildknecht trained in philosophy and worked as a restaurateur before spending a quarter century in the U.S. wine trade. His tasting reports, ones from Austria and Germany prominent among them, have since the late 1980s been fixtures of Stephen Tanzer's International Wine Cellar; Robert Parker's Wine Advocate; and, since 2015, Vinous. A columnist and feature contributor for Wine & Spirits, The World of Fine Wine, and Austria’s Vinaria, he is responsible for the German and Austrian entries in the The Oxford Companion to Wine and a co-author of the 7th edition of Robert Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide. David has also addressed issues of aesthetics in contexts academic and otherwise, and his life in wine leaves time to pursue his passions for cooking, music, history, and his infinitely tolerant wife of five decades.

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