Journey to the Center of the Mosel: a Nordic Perspective
How a former chef's trip from the Norwegian Fjords to Germany's Mosel valley took wine appreciation to the next level.
What’s the Point of Fine Wine, Afterall?
Channeling literary theory in order to propose a new threshold test for fine wine.
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.
Biodynamics’ Blind Spot
An essay reconciling the realpolitik of Rudolf Steiner today.
But for that Umlaut
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…...
In Alsace
The ancient injunction to keep your friends close and your enemies closer is all very well, but in Alsace it can be hard to tell the two apart. Control of the region has swung between Germany and France like a pendulum, and the Protestantism of the one and Catholicism of the other has caused generations of religious dissidents to flee west and east respectively, to halt by the great Vosges mountains and settle on the swathe of land beside the Rhine. Which, it turned out, might have been a problematic spot in political terms, but was an ideal place to…...
Germany · Essay · Mosel · Tasting Article
What’s German for Drier Than Dry? Furztrocken, of course
The dark wit of Berlin. Dangerously low water levels in the Rhine River. Black bread. Germany does trocken like few others. And then there’s the wine. Despite its reputation as the land of Blue Nun, more than 60 percent of the wines made in Germany are dry. And within that 60 percent, there are discernible levels of dry, drier, and driest. So dry, in fact, that there’s a strangely specific word for it. (Of course there’s a word. It’s Germany. There’s always a word.) Furztrocken. Fart Dry. Literally. As difficult to grasp as I find a term like feinherb, it’s Kinderspiel when compared to furztrocken. Then again, mindset…...
What to Drink When a Somm Comes to Dinner
It is Friday night and I’m terrified. In 24 hours, a top sommelier is coming to our house for dinner. A sommelier who puts together the wine lists for a global restaurant group; a sommelier who has spent over 30 years training more somms than I’ve seen typos on a wine list; a sommelier who matches food and wine the way the rest of us match our Sunday outfits. And tomorrow, I’m responsible for the wine. My wife draws up a shopping list for the meal, blissfully unconcerned. “We’re not a restaurant,” she says, “why should she expect Michelin-starred cooking?”…...
Hermannshöhle Hallelujah
Her child, she thinks, is a Riesling. Of all the varieties in the world, she inevitably returns to this one. There is something in the grape’s singular ability to convey fragility and strength, ephemera and eternity, that mirrors motherhood and frames the child in her mind’s eye. The child could have reflected a multiple of varieties, a blend perhaps, or a different hue. She remembers a strawberry-scented evening of pink Cinsault in a South African game lodge, bottomless glasses as sundowners, followed by a queasy morning-after, and a realization that the child — then little more than a flicker —…...
How Natural Wine Made Me Confront My German Problem
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…...
Germany · Austria · Essay · Switzerland
Opinion: Reconciling the Racism of Rudolf Steiner
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.
The Greatness of Small
Truth be told, I relish the fact that the phrase “kabinett trocken” feels like an oxymoron to so many people. For all reasonable drinkers who have come to reflexively associate the word “Kabinett” with an off-dry Riesling, the fact that a Kabinett can be both 1) dry and 2) not Riesling is jarring. An oxymoron right up there with “freezer burn,” “peacekeeper missile,” and “airline food.” Yet, that’s only one part of a much larger obsession…er, story. Kabinett trocken reduces the grandest terroir to its most essential, most fundamental, most tangible, and most immediate. A few exceptional Kabinett trockens have been among…...