Letter to My Younger Somm Self
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Letter to My Younger Somm Self

ByPaula Redes Sidore

Don’t let anyone tell you those rocks are a waste of time.  Twenty-five years from now, sitting in a Koblenz classroom on your first day of wine school, you will be grateful for each and every one of them. Because there in the heart of German wine country, those stones and their secrets —  though you don’t know it yet — will be the foundation keeping you steady among your more experienced classmates, those vintners’ sons and daughters who boast seven, ten, 15 generations in the business, and counting. All while you are still trying to locate the Mosel on…...

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A small building half destroyed by flood is in the foreground, in the background a terraced vineyard.
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Flood Comes for the Ahr and Its Winemakers

ByValerie Kathawala

From last Wednesday night into Thursday morning, 148 liters/square meter of rain fell on the Ahr. In a normal July, the region gets about 80 liters/square meter — in the entire month. This immense volume of precipitation in such a short span dilated creeks into torrents. Torrents rose and swiftly emptied into the Ahr itself, which morphed into an implacable, surging mass of water. As we’ve now all seen on the news, the river ripped through the villages that line its banks — Ahrweiler, Dernau, Mayschoss will be names familiar to German wine lovers — shocking everyone from the authorities charged…...

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Beethoven as Bacchus, Part II
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Beethoven as Bacchus, Part II

ByRon Merlino

In the first movement of this piece, we looked at the origins of Ludwig van Beethoven’s interest in wine and the critical role this played in shaping the composer’s musical career. Here, we trace his path through Vienna’s living landscape, to find multiple points of intersection between past and present in his music and in some of the city’s defining wines. We then head south to the Austrian spa region of Baden, where Beethoven drank, and composed, masterpieces. As we will find, his music comes more vividly to life when appreciated within the context of the vines and landscapes in which it was written…...

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World clock on Alexanderplatz in Berlin seen from below

Berlin-Style Sustainability

ByLiv Fleischhacker

Over the last decade, Berlin has established itself as a wine city. No small feat, since little quality wine is made within a five-hour driving radius. But in the early 2010s the natural wine movement brought in “small plates and natural wine” bistros and more and more distributors — independent wine stores who both import and buy wines and then sell them to both restaurants and consumers alike — are basing themselves here. The RAW wine fair made Berlin its Central European hub back in 2015. Before March 2020, business was good.  Then came Covid.  Putting the Neighbor back in Neighborhood at…...

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Terroir Trocken
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Terroir Trocken

ByStuart Pigott

The photos that German astronaut Alexander Gerst sent back from the International Space Station during summer 2018 were deeply shocking: Germany was no longer green, but brown. The only visible green in the entirety of many of the wine regions was in fact the vines.  RIP cool climate? While it was common knowledge that the summer of 2018 had been exceptionally warm, few people realize it was also the warmest ever recorded. The Average Growing Season Temperature (AVGST) registered at Geisenheim/Rheingau in 2018 was 17.8° Celsius, or 0.9° (1.6° on the Fahrenheit scale) above the previous record year, 1947. However, most were…...

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Get to Know German-Speaking Orange Wines
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Get to Know German-Speaking Orange Wines

ByValerie Kathawala

Skin-contact white wines may have their revolutionary roots in Georgia, Slovenia, and Friuli,  but the umlaut zone also stakes a strong claim for orange expressions.  Austria was an early and highly successful adopter (think Tschida and Tscheppe, Muster and Meinklang). For this, thank geographic proximity, shared traditions, a former empire’s worth of fascinating white varieties, and the remarkable open-mindedness of producers, especially in Styria and Burgenland. Germany came later to the game. The country has been slower to embrace natural and experimental styles generally and its signature variety, Riesling, requires an exceptionally deft hand to succeed in skin-fermented form. However, German…...

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Photograph of black and white biodynamic wine bottles to symbolize the racist legacy of the man, Rudolf Steiner, behind the wines.
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Opinion: Reconciling the Racism of Rudolf Steiner

ByLauren Johnson-Wünscher

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.

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The Greatness of Small
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The Greatness of Small

ByStephen Bitterolf

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…...

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Eat + TRINK | Where Silvaner Meets the Sea
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Eat + TRINK | Where Silvaner Meets the Sea

ByJérôme Hainz

Confession time: Which wine and food pairings make your eyes roll faster than a teenager’s? Champagne and strawberries? Pizza and Lambrusco? Muscadet and oysters?  In southern Germany, Silvaner and white asparagus are regional marketing 101. Silvaner has been praised and prized as a pairing for the spring stalk to such an extent that grocers will double their inventories of cheap Silvaner and stack it by the case in the vegetable section. And while the fastest way to get a screenful of Internet ill-will slung in your direction is to suggest the pairing to a German wine group, it is true…...

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Kabinett Trocken: Oxymoron or Opportunity?
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Kabinett Trocken: Oxymoron or Opportunity?

ByDavid Schildknecht

It’s an unfortunate paradox: the very climatic conditions that leave us thirsting for lightweight, refreshing and soul-satisfying dry wines render these hard to achieve. Yet, rather than leading the way in surmounting this viticultural challenge, Germany’s Riesling establishment routinely throws up roadblocks. That’s a crying shame.  THE CURIOSITY OF “KABINETT” To understand what’s become of “Kabinett trocken,” we must first retrace the steps leading to “Kabinett.” “Cabinet,” as a term applied to German Riesling, dates to 18th-century Rheingau, a derivative of “Cabinetstück” (alternatively, “Kabinet[t]stück”), in use for diverse objects worth displaying in a cabinet of curiosities or, by extension, worthy literary and…...

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12 Questions for Terry Theise
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12 Questions for Terry Theise

ByValerie Kathawala

Terry Theise. Until quite recently, I would have written “an importer of German and Austrian wine who needs no introduction.”  But over the past year, the axis of wine, not to mention the world, has shifted. A slew of new wine lovers might just need to be brought up to speed on this pioneering champion of “umlaut-bearing wines” (a term Theise coined long before we or anyone else). Theise fell for German wine and wine culture while living in Munich in his 20s. When he returned to the U.S. in the early 1980s, he brought this zeal back with him. He…...

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Swabian Vibes
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Swabian Vibes

ByKatharina Matheis

Those who go on the hunt for modern Württemberg may be surprised by what they find on the journey. In this stretch of southern Germany, many things work differently. Swabians have their own take on cool.  Here you’ll meet a grower from the hip-hop scene who has the region’s traditional wine mug inked as a tattoo. You’ll bump into a start-up winery launched with crowdfunding. And you’ll land at the door of one of Germany’s hippest growers, 68-year-old Helmut Dolde of Linsenhofen. DOLDE Dolde wears a walrus mustache and, on the day of my visit, a cap someone gave him that says “Wine in…...

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