I reach down to the baggage carousel and slip the strap over my shoulder, the weight of a month’s traveling slowly spreading through my frame, equalizing itself. I pause. Something feels wrong. There is a dampness between my shoulder blades and a smell that doesn’t belong: windfall cherries, woodsmoke. I look down to see a small, red pool forming behind my heels. A man in a yellow jacket reaches for a walkie-talkie. The source is a now-leaking bottle of Fritz Wieninger’s Pinot Noir Select 2006, naively swaddled in pair-upon-pair of walking socks. It’s a memento of one of those evenings…
Tom came dangerously close to working in wine on two occasions. First, there were a few steps in the wine trade, pouring and selling, and then later a close call with a chalky, south-facing slope in Kent. As it happened, he found his home at the piano as a performer, composer, and educator in the realms of jazz and contemporary music. Two joyfully unpredictable fields seemed better than one, though, so he now writes about sparkling wine at sixatmospheres.co.uk, also having featured at timatkin.com, Falstaff, The Buyer, and The Drinks Business. He is currently preparing the largest ever single report on English wine for timatkin.com, due for publication in autumn 2021.
St. Lawrence, the man, was born in Valencia, Spain, sometime around 225 CE. He moved to Rome to work with Pope Sixtus II, became a deacon, and earned a reputation as a champion of the poor. On August 10, 258, Roman Emperor Valerian sentenced him to die by being lashed to a bed of hot coals. But so great was his devotion to god, the legend goes, that he resisted the flames, demanding that his tormentors flip him like a steak. A martyr was made. St. Laurent, the grape, is thought to have originated in what is now eastern Austria…...
Wine regions are threaded along the Danube, one after another, like a string of Chanel pearls. Wagram, Kamptal, Kremstal, Wachau. And Traisental — the only one that lies exclusively south of the Danube. Its namesake river, the Traisen, divides the valley as the Seine does Paris or the Gironde does Bordeaux, into left and right banks. The tiny region flaunts French finesse and cool avant-garde. But also a rustic, down-to-earth charm. In Paris, the Left Bank is the quartier of intellectuals and artists. Through Yves Saint Laurent it achieved world fame in fashion. Who or what sets the tone and…...
Editors’ Note: Data open tantalizing invitations to speculation. Wine economist Dr. Karl Storchmann of the American Association of Wine Economists is a master at collecting information, presenting it in clear, compelling graphics, and stepping away to allow each of us to draw our own conclusions. When he looked at wine, beer, and spirits consumption in three of TRINK’s coverage zones over the past century, he found striking disparities and a surprising convergence. What story do they tell you? Per capita wine consumption in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland has fluctuated significantly since the late 19th century (see Figure 1). Switzerland has…...
Austrian sparkling wines are filled with adventure, from serious Winzersekt (Austria’s answer to grower Champagne) to the refreshing fizz of pét-nat, a style the country was quick to embrace. The adoption of a three-tiered quality pyramid for Austrian sparkling wine in 2015 helped set the stage. The book 111 Austrian Wines You Must Not Miss includes nine sparkling wines that illustrate this effervescent trend. Three I’d like to spotlight here are the outstanding Winzersekte of Ebner-Ebenauer and Fred Loimer, which represent the absolute pinnacle of quality, as well as a pét-nat that was one of the first to make a splash…...
In Vulkanland Steiermark — “volcanic Styria” — the name says it all. Some 1,500 hectares of vineyard are, for the most part, sited on the slopes of extinguished volcanic cones that rise from a gently hilly landscape. Here Pannonian warmth from the east meets the Illyric balminess of the Adriatic. Among the best-known growers in Vulkanland are Weingut Neumeister, Winkler-Hermaden, and Ploder-Rosenberg. As throughout Styria, white varieties are most strongly represented, with Welschriesling and Weißburgunder (aka Pinot Blanc) statistically far in the lead, followed by Sauvignon Blanc, Müller-Thurgau, and Chardonnay; Zweigelt yields respectable red wines here as well. Traminer from…...
The little wine region of Carnuntum sits east of Vienna and south of the Danube. With a mere 900 hectares under vine, it distinguishes itself through an awareness of regionality developed early on. In 1992, when Austria was still largely classifying its wines by variety rather than origin, Carnuntum implemented the idea of a regionally typical red wine with the name Rubin Carnuntum. But reaching DAC origin status – oriented to the regional, village, single-vineyard wine concept – was still a long road away. This only took effect in 2019 and today Zweigelt Rubin Carnuntum is a regional wine. Although white…...
