The Wine Friend is a figure of great importance in the life of a wine drinker. They can take the form a kind benefactor, perhaps older, perhaps wiser, one whose personal cellar heaves with decades of collected knowledge and interest, and whose guileless goal is to share these experiences with others as a form of vinous karmic pleasure. I count myself as lucky to have a few such friends, which is how I found myself — on one of those chilly, foggy autumn San Francisco evenings — drinking a very smart coterie of wines among a small group of pals,…
The scent of pine trees is a time machine, a brusque mix of barbed, balsamic beauty. I have a million pine memories. One good whiff and I’m transported home, sap streaking the inside of my scraped arms as I scale the tall white pine in our neighbor’s backyard, lunchbox dangling from the rear belt loop of my short pants. Lost in a cross-hatching of aromatic needles. I’m in the warming house of the town rink, my toes aching with cold. Silhouetted skaters float and spin on the bumpy ice outside. A pine fire acrid with resin heaves black smoke up…...
These days, when I discover a new wine producer, it usually happens at a restaurant. I turn the bottle around, read the information on the label, and later, research the wine on the Internet, looking for a blog post or something reliable on Instagram. Maybe I’ll find a few photos, or a social media post from someone I trust who has actually met the winemaker. Someone lucky enough to be living in Europe, who is able to do what I once did on a regular basis: hop on a train, rent a car, find the vineyard — or, meet the…...
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…...
This article is an excerpted chapter from We Don’t Want Any Crap in Our Wine (2019). After the book went to print, the Rennersistas informed the author that Susanne Renner left the winery, which will now be run by siblings Stefanie and Georg. In 2015, Susanne and Stefanie Renner took over the family wine business in Gols, Austria and became their parents’ bosses. In short order, the sisters converted to biodynamics and created their own line of wines, Rennersistas, in addition to the family’s traditional red Renner cuvées. Ever since, Susanne and Stefanie have reveled in the freedom of making…...
Djuce first entered my periphery late last year at the New York City iteration of Karakterre’s natural wine fair. Amid a cheerful invasion of producers from what has winningly been dubbed “the Austro-Hipsterian Empire,” I narrowed my focus to taste at some touchstones of Austrian natural wine — Judith Beck, Zillinger, Heinrich, Meinklang, Nittnaus, Weninger. Hurrying between offerings of electric-amped Grüner Veltliner and ethereal Blaufränkisch, I brushed by a small table stacked with slim, colorful cans and a paper sign that read “Djuce.” I paused just long enough to register an internal eye roll at what I assumed was the bro-culture spelling and reflexive ecoism of yet…...
