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…
Nina Caplan is an award-winning wine, arts, and travel journalist based in London, England and Burgundy, France. She is the Drinks Columnist for Times Luxx, the Travel and Lifestyle columnist for Club Oenologique, a Contributing Writer for Travel+Leisure, and the author of the wine travel memoir The Wandering Vine: Wine, the Romans and Me, which was the Louis Roederer Wine Book of the Year and Fortnum & Mason Debut Drink Book of the Year. She is working on a book about France.
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.
In Alsace, Grand Cru usually means one thing: Riesling. But on Zotzenberg — a low, east-facing slope between Barr and Mittelbergheim — the often overlooked Sylvaner holds an unusual place of privilege. Zotzenberg remains the only Grand Cru vineyard in Alsace for which Sylvaner is officially recognized on the label. It’s a rare exception that shows how a site can reshape a grape’s reputation and, perhaps, its future. Six Centuries on a Quiet Hill in Alsace Zotzenberg was first documented as “Zoczenberg” over 600 years ago. Its quality was noted early on: in 1541, Mittelbergheim’s village records mention the hill…...
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 —…...
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…...
