Volume 23 – The 5th Anniversary Edition

September 2025

TRINK 5th Anniversary edition illustration

 

Dear Readers,

Happy birthday to us! This fall, TRINK turns five and we can hardly believe it ourselves. It feels a very short time ago that we were feverishly writing, editing, designing, and putting out our very first issue. Now, thanks to an unbelievable roster of more than 60 superb journalists, essayists, photographers, artists, subeditors, and tech talents, we are inordinately proud to bring you Vol. 23: The 5th Anniversary Edition.

From day one, TRINK has been about just a handful of things:

  • German-speaking wines
  • Making connections between cultures
  • Bridging the language barrier to give non-German speakers the fullest possible understanding of what’s happening in German-speaking wine regions
  • Telling the full story of those wines and wine cultures
  • Bringing food, travel, reading, art, history and science together through the lens of wine.

Our articles always have been and always will be, 100% human-authored. They are the sorts of stories that can only come from hard-won expertise, skilled in-person research, and on-the-ground reporting. They have voice, grit, humor, and depth.

From day one, we have fiercely (from a business perspective, some might say quixotically) put editorial independence first. We are profoundly grateful to the hundreds of individual subscribers and partners who support us and respect our independence and commitment to quality.

TL;DR a collection of TRINK stories on how the biodiversity of our subjects and authors strengthens our resolve and selves.


We started out in autumn 2020. All of us had a lot on our minds that wasn’t wine. On top of that, the media world was already (to put it gently) in flux. It was near impossible to predict models for where independent journalism would go. We joined a market that still favored large legacy brands. But we eagerly carved out a place as a new niche specialist among them. We believed — and still do — in the future of micro-media.

As well-funded giants have entered (and exited!) the scene, we’ve kept our heads down, our staff trim and budget lean, and published on. Personal brands, individual influencers, widening distrust in authority: all have flattened publishing hierarchies and eroded the value of seasoned experience. Through it all, we’ve stayed true to our vision of a multi-voice magazine rooted in place and authorship.

Did we ever question our choices? You bet. Did we buckle? No way.

Trusting our values and instincts has proven again and again that this is the right path. Many of the splashy start-ups that seemed destined for success have folded. Even a key competitor, one with serious publishing muscle, closed its doors this summer. We grieve this state of the industry: the loss of work, erosion of standards, and depletion of shared culture that result. 

But we whole-heartedly celebrate what is — somewhat shakily — rising in its place. A beautiful culture of small, independent publications driven by real human interest, talent, and connection. Tiny-mighty magazines are proliferating. The next step is for them to thrive. We’re proud to be part of this evolving ecosystem of readers and magazines proving micro-media has a real shot at keeping journalism alive.

Story One: German Vintners at the Table

We are very proud to kick off Vol. 23 with TRINK correspondent Rainer Schäfer’s “German Vintners at the Table.” It showcases everything we’re about:

A story that could only come out of reported experience, rendered into English by our trusted translation team, with an angle only TRINK delivers. It’s a kind of pairing: vintners make better cooks because of their relationship with flavor, balance, and attention to quality. We, as English-language writers and German-speakers came together to create a platform to bring together fresh perspectives and approaches for a better magazine. As grower Marcel Idler notes, “Somebody who doesn’t care about good food cannot, in his opinion, be a good winegrower.” People who don’t care about good writing, can’t be good publishers.

A Note on How We Publish

A few of you have asked about our publishing rhythm. We want to offer some clarity. When we first launched TRINK, we published each volume all at once. While that appealed to our desire for a complete, cohesive narrative, we’ve since found that a new article (or, during podcast season, pod episode) each week, allows us to stoke the conversation year-round, ensuring each piece gets its moment to shine while providing a steady flow of vibrant, deeply textured stories.

Thank you for being with us for the first five years of TRINK. We can’t wait for the next five with you!

Eure

Paula and Valerie

  • · ·

    Flavescence dorée: A Viticultural Murder Mystery

    ByNils Kevin Puls

    In slanting early morning light, a shadow crosses a vineyard. The figure moves row by row, ripping out vines and casting them onto a large, burning pyre. The blaze stretches to greet the sun as it rises above a mountainous horizon. There is fire from all points of the compass. Death is in the air. The culprit is a phytoplasm fatal to Vinifera vines. Its spread is aided by the American grapevine leafhopper (Scaphoideus titanus), a dwarf cicada native to North America. As it feasts on the vines, it transmits the pathogen of what is known in German as Goldgelbe…...

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  • Specialist Retailers Are a Bright Spot for German Wine in the UK

    ByBart De Vries

    “Where are all the dynamic, characterful wines from Germany?” Bastian Fischer asked in exasperation after 16 years in the UK wine trade. This year he answered that question himself by opening his own shop. Trinkfluss Wines, just outside London, focuses “on some of the most electric, food-friendly, and downright delicious wines anywhere,” in Fischer’s view. His new venture, baptized with the German word for drinkability, quenches the thirst for Germany’s full gamut of varieties. But one swallow doesn’t make a summer. The somms and wine aficionados who shop at specialist wine stores like Fischer’s may have embraced German wines, but…...

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  • · · ·

    It’s a Kind of Magic

    BySimon J. Woolf

    My socials fill up with harvest photos at this time of year. It’s joyful and a bit primal. Nature controls the parameters of how and when, no matter how hard we try to predict and plan. The act of picking grapes initiates an even more fundamental process. Fermentation is to wine what oxygen is to humans. It’s both essential and deadly at the same time. There is no wine without it, yet fermentation’s transformative effects can destroy as readily as they create. It’s a kind of magic. Smoke, Stinks and Magic It’s magic because you start with fresh fruit, then…...

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  • Is Culture a Cause Worth Drinking for?

    ByValerie Kathawala

    Maps illustrating German viticulture in the Middle Ages show a dense, far-reaching expanse. Vines and wine were integral to daily life, sacred and secular. Vineyards formed a distinctive cultural landscape and wine a vital cultural asset — a long, living link to the past. Today, that link is being tested. The German wine industry is contending with what some experts have called its greatest crisis since World War II. Fueling the crisis are anti-alcohol messaging, demographic shifts, rocketing costs, and the increasingly erratic tolls of the climate crisis. Worse, there’s no clear sense of where rock bottom lies. But German…...

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  • ·

    Alcohol Consumption in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland: A Long-term View

    ByKarl Storchmann

    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…...

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  • ·

    The Zotzenberg Exception

    ByBenjamin Roelfs

    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…...

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  • · · ·

    The Vanished Cellar

    ByRuth Landy

    The quiet whirr of my high-speed German train is a soothing reminder of Europe’s classy public transit I so miss in America. I’m headed south from Frankfurt towards a gentle landscape of vineyards, orchards and villages near the Rhine River and my Jewish father’s hometown. I’m much less comfortable with the muted conversations surrounding me. Like many children of Holocaust survivors, I grew up instinctively wary of the German language and all things German.  I’m on a symbolic journey alone back to Landau, the market town where my grandfather Heinrich Levy was a winemaker in the Pfalz in 1920s and ‘30s,…...

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  • · ·

    Remembering Werner Näkel

    ByMichael Schmidt

    On Saturday 13 September, Germany lost a winemaking legend when Werner Näkel passed away at the age of 72 in Dernau, his home village in the Ahr Valley and seat of the family estate, Weingut Meyer-Näkel. Werner Näkel will be remembered as a founding father of great German Pinot Noir, a wine which under the name of Spätburgunder had for a long time simply languished in the vinous doldrums of Germany, before, in the 1980s, Näkel and a handful of like-minded colleagues began to wonder why the grape, so highly revered worldwide for its red Burgundy renditions, should not be…...

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  • ·

    The Weight of a Word: On Purity and German Riesling

    ByEvan Spingarn

    Words are like viruses. They appear in culture and may lie dormant then suddenly they are everywhere, swirling about, adapting to their hosts, mutating to survive. In the wine world, this process can happen fast. "Purity," it turns out, is anything but pure.

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  • German Vintners at the Table

    ByRainer Schäfer

    Hans Ruck, 74, is fully at home in front of a stove. The German vintner, of Weingut Ruck in Iphofen, has been a serious chef for five decades, with a healthy stash of self-composed recipes — all harmonized to the wines from his estate at the edge of the Steigerwald in central Franken.  “I’ve never had a beer with a meal in my life,” Ruck claims. “The harmony between food and wine is what truly brings the enjoyment.” Once Ruck gets rolling, it’s hard to stop him. You soon feel like you’re standing at the stove with him, peeking into…...

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