Volume 07 – The Literary Edition

September 2021

Black and white papercut of a woman walking towards a fachwerk house with 3 men sitting around a table drinking wine outside

Dear Readers,

Readability is to writing as drinkability is to wine. Conflict is tension; voice is momentum. And, of course, plot (as in vineyard) builds character. Whether it’s the linear precision of poetry, the tightly structured development of a short story, or the juicy flow of a novel, the careful selection of words and ideas is the foundation of good writing. Yet, too often, when it comes to wine writing, this is subordinate to simply conveying information.

It’s unusual for a publication to start breaking the rules before it’s even completed its first year. Yet here we are, doing what (we believe) no wine magazine has done before. In this volume, we bring you 11 pieces penned from published novelists to part-time poets. Here you’ll find personal essays, short stories, reflections, and verse spanning the range from an autumnal recognition of a greater power to a page-turning thriller that delves inside the mind of an expert wine forger.

The common theme, as ever at TRINK, is umlaut wines. But like all of our texts, creative and otherwise, it is also about so much more. Each artist has exposed a part of his or her soul to bring these pieces to light. This is, to quote one of our writers, “naked” writing.

Creative media encourage us to get outside the wine bubble, to use wine to look at life, not the other way around.

On a technical note, there are fewer external or explanatory hyperlinks than in our “regularly scheduled program” because for this issue, we are asking you, dear readers, to provide your own context, experience, and understanding to the texts as they are.

So pour yourself a glass of aged Lagrein and dig in to Liam Callanan’s short story, which features it. Or maybe you’re more in the mood for a silverwater Riesling as you read Alice Feiring’s confrontation with her “German problem”? Fall into one of many worlds in TRINK Vol. 07.

As ever, we welcome your feedback and suggestions. Drop us a line at [email protected]

Happy reading!

Paula Redes Sidore, Bad Honnef
Valerie Kathawala, New York City

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    A Remembrance of German Wines Past

    ByNeal Hulkower

    My twenty-something self left two gifts for the older man I would become: a doctorate in applied mathematics and four small, looseleaf notebooks. The degree opened many doors and reinforced my ability to do independent research, perform analyses, and document the results. The notebooks, along with labels from many of the bottles, form an archive of my first decade tasting wine.        Between 1969 and 1979, a period covering my student and early career years, I kept detailed notes on almost everything I tasted. During most of that time, I lived in Evanston, Illinois. It was dry until 1975, necessitating runs…...

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    Gemischter Satz, Mixed Messages

    ByTom Hewson

    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…...

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  • A Gut Feeling

    ByRachel Signer

    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…...

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    The Auslese Alchemist

    ByTorsten Schmidt

    People imagined him to be an alchemist. Granted, it wasn’t gold his slender hands were currently molding, rather a gleaming tinted zinc capsule, encompassing perfect angles and gracing the long slender neck of a curvaceous body. While such language might seem passé in 2021,  the characters who regularly participated in such frolics were not. Many were successful, most of them hailing from families older than the states whose passports they’d carry in their bespoke suits. Make no mistake: even here, the wealthier they were, the less attention to proper attire; and don’t let us get started on the unshaven angel…...

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  • · ·

    Die Rebe ist ein Sonnenkind

    ByAmanda Smeltz

    for S.B. with love  Die Rebe ist ein Sonnenkind. Sie liebt den Berg und haβt den Wind.So open your door already—for god’s sake, just let me in!  Nothing to fear from wild slopes—a matter of terraces and grading.Sankt Aldegund, your roses—they labor on unforgiving slate.   Vigor derives from parameters. The desert ends with water.Ritual is an amphora: it gives life room to breathe.   The hag at the door is never a hag—she’s always a secret queen. Don’t you fear that ugly mug comes bringing revelation.  The special red plum from the Mosel is imbued with healing power.If you go to the…...

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  • · ·

    Wine Meets Literature in Wiesbaden

    ByJudy Rae Merhar

    The intimate wine bar from Holger Schwedler, the size of a Texas walk-in closet, sat off a quiet pedestrian alley not far from the famous curative hot spring of Wiesbaden, the Kochbrunnen. Too small for a kitchen, the wine bar encouraged patrons to bring their own vittles, which, like the guests, included a variety...

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  • · · ·

    Hermannshöhle Hallelujah

    ByClare Tooley

    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 —…...

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  • · · ·

    How Natural Wine Made Me Confront My German Problem

    ByAlice Feiring

    For a Jewish baby boomer like me, the Holocaust was always part of my DNA. Yet, I was not the child of survivors. My Polish grandparents were safely in the United States by the 1920s. The family they left behind were mostly killed. In yeshiva, where I spent a dozen years splitting my curriculum between religious and secular studies, we were frequently subjected to footage of emaciated bodies, piled up for burning or disposal. Teachers didn’t hide the numbers tattooed on their arms. But the personal horror stories my cousins told of Polish concentration camps and ghettos were the images…...

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  • · ·

    Humility

    ByTrink Magazine

    By Rudolf Trossen The sun recedes, the summer wanes,the ripe grapes long since gifted.A chill arrives under the guise of evening wind,Long shadows stretch heavy like leadacross golden vineyards’ last light. Alone on the slope,I watch in silence. But in old caskschurns young wine,roaring with the summer’s solar might,lust and longing into the night,cheering, laughing, singing bright. I bow beforethe deity’s vigor. November 1994 From the collection Was die Reben Sagen Translated September 2021...

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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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  • ·

    Something Red

    ByLiam Callanan

    The wine stood on a high shelf, past tense very much called for, because moments after the waitress leapt for it — leapt, did not get a stool, did not ask for help, leapt because she once could — the bottle wobbled and began to fall. On earth, objects plummet at a pace of 9.8 meters per second squared, which means this bottle will reach the ground approximately two-thirds of a second after it begins its journey. But as any oenophile knows, wine makes a moment last — in this case, long enough to share exactly 15 things about this…...

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