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,…
Based in San Francisco, Ruth Landy is a writer and second-generation Holocaust survivor. Drawing on a career in documentary filmmaking and global advocacy for WHO and UNICEF, her work has been published in The Guardian and Whetstone magazine. Ruth is currently writing a memoir about her Holocaust inheritance, exploring the powerful role of her family’s food and wine heritage in transmitting memory and strengthening bonds.
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.
Archetype, a Portland, Oregon-based import start-up, is focused on Alpine wines. They are refining consumer's understanding of the category and building community near and far.
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 —…...
Trink Magazine | That viticulture is still possible in Germany's Saale-Unstrut in an age of climate crisis is due to the microclimate of the valleys and the perseverance of its growers.
