I’ve read about as widely on Swiss wines as an Anglophone can: the relevant chapters of Jason Wilson’s delicious Godforsaken Grapes. The late Sue Style’s charming, informative Landscape of Swiss Wine. Ellen Wallace’s colorful Vineglorious. Dennis Lapuyade’s expert blog ArtisanSwiss. Stephan Reinhardt’s candid, convincing coverage in the Wine Advocate. But it is Dr. José Vouillamoz’s Swiss Grapes: History and Origin that has done the most to help me wrap my head around the marvelously confounding world of Swiss wines. The English edition, published in 2019 (two years after the original French), is a startlingly accessible and appealingly personal exploration of the trove…
Valerie Kathawala specializes in the wines of Germany, Austria, South Tyrol, and Switzerland, as well as those closer to her home in New York City. Her work appears in the pages of Noble Rot, Full Pour, SevenFifty Daily and a number of other tolerant publications.
By traditional measures, my first year of college was a waste. I spent a lot of it playing cards with a gang of liberal theologians at a Jesuit university in California. Towering above the group was our guru, the truest Renaissance man I’ve ever met — priest, medieval scholar, professional clown, and director of his own traveling circus. He spent most of each year wandering from one Catholic university to another, plying his gift for persuasion. But he always made time for cards when he was in town. When not lobbying for Christ, he was partial to Texas Hold ’em,…...
One of the biggest trends in wine over the past two decades has been an increased interest in expressing origin. Organizations like the Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter (VDP) in Germany and the Österreichische Traditionsweingüter (ÖTW) in Austria have both shaped and surfed this wave to the extent that their vineyard classifications — in both cases private initiatives — are now being codified into national law. Switzerland has no comparable organization. The one that comes closest, Mémoire des Vins Suisses, was founded more than 30 years ago, with the aim of proving that Swiss wines can age. Does this mean Swiss wines…...
A new wave of vignerons is gathering strength in Swiss wineries. They are young, eclectic, and often organic or biodynamic in their work. Most are keenly focused on sustainability and trying disease-resistant grapes. Thirty of them, who go by JSNW (Junge Schweiz Neue Winzer, or Young Switzerland New Vignerons), offer a snapshot of this generation, all under age 40. The association was created in 2010 in Zurich to put “sharing” in boldface: of experience and ideas, but most of all of their wines and feedback, at regular meetups. The group has expanded to include vignerons from the French- and Italian-speaking…...
In a Swiss park, a footpath leads from Leuk, a village straddling the Rhone, up to Varen, which is perched on a cliff. The trail is steep and strewn with pebbles in early summer. But three lightfooted young people with small backpacks move at a steady pace, in the way the Swiss tend to do when they grow up hiking in the Alps. The trio checks a list of clues they picked up at the Leuk tourism office. This treasure hunt will take them along groomed trails for eight hours (several pauses included) to wineries within the extraordinary Pfyn Nature…...
It would be easy to dismiss what happens in the tiny winegrowing country of Switzerland as an inconsequential alpine eddy, an iridescent surge in the great river of wine. After all, the nation boasts a mere 15,000 hectares of vines, ranking it only 132nd worldwide in terms of area. But do so at your own peril. After all, the Rhine itself begins in this country, high in the hills of Graubünden some 120 km due south of Switzerland’s capital city. In that spot, it is little more than a spring-fed stream off Lake Toma. “To me, the Rhine looks very…...
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.
