Trink Magazine Articles

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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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    Playing Bond, James Bond, at a Swiss Wine Hotel

    ByEllen Wallace

    ​The lure of 007 and having bubbles at their fingertips in the Bollinger Suite pulls some people into Erlinsbach, in northern Switzerland, for a night or two of intrigue. Others fantasize about being lulled to sleep surrounded by gently aging (shhhh) vintage Burgundies in the Wine Cellar Suite. For the rest of us, it’s a simpler dream of a night that opens with great food and a hard-to-find bottle of a Swiss vintage wine. Albi von Felten was ahead of his time when he bought the Landhotel Hirschen from his parents 22 years ago. He and his wife Silvana are gratified to…...

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    Flood Comes for the Ahr and Its Winemakers

    ByValerie Kathawala

    From last Wednesday night into Thursday morning, 148 liters/square meter of rain fell on the Ahr. In a normal July, the region gets about 80 liters/square meter — in the entire month. This immense volume of precipitation in such a short span dilated creeks into torrents. Torrents rose and swiftly emptied into the Ahr itself, which morphed into an implacable, surging mass of water. As we’ve now all seen on the news, the river ripped through the villages that line its banks — Ahrweiler, Dernau, Mayschoss will be names familiar to German wine lovers — shocking everyone from the authorities charged…...

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    Beethoven as Bacchus, Part II

    ByRon Merlino

    In the first movement of this piece, we looked at the origins of Ludwig van Beethoven’s interest in wine and the critical role this played in shaping the composer’s musical career. Here, we trace his path through Vienna’s living landscape, to find multiple points of intersection between past and present in his music and in some of the city’s defining wines. We then head south to the Austrian spa region of Baden, where Beethoven drank, and composed, masterpieces. As we will find, his music comes more vividly to life when appreciated within the context of the vines and landscapes in which it was written…...

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  • Berlin-Style Sustainability

    ByLiv Fleischhacker

    Over the last decade, Berlin has established itself as a wine city. No small feat, since little quality wine is made within a five-hour driving radius. But in the early 2010s the natural wine movement brought in “small plates and natural wine” bistros and more and more distributors — independent wine stores who both import and buy wines and then sell them to both restaurants and consumers alike — are basing themselves here. The RAW wine fair made Berlin its Central European hub back in 2015. Before March 2020, business was good.  Then came Covid.  Putting the Neighbor back in Neighborhood at…...

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    Terroir Trocken

    ByStuart Pigott

    The photos that German astronaut Alexander Gerst sent back from the International Space Station during summer 2018 were deeply shocking: Germany was no longer green, but brown. The only visible green in the entirety of many of the wine regions was in fact the vines.  RIP cool climate? While it was common knowledge that the summer of 2018 had been exceptionally warm, few people realize it was also the warmest ever recorded. The Average Growing Season Temperature (AVGST) registered at Geisenheim/Rheingau in 2018 was 17.8° Celsius, or 0.9° (1.6° on the Fahrenheit scale) above the previous record year, 1947. However, most were…...

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    Get to Know German-Speaking Orange Wines

    ByValerie Kathawala

    Skin-contact white wines may have their revolutionary roots in Georgia, Slovenia, and Friuli,  but the umlaut zone also stakes a strong claim for orange expressions.  Austria was an early and highly successful adopter (think Tschida and Tscheppe, Muster and Meinklang). For this, thank geographic proximity, shared traditions, a former empire’s worth of fascinating white varieties, and the remarkable open-mindedness of producers, especially in Styria and Burgenland. Germany came later to the game. The country has been slower to embrace natural and experimental styles generally and its signature variety, Riesling, requires an exceptionally deft hand to succeed in skin-fermented form. However, German…...

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    Explore Pfyn: A Swiss Wine Nature Park

    ByEllen Wallace

    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…...

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  • Non-vintage Is Timeless 

    ByNils Kevin Puls

    ​ Was everything really better in the past? Well, people were at least more patient. Vaccines were developed over the course of years. Under Communism in eastern Germany it could take up to a decade to get a car. OK, bad examples. But even food and drink were given more time. Today, fermentation and preservation are back on the front burner in kitchens — and in cellars, too.  Vintners typically work within the natural rhythms of the year, giving their wines time in cask or tank until just before the next harvest. But some are stepping deeper into the past…...

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    Opinion: Reconciling the Racism of Rudolf Steiner

    ByLauren Johnson-Wünscher

    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.

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    The Greatness of Small

    ByStephen Bitterolf

    Truth be told, I relish the fact that the phrase “kabinett trocken” feels like an oxymoron to so many people. For all reasonable drinkers who have come to reflexively associate the word “Kabinett” with an off-dry Riesling, the fact that a Kabinett can be both 1) dry and 2) not Riesling is jarring. An oxymoron right up there with “freezer burn,” “peacekeeper missile,” and “airline food.”  Yet, that’s only one part of a much larger obsession…er, story. Kabinett trocken reduces the grandest terroir to its most essential, most fundamental, most tangible, and most immediate. A few exceptional Kabinett trockens have been among…...

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  • Veritable Vernatsch in Alto Adige

    BySimon Staffler

    For centuries, the grape variety Vernatsch has been both flagship and albatross around the neck of Italy’s northern region of Alto Adige-Südtirol. In this final installment of his three-part series, Simon Staffler looks closely at DOC Alto Adige and posits the question: Why Vernatsch? “Vernatsch is unique in the world,” says Martin Pollinger, winemaker at Weingut Eichenstein. The estate is located 400 meters above the city of Meran, and Pollinger is part of a new generation of winegrowers and winemakers who are finding their way back to South Tyrol’s flagship variety. Surrounded by vines, Meran makes up the westward start of the…...

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    Eat + TRINK | Where Silvaner Meets the Sea

    ByJérôme Hainz

    Confession time: Which wine and food pairings make your eyes roll faster than a teenager’s? Champagne and strawberries? Pizza and Lambrusco? Muscadet and oysters?  In southern Germany, Silvaner and white asparagus are regional marketing 101. Silvaner has been praised and prized as a pairing for the spring stalk to such an extent that grocers will double their inventories of cheap Silvaner and stack it by the case in the vegetable section. And while the fastest way to get a screenful of Internet ill-will slung in your direction is to suggest the pairing to a German wine group, it is true…...

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    Kabinett Trocken: Oxymoron or Opportunity?

    ByDavid Schildknecht

    It’s an unfortunate paradox: the very climatic conditions that leave us thirsting for lightweight, refreshing and soul-satisfying dry wines render these hard to achieve. Yet, rather than leading the way in surmounting this viticultural challenge, Germany’s Riesling establishment routinely throws up roadblocks. That’s a crying shame.  THE CURIOSITY OF “KABINETT” To understand what’s become of “Kabinett trocken,” we must first retrace the steps leading to “Kabinett.” “Cabinet,” as a term applied to German Riesling, dates to 18th-century Rheingau, a derivative of “Cabinetstück” (alternatively, “Kabinet[t]stück”), in use for diverse objects worth displaying in a cabinet of curiosities or, by extension, worthy literary and…...

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    12 Questions for Terry Theise

    ByValerie Kathawala

    Terry Theise. Until quite recently, I would have written “an importer of German and Austrian wine who needs no introduction.”  But over the past year, the axis of wine, not to mention the world, has shifted. A slew of new wine lovers might just need to be brought up to speed on this pioneering champion of “umlaut-bearing wines” (a term Theise coined long before we or anyone else). Theise fell for German wine and wine culture while living in Munich in his 20s. When he returned to the U.S. in the early 1980s, he brought this zeal back with him. He…...

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    ​3 Can’t-Miss Wines from Carnuntum​

    ByDaniela Dejnega

    ​The little wine region of Carnuntum sits east of Vienna and south of the Danube. With a mere 900 hectares under vine, it distinguishes itself through an awareness of regionality developed early on. In 1992, when Austria was still largely classifying its wines by variety rather than origin, Carnuntum implemented the idea of a regionally typical red wine with the name Rubin Carnuntum. But reaching DAC origin status – oriented to the regional, village, single-vineyard wine concept – was still a long road away. This only took effect in 2019 and today Zweigelt Rubin Carnuntum is a regional wine. Although white…...

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  • Markus Ruch

    ByDaniel Schönberger

    Swiss wines remain rare on the international wine scene. But a new generation of talent committed to uncompromising work and meaningfully sustainable viticulture is slowly changing this.  Markus Ruch has been cultivating his own vineyards in the Klettgau, part of Switzerland’s northernmost canton, since 2007. He is widely credited with producing the first Swiss natural wines and leads the movement today. His Pinot Noirs and orange Amphore are served from NOMA in Copenhagen to Konstantin Filippou in Vienna. Ruch’s wines are classy. With a twist. For those less familiar with Swiss geography, the canton of Schaffhausen is situated north of…...

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