Letter to My Younger Somm Self
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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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Macro of a glass of red wine on a red tablecloth against a lit window
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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
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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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A small building half destroyed by flood is in the foreground, in the background a terraced vineyard.
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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
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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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World clock on Alexanderplatz in Berlin seen from below

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
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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
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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
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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 

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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Photograph of black and white biodynamic wine bottles to symbolize the racist legacy of the man, Rudolf Steiner, behind the wines.
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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
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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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