PIWI’s Big Wine Adventure

Trink Magazine | Are PIWIs or grape hybrids our viticultural future as the climate crisis makes winegrowing more, not less, challenging? By Christoph Raffelt
Trink Magazine | Are PIWIs or grape hybrids our viticultural future as the climate crisis makes winegrowing more, not less, challenging? By Christoph Raffelt
Christoph Raffelt is one of an exciting new vanguard of voices when it comes to German wine. And voices is not a euphemism here, as it is indeed his voice together with his stellar cast of winemakers and guests that come together on his monthly podcast Originalverkorkt.de; while his words appear in his online magazine of the same name. He's been on the road since 2016 with Büro für Wein & Kommunikation as a freelance journalist, copywriter and all-round wordsmith. His work has appeared in such esteemed publications as Meiningers, Weinwirtschaft, Weinwelt, Sommelier, Champagne-Magazin and Schluck.
Lunar New Year (aka Spring Festival, or Guo Nian in Mandarin) is arguably the most important holiday for people of Chinese heritage — especially in Taiwan, where I grew up. It’s been my favorite since I was a kid. Now, living in Brooklyn, I recall that a few days before the New Year every household starts to “sweep the dust” to banish bad luck, erase unhelpful habits, and create positive new ones. On the day before New Year’s Eve (a holiday we call Little New Year’s Eve), we will take down the old Spring Festival couplets and replace them with fresh verses. On New…...
The historic German wine club faces a crossroads.
German Chardonnay may be the most thrilling wine for our moment.
It is Friday night and I’m terrified. In 24 hours, a top sommelier is coming to our house for dinner. A sommelier who puts together the wine lists for a global restaurant group; a sommelier who has spent over 30 years training more somms than I’ve seen typos on a wine list; a sommelier who matches food and wine the way the rest of us match our Sunday outfits. And tomorrow, I’m responsible for the wine. My wife draws up a shopping list for the meal, blissfully unconcerned. “We’re not a restaurant,” she says, “why should she expect Michelin-starred cooking?”…...
The Pfalz is Germany’s second-largest wine region (by volume) — and perhaps its biggest surprise. The south-of-the-Alps feel of abundance and harmony stems from geographic confluence, where the sheltering Haardt mountains meet Rhine river plain. With Rheinhessen to its north and Alsace due south, it’s a wholly unexpected idyll of fig, lemon, and almond trees, pastel villas, and gentle vine-wrapped slopes as far as the eye can see. Amid this beauty, the Pfälzer live with French-inflected savoir-faire. This amplitude is all there in the wines. Within a compact 85-km north-south span, 130 villages and seemingly countless vineyards are tightly packed north to…...
Wine and hiking expert Ellen Wallace guides readers to the green heart of Alto Adige with stops at biodynamic winery Manincor and leading cooperative Kellerei Kaltern.
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