“Die Luft war raus.” The spark had vanished; the bloom was off the rose. That was the phrase circulating in the weeks before ProWein opened, in emails, on the phone, in the particular silence that greets an appointment calendar nobody has the energy to open. Executing pre-fair rituals felt like a chore. My cowboy boots weighed heavy; my playlists, uninspired. And I wasn’t alone. Wine Paris closed its seventh edition in February with 63,541 trade visitors from 169 countries, up 21 percent in a single year. My social media feed was full of smiling faces and hand-lettered “Bonjour! Bienvenue!” signs,…
Paula Redes Sidore moves smoothly between the worlds of wine and words. In 2012, she founded Weinstory, a creative content and translation agency dedicated to transposing the world of German-speaking wine into English. TRINK is the natural extension of that pursuit. She is the German and Austrian regional specialist for jancisrobinson.com and a member of the Circle of Wine Writers. Paula has a Masters degree in fiction writing, and her work has been featured in jr.com, Sevenfifty Daily, Feinschmecker, and Heated. She lives on the northern wall of wine growing with her family in Bonn, Germany.
For Deandra Anderson, co-founder of Ebb & Flow Keg, a Frankfurt-based purveyor of organic kegged wines, the supposed “death of wine” among millennials isn’t a crisis, it’s a myth. In her view, the challenge is whether the German wine industry can meet the next generation where they already are.
My socials fill up with harvest photos at this time of year. It’s joyful and a bit primal. Nature controls the parameters of how and when, no matter how hard we try to predict and plan. The act of picking grapes initiates an even more fundamental process. Fermentation is to wine what oxygen is to humans. It’s both essential and deadly at the same time. There is no wine without it, yet fermentation’s transformative effects can destroy as readily as they create. It’s a kind of magic. Smoke, Stinks and Magic It’s magic because you start with fresh fruit, then…...
By Rudolf Trossen The sun recedes, the summer wanes,the ripe grapes long since gifted.A chill arrives under the guise of evening wind,Long shadows stretch heavy like leadacross golden vineyards’ last light. Alone on the slope,I watch in silence. But in old caskschurns young wine,roaring with the summer’s solar might,lust and longing into the night,cheering, laughing, singing bright. I bow beforethe deity’s vigor. November 1994 From the collection Was die Reben Sagen Translated September 2021...
The one piece of German wine law I thought I fully understood was the Prädikat system. First, I memorized the Prädikat levels. Later, I memorized the minimum must weights. I pushed aside my frustration that the sweetness of a wine did not correspond with Prädikat level — accepting that residual sugar wasn’t part of the system. Before visiting Germany, I never expected that the lack of consistency in sweetness for Prädikat wines would be an ongoing point of tension in the very country that came up with the system. Or, that by prioritizing origin over Oechsle degrees, Germany’s renowned wine organization Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter (VDP) would in essence dismiss the…...
A bottle of wine is a foregone harvest, a transmuted measure of the soil, sun, and rain that fed erstwhile grapes. Federweißer, however, is an immediate taste of the harvest. In 2007, I was fresh out of college and living in Mainz, Germany, a gateway to major wine regions like the Rheingau and Rheinhessen, when I first encountered the young, sweet, low-alcohol wine called Federweißer and its red counterpart, Federroter. It was late summer when wooden stalls selling Federweißer materialized throughout the pedestrianized city center. There, I had my first swigs alongside Zwiebelkuchen, a flaky onion tart with a caramelized…...
