The sun blazes. The air shimmers. On the horizon four figures throw long shadows across the dry, crumbling ground. They are headed toward a city. Doors swing open. The four step from light into dark, their throats dusty and dry. Behind a deserted bar stands a man. He pushes four full glasses over to them. Out of the glasses sloshes a wine as red as the setting sun. If you aren’t thirsty by now, you should at least be hearing the melody of a harmonica. This is how the opening scene of a revival—the Rotling revival—could begin. The four men…
Kevin Puls works in advertising and PR. His passion for Austrian wine began nearly two decades ago and he's regularly tasted the vintages of the Alpenrepublik from the Wachau to Styria. His weakness for estates that work organically and for natural wines started with Gut Oggau's 2007 vintage. He's also a regular visitor to Franken. He blogs about food, wine, and the people who make them.
We British are not the world’s most noted linguists, but that doesn’t seem to put off some of us from drinking “German-speaking” wines. That said, the market for these wines has had a rough ride at times, which makes their current increasing popularity all the more intriguing. Germany has historically boasted a well-established presence in the U.K. wine market. In the 19th– and early 20th– centuries German wines were famously on par with Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, and Port in terms of price. After the fall of Napoleon, the Rhineland and the Mosel both entered a period of prosperity, initiated by…...
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…...
In 2013, I moved to Austria and spent most of a year living in the small town of Eisenstadt. There were several cultural difficulties to surmount, not least the language. Despite my decent grasp of German, I found the Austrian dialect all but impenetrable for the first few months. And then there were the drinking customs. Because Austria had forged an impressive international reputation for elegant, high-quality wines, I expected to spend my time savoring delicious Blaufränkisch, or getting to know the top single-vineyard sites of the Wachau. But everywhere I went people just drank a mix of cheap white…...
Hans Ruck, 74, is fully at home in front of a stove. The German vintner, of Weingut Ruck in Iphofen, has been a serious chef for five decades, with a healthy stash of self-composed recipes — all harmonized to the wines from his estate at the edge of the Steigerwald in central Franken. “I’ve never had a beer with a meal in my life,” Ruck claims. “The harmony between food and wine is what truly brings the enjoyment.” Once Ruck gets rolling, it’s hard to stop him. You soon feel like you’re standing at the stove with him, peeking into…...
If there is an underdog in Germany’s largest winegrowing region, Rheinhessen, it is Scheurebe. Vinified sweet for many years, Scheurebe — pronounced SHOY-ray-beh — largely fell out of fashion. But things changed, and with the dry wine revolution in Germany over the last 20 years, Scheu is back, with — to quote Patti LaBelle — brand new ideas and a new attitude. “Scheu,” as aficionados like to call it, was bred by German viticulturist Justus Georg Scheu in 1916. Unhappy with the many highly acidic and sour Rieslings he encountered, Scheu (the man, not the grape) wanted to create a…...
