What does one drink, when one doesn’t drink? Isabella Steiner opts for an oat milk latte. On the sun-kissed, hipster corner of Berlin known as Paul-Lincke-Ufer, a line for almond croissants forms from a crowd that looks more house party than home office. Steiner takes her spot, her poodle-mix by her side. Steiner and her business partner, Katja Kauf, manage Nüchtern Berlin, a platform for “Sober Culture — Made in Germany.” It appears to tap into something even deeper than the global wellness trend. “The selection of non-alcoholic alternatives [in Germany] rose sharply in 2020,” says 32-year-old Steiner. “This year they…
Eva Biringer, born in southern Germany, studied art history and theater studies. She writes about food, travel, and feminism for publications like Zeit, Zeit Online, Welt, Feinschmecker, and many more. She currently lives in Berlin.
While artists throughout the ages have longed to catch time in a bottle, it is winemakers who have indeed come closest to achieving this noblest of goals. A fine wine captures not just a single moment, but the span of a vintage, a lifetime, of eons of geology. A liquid suspension of sugar, acids, ethanol, tannins, phenolics, and chemical compounds can become a remarkable crucible of climate, soil, and vision. Yet unlike many other artistic disciplines, there is no fixed point at which the winemaker can lay down his pen or her brush and declare the bottle finished. There are certainly…...
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…...
“Free your mind and the rest will follow.” Coming from one of the co-owners of Germany’s oldest wine trading houses, one might suspect a quote from Goethe, Schiller, or Nietzsche. It’s actually the American R&B/pop group, En Vogue. And that makes for a jarring, if fitting, introduction to my conversation with these stewards of tradition in German wine that look back to 1786 in Worms as easily as they look ahead to 2019 Organic Madonna. P.J. Valckenberg has the history and the pedigree, no question. Its customers have included the Swedish royal family and Charles Dickens. In addition to a truly impressive portfolio…...
