Just in time for the tropical temperatures of summer 2026, I made myself Som Tam Thai (ส้มตำ), a Thai papaya salad. At 30°C (86°F) or above, few of us have much of an appetite. But you have to eat something eventually. With no green papaya on hand, kohlrabi cut a surprisingly good figure. And the bold, intensely seasoned dressing did the rest. So, what to drink with it? They recommend you should consume an extra two liters of fluid at these temperatures, and who am I to argue? Off to the wine cellar to find a good bottle. Oddly, the…
Sebastian Bordthäuser’s original dream was to be a rockstar. But between solos and concerts, he developed a hunger and thirst for good food and wine — and the people and stories behind them. And so trading his guitar for books, he began studying German and English literature. He spent more than a decade working in gastronomy before setting out as a freelance sommelier, author, and journalist. His work appears regularly in many of Germany's top publications, including Effilee, Welt am Sonntag, Der Feinschmecker, and Meiningers Sommelier-Magazin. Wine, food, cooking and travel remain the heart of his matter.
It was the first hour of my first shift, and of course, it was a “Manhattan Cocktail.” I pictured the flashcards heavy in my pocket from the cram-session the night before: Rye whisky, sweet Vermouth, and bitters. Don’t forget the cherry. To that point, I had known Vermouth as little more than a grandmother’s drink, the bottle dying a slow oxidative death in wood-paneled curios around the world. So after making the guest’s request, and in the name of job experience, I downed the remaining jigger of inexperienced overpour. Later, I would comment to the bar manager that it tasted a…...
The dark wit of Berlin. Dangerously low water levels in the Rhine River. Black bread. Germany does trocken like few others. And then there’s the wine. Despite its reputation as the land of Blue Nun, more than 60 percent of the wines made in Germany are dry. And within that 60 percent, there are discernible levels of dry, drier, and driest. So dry, in fact, that there’s a strangely specific word for it. (Of course there’s a word. It’s Germany. There’s always a word.) Furztrocken. Fart Dry. Literally. As difficult to grasp as I find a term like feinherb, it’s Kinderspiel when compared to furztrocken. Then again, mindset…...
For a Jewish baby boomer like me, the Holocaust was always part of my DNA. Yet, I was not the child of survivors. My Polish grandparents were safely in the United States by the 1920s. The family they left behind were mostly killed. In yeshiva, where I spent a dozen years splitting my curriculum between religious and secular studies, we were frequently subjected to footage of emaciated bodies, piled up for burning or disposal. Teachers didn’t hide the numbers tattooed on their arms. But the personal horror stories my cousins told of Polish concentration camps and ghettos were the images…...
