A fresh crop of Masters of Wine was announced late last month: Ten individuals who have grasped the holy grail of wine education. Among them is Moritz Nikolaus Lüke of Bonn — the tenth German to achieve the distinction. He joins an elite crew who have earned the title by passing legendarily rigorous blind tasting examinations and writing a series of theory papers as well as a research-based thesis. TRINK caught up with Lüke to find out what the experience was like, learn about his Covid-driven research paper — and get an answer to the question we’re all naturally most curious about: what he drank…
Valerie Kathawala specializes in the wines of Germany and Austria. Her work appears in the pages of regularly in Noble Rot and SevenFifty Daily. She is the author of the "German Wine Scholar" (2025).
Terry Theise. Until quite recently, I would have written “an importer of German and Austrian wine who needs no introduction.” But over the past year, the axis of wine, not to mention the world, has shifted. A slew of new wine lovers might just need to be brought up to speed on this pioneering champion of “umlaut-bearing wines” (a term Theise coined long before we or anyone else). Theise fell for German wine and wine culture while living in Munich in his 20s. When he returned to the U.S. in the early 1980s, he brought this zeal back with him. He…...
If you ask a person from Taiwan to choose the 10 dishes that best represent his or her cuisine, Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup is inevitably on the list. More than a beloved national dish, the soup has become something of an obsession — like pizza to New Yorkers. Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup was created by soldiers who retreated with the Nationalist government from mainland China to Taiwan in the 1950s. For political reasons, they were banned from returning to their hometowns. Missing both family and familiar cuisine, the soldiers used local ingredients to create a dish that evoked the flavors…...
Liora Levi, high-profile sommelier, television personality, and president of ASI Norwegian Sommelier Association, came late to wine. In its own odd way, that only bolsters her bona fides as a daughter of the north. The countries to the north of the umlaut region can generally be viewed as latecomers to the joys of wine, and white wine in particular. But times change, and opinion makers like Levi have now helped the Nordics become prime drivers of the Riesling Revolution. It is a boom time for whites under the northern lights. As Levi explains in an interview with TRINK, the delayed…...
Words are like viruses. They appear in culture and may lie dormant then suddenly they are everywhere, swirling about, adapting to their hosts, mutating to survive. In the wine world, this process can happen fast. "Purity," it turns out, is anything but pure.
My twenty-something self left two gifts for the older man I would become: a doctorate in applied mathematics and four small, looseleaf notebooks. The degree opened many doors and reinforced my ability to do independent research, perform analyses, and document the results. The notebooks, along with labels from many of the bottles, form an archive of my first decade tasting wine. Between 1969 and 1979, a period covering my student and early career years, I kept detailed notes on almost everything I tasted. During most of that time, I lived in Evanston, Illinois. It was dry until 1975, necessitating runs…...
“When I started drinking wine, wine was French,” my father told me recently over dinner at Scheepskameel, a Dutch restaurant known for its excellent wine menu. He never spends more than 10 euro on a bottle, and rarely drinks white, but that evening he unexpectedly admitted, he preferred our glass of German Riesling to our bottle of red Bordeaux. A few days later, I hosted a Riesling tasting for some serious wine friends. They have accounts with posh traders and their own cellars, which are typically stocked with Burgundies and Bordeaux. They were impressed. But, I wondered, would they buy…...
