Classic German Cooking, Luisa Weiss, photo credit: Valerie Kathawala
“Germans are particularly nostalgic about the food of their grandmothers,” writes Luisa Weiss, furnishing a sturdy thesis for her handsome, welcoming new cookbook. Weiss, whom you may — should — know, is a food writer. She was born, partly raised, and now lives full-time in Berlin. She blogged about food for more than a decade from New York as The Wednesday Chef, then moved to Germany. There she wrote her way deeper into the German culinary world: the food-driven memoir My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story with Recipes (2012) and Classic German Baking (2016). She now writes a Substack organized around…
Valerie Kathawala specializes in the wines of Germany, Austria, South Tyrol, and Switzerland, as well as those closer to her home in New York City. Her work appears in the pages of Noble Rot, Full Pour, SevenFifty Daily and a number of other tolerant publications.
Those who go on the hunt for modern Württemberg may be surprised by what they find on the journey. In this stretch of southern Germany, many things work differently. Swabians have their own take on cool. Here you’ll meet a grower from the hip-hop scene who has the region’s traditional wine mug inked as a tattoo. You’ll bump into a start-up winery launched with crowdfunding. And you’ll land at the door of one of Germany’s hippest growers, 68-year-old Helmut Dolde of Linsenhofen. DOLDE Dolde wears a walrus mustache and, on the day of my visit, a cap someone gave him that says “Wine in…...
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.
It is Friday night and I’m terrified. In 24 hours, a top sommelier is coming to our house for dinner. A sommelier who puts together the wine lists for a global restaurant group; a sommelier who has spent over 30 years training more somms than I’ve seen typos on a wine list; a sommelier who matches food and wine the way the rest of us match our Sunday outfits. And tomorrow, I’m responsible for the wine. My wife draws up a shopping list for the meal, blissfully unconcerned. “We’re not a restaurant,” she says, “why should she expect Michelin-starred cooking?”…...
The future of the Mosel Apollo butterfly and its habitat of the Mosel terraces are endangered. Can a solution be found that allows both to continue to coexist?
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…...
