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…
Paula Redes Sidore moves smoothly between the worlds of wine and words. In 2012, she founded Weinstory, a creative content and translation agency dedicated to transposing the world of German-speaking wine into English. TRINK is the natural extension of that pursuit. She is the German and Austrian regional specialist for jancisrobinson.com and a member of the Circle of Wine Writers. Paula has a Masters degree in fiction writing, and her work has been featured in jr.com, Sevenfifty Daily, Feinschmecker, and Heated. She lives on the northern wall of wine growing with her family in Bonn, Germany.
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…...
Pinot Noir from Switzerland? Gantenbein! Donatsch! Hardly another country exists whose reputation among international wine lovers for producing quality wines from this variety boils down to just two names. It’s high time that other Swiss producers get some of that spotlight – and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t come from the Canton of Zürich. Deutschschweiz, the sizable swath of eastern Switzerland that is German-speaking, is Pinot Noir land. Reportedly, the vine was introduced to Graubünden in 1631 by the Duke of Rohan, as a gift to local farmers, to win them over as mercenaries during the 30 Years War…....
Weingut Blankenhorn It wasn’t love at first sight for Martin and Yvonne Männer of Weingut Blankenhorn in Schliengen. On a trip to Switzerland in spring 2015, they were initially disappointed by the Gutedel (a.k.a. Chasselas) they found there. Or, to be more precise: by how the vintners they encountered vinified it. But when they ordered a bottle of 18-year-old Chasselas Médinette Dézalay Grand Cru from Domaine Louis Bovard on their last night in Geneva, at the Michelin-starred Le Chat-Botté, they realized they had found the key to making a multifaceted, indeed divine Gutedel. Ever since, Langlebigkeit, or longevity, has been part of Weingut Blankenhorn’s DNA. Their wines tell a…...
From last Wednesday night into Thursday morning, 148 liters/square meter of rain fell on the Ahr. In a normal July, the region gets about 80 liters/square meter — in the entire month. This immense volume of precipitation in such a short span dilated creeks into torrents. Torrents rose and swiftly emptied into the Ahr itself, which morphed into an implacable, surging mass of water. As we’ve now all seen on the news, the river ripped through the villages that line its banks — Ahrweiler, Dernau, Mayschoss will be names familiar to German wine lovers — shocking everyone from the authorities charged…...
At a time when some Mosel producers are shedding vineyards like snakeskins, Ernst “Erni” Loosen, who already has 90 hectares at his disposal, is trying on a new one. A few years ago, a cousin of Loosen’s called to say he was selling a parcel. Lammertslay, a steep, mid-slope, two-and-a-half-hectare plot within the Wehlener Sonnenuhr, is hallowed ground for Riesling. The vines were largely wurzelecht (ungrafted), planted around 1895 in pure blue slate soil on a south-facing slope. Loosen was sold. The parcel had belonged to his great-grandfather, Dr. Zacharias Bergweiler-Prüm. Loosen saw it as a rare chance to honor…...
