Whether you’re dropping into town for the bacchanalia that is Rieslingfeier or you’re a native New Yorker curious to get a taste of the latest and greatest in German and Austrian wines, here’s your hit list of bars and restaurants that make NYC the country’s best (if priciest) city to drink auf Deutsch. Updated November 2025 to remove Koloman, which has closed. G = German focus A = Austrian focus Noreetuh (G) Manager and co-owner Jin Ahn has turned this decade-old Lower East Side Hawaiian spot into the city’s ultimate insider Riesling hangout. Ahn’s exceptionally well-informed list is divided into Rieslings “25…
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).
It is a landscape rife with charms and challenges: From their perch atop the Oberrotweiler Eichberg, on a long-dormant volcano that rises to 310 meters, Johannes Landerer and Jakob Moise can enjoy some of the finest views over the Kaiserstuhl and sprawling Rhine Basin in Baden. The early morning sun is quickly rising, but the Kaiserstuhl, normally a place of striking warmth, has seen an unusual amount of precipitation in the summer of 2024, leaving it greener than at any time in recent memory. But if this pair of Kaiserstuhl winegrowers agree on anything, it’s that this situation is likely…...
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…...
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…...
“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…...
We’ll come right out and say it: Franken (Franconia) is Germany’s most underrated region. If you still think of it as the source of wan wines poured from squat flagons and drunk mostly at home, we’re here to let you in on a secret: there has never been a more exciting time for this corner of northern Bavaria, where wine, not beer, rules the day. The region sits just below the 50th parallel and at the cool, eastern edge of Germany’s wine core. It’s a perilous position for viticulture. As decades of frost-crimped and extreme-heat-affected vintages attest, its starkly continental…...
