The Wineparty
(Nikolaus Skene / Photo: CNN / Animation: Runwayml) What appears in the digital feeds of Facebook, LinkedIn or X is more than an exchange of opinions. It is a seismogram of collective sentiments. When you read social media across time zones, you quickly realise: the content differs less in its subjects than in the attitude with which Read the full article…
(Editorial / Claude Auguste / Manfred Klimek / Photo: Lenzmark, Runwayml) This project could also have gone wrong. It would not have been the first project with great ambitions to fail in the wine world – for whatever reason. Two winegrowers, almost three decades apart in age, two very different biographies, and an ambition that wants nothing less than Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek / Editorial / animated photo: Weingut & Runwayml) I no longer remember exactly what year it was. The late nineties, perhaps the very early 2000s. I only know that at the time I was fairly convinced that German red wine was, at best, a perhaps well-intentioned misunderstanding. Something one tried out of politeness, but not out of Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek / Mixology) We instinctively hesitate at this question. Too many superlatives, too many reflexive counterarguments, too many good wines that could likewise lay claim to it. And yet this is precisely the question that imposes itself when you drink Knipser’s Cuvée Marsannier – not out of national exuberance, but out of objective astonishment. For this wine presents Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek) I only wanted to buy Bilomilk when I suddenly found myself standing in front of a small wooden crate: a magnum bottle of Faustino Rivero Ulecia Reserva 2019, attractively and presentably packaged – and all for €9.90 at the Netto discount supermarket. A moment of astonishment, followed by a vigorous furrowing of the brow and then: an inner nod. For this bottle tells us a great deal Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek) There are winemakers whom we describe through their wines. And then there are those few with whom we eventually realise that we are actually describing a person who makes wine. Anton Bauer belonged to this second, rarer category. With his death, the Wagram loses not only one of its most important protagonists, but also an unflinching individualist who Read the full article…
(Claude Auguste / Editorial team / animated photo: Weingut & Runwaylm) It is worth looking at Markus Molitor from the perspective that almost always gets lost in the public discourse about this winemaker, who has received less attention in recent years. Not the Riesling myth in Molitor’s now almost impossible-to-survey Riesling universe, but the “other” wines. They are Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek / WELT am SONNTAG / editorially revised / revised photos: Runwayml) Restraint in consumption, price pressure, younger generations drinking less wine, winemakers expected to prepare for tougher times – these sentences have by now become part of the industry’s background noise. They are repeated, varied and intensified. And they are not wrong. But neither are they the Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek, Editorial team) 1. More lightweight bottles. More used containers. Winemakers around the world have pretended for too long that glass is neutral and irrelevant. It is not. Weight is CO₂, prestige is emissions. Anyone who still believes that heavy bottles stand for quality has neither done the sums nor listened. 2026 should be the year in which lightweight bottles and reused Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek / Photo of Uwe Schiefer by Andreas Durst) It begins with a number. 98. Black on white, beneath a wine unlike any previously seen in Austria: 98 Parker points for the Blaufränkisch “Ried Spitzerberg – Obere Spitzer”. The highest rating ever awarded to an Austrian Blaufränkisch. Anyone who sees the value solely as Read the full article…
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