The Wineparty
(Editorial team, Manfred Klimek) It lies there harmlessly, this cool blue stick that rejects all the romance of enjoyment: technically sleek, slightly futuristic, a small device without pathos. Nothing about it reveals that for an entire generation it has become what red wine was for us: the opener to the evening, the decelerator, the small private transition from day to night. Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek) Weekends that have an effect. Already in the way I wanted them to and did not want them to. Weekends that, while they are happening, already let you know that a bill will be presented at the end. Mine arrived on Monday. With force. But let us begin at the beginning, that is, at the end of the day before the day before yesterday: late on Saturday evening, Berlin, a loose, slightly frayed constellation of two people Read the full article…
(Editorial team) Rankings, lists, leading stars – the wine world loves orientation. Yet this rarely comes from a direction from which one can gain anything new. The “World’s 50 Best Vineyards”, discussed here yesterday, celebrate architecture, viewpoints, visitor car parks and occasionally wine. Michelin, on the other hand – for decades the world’s most reliable and ultimately only system for culinary excellence – is now Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek / WELT am SONNTAG) Rankings rule the world – and not only since elections came into existence or since the rock and pop music charts, which began in the 1950s, started rating pop culture. Rankings are annoying, but they make the search for something exceptional easier. Exceptional wine estates, for example. And for that there has been, since 2020, Read the full article…
( Klimek, Editorial team, Mixology-Base) It seems almost like a joke played by time: while Gen Z speaks with astonishing composure about “low alc”, “big fruit” and “easy drinking”, while sparkling wines (apparently still popular with Gen Z) and, to a lesser extent, proxies conquer the bedrooms of the urban republic, it is precisely that wine category which has embodied all this for Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek – following a report by Der Standard from Vienna) It is an event of a kind that Austria, the wine country, probably has not seen since 1985. Back then, the glycol scandal shook the entire sector; the state intervened with associations, cleared up, controlled and regulated with maximum innovation – successfully, as we all know. Forty years later, Read the full article…
(Claude Auguste / Manfred Klimek) Emmanuel Reynaud is dead. 61 years old. So, no age at all. He was the winemaker who did not modernise the Rhône, as many others did, but returned its memory to it – and who was revered for that like a hermit prophet. With his death, not only a winemaker disappears, but a style, a worldview, Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek / WELT am SONNTAG) The wine world is bringing its second year of sales crisis to an end, a crisis that is proving particularly difficult for red-wine growers, because the everyday red wine consumed as a matter of course by millions for years has been completely rejected by Generation Z and millennials. Yet the crisis in winegrowing is not happening everywhere: quite the opposite, Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek) There are also wineries that need no revolution in the current crisis, because their stability is already an expression of revolutionary intelligence. Max Ferdinand Richter in Mülheim on the Moselle is one of these rare exceptional estates. A house that has known what it is doing for centuries – and therefore also in times of the global wine crisis Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek, editorial team) There are maps that tell us more about a country’s culture than about its landscapes. The map of alcohol dependency in Germany (source: Barmer), which has been circulating for several days, belongs exactly in this category. It shows – broadly simplified – that precisely those regions in which winegrowing has been part of everyday life and culture for centuries have the lowest Read the full article…
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