The Wineparty
A commentary by Claude Auguste There is a scene on Instagram, on Facebook, even on TikTok. Wine is “talked about” (written about) there, but it is a way of speaking and writing that rarely has much to do with curiosity or discovery alone. What counts is the label. The more famous the bottle, the greater the attention. A 2008 Petrus? Read the full article…
(© Dourthe Freres) by Manfred Klimek I got to know Château Maucaillou when I bought 60 bottles from the 1982 and 1985 vintages at the auction of the bankrupt commodities futures trader Kernstock in Vienna. Everyone was interested only in Lafite, Latour, Margaux, Mouton, Petrus, which Kernstock also had stacked by the crate in the cellar. Nobody called out for the 60 bottles Read the full article…
by Claude Auguste Sometimes I wonder whether Germans even know what they have in wine. I write this as a South Tyrolean, as someone who stands with one foot in Italian patriotism and the other in Tyrolean-Austrian patriotism, which, admittedly, has given way to an autonomy patriotism that no longer relies on Austria. For us it is part of the Read the full article…
(by Marcel Reich-Painicki, delivered in his voice) There are texts, ladies and gentlemen, that, however inconspicuous they may appear, are a document. A document not merely of a private memory, but of an era, an attitude, indeed, of an entire culture. Such a text lies before us here. It is the story of a man – a wine enthusiast, as Read the full article…
(Editorial) There are stupid but instructive experiments. Right at the top of this discipline: drinking red wines from champagne flutes. We did it, because it began with the saying: Great wines explain themselves from every glass. Even from a champagne flute, the maximally wrong glass – slender, pointed, built for bubbles, not for tannin. An affront to everything, Read the full article…
Second and final part of the public reactions to our question about which wines were the “awakening wines” that led people to become wine enthusiasts. And here it becomes especially clear how responsible many fathers were for this: people who are now very old or dead, liberal men who wanted to pass on their pleasure in enjoyment to their children – to them it is Read the full article…
(Editorial) Three days ago, we asked our readers about those wines that turned them into wine enthusiasts. And we received more responses than expected (121). This is a powerful sign of life from a community now wrongly declared dead. Here is the first batch of reactions, anonymised, but otherwise in the posters’ exact words. A second batch will come tomorrow. And Read the full article…
(Editorial) The wave is here. It does not break thunderously over the mainland of the wine world like a tsunami; it rolls in smoothly, almost inconspicuously. Less alcohol, more fun in the glass – perhaps that one extra glass that the hospitality industry is so urgently lacking. Not as an act of penance, but as an act of conviction. Two Sauvignon blancs show today how eleven per cent Read the full article…
by Derfnam Kemilk There are thresholds in life, and of the liver, that we only recognise once we crossed them long ago. No bang when crossing them, no fanfare when opening the door – just that one special moment in which something switches inside you and makes it clear: a new era is beginning now, perhaps even a new life. A new Read the full article…
(Empty containers? Please hand them in at https://drink.winearty.wine) by Claude Auguste Sometimes, days after the evening I thought was over, I return to the scene of the action. The glass is still in the kitchen, not washed, not polished, not put away. Beside it, the bottle, empty. Or almost empty. I lift it, tilt it, look Read the full article…
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