The Wineparty
Today we are talking briefly and succinctly about the great wines of the Alsatian estate Domaine Trimbach. And briefly and succinctly about Alsace itself, because Alsace has gone through a strange phase in recent years: with the exception of a handful of winegrowers, the region fell into a kind of long winter sleep for twenty years, while in other areas Read the full article…
Woke and identity politics. What do the two have in common with viticulture? Little. The only connection, and it is nevertheless not insignificant, is that a Jacobin social-media movement began, ten years ago, to have a natural-wine Taliban subject winegrowers who practised conventional viticulture to shitstorms that had never before occurred in viticulture in their radicalism. And also Read the full article…
Tap, tap, tap: my fingers hammer on the tabletop. At least, being masters of percussion, they drum out a rhythm. Tap, tap, tap, taperapp, da tapp: I am waiting for a parcel from Portugal that should have been here with me in Berlin long ago, so that I can get my hands on the second bottle selection from that Portuguese estate in the Alentejo Read the full article…
I wake up. I am in Franconia. In the Franconian wine-growing region, which nobody apart from the Franconians themselves really knows very well; this is because the Franconians mainly drink their own wines. Even renowned estates here have up to seventy per cent private customers and do not need merchants to bring their wines to the people. I wake Read the full article…
Wine and politics. There are communicating vessels here that do not have to be made of glass. Not infrequently over the last thirty years, the purchase or founding of an estate has had political motives. Throughout all those centuries – except for the period of secularisation, when, for example, the bishoprics’ vineyards were also taken away from them on the Moselle, in order to place them at the service of the state Read the full article…
There is an old story. It lasted for several centuries and goes like this: The best wines in the world are made in France, Germany and Hungary. But then came the twentieth century and the murderous ideologies. German wine exports, at that time essential and important for the wine-growing regions of the Rheingau, Moselle and Saar, had already been politically for a long time before 1945 Read the full article…
Burgundy has always been difficult terrain, requiring a precise expertise like no other wine region. Because in Burgundy you can get very, very good stuff for comparatively little money (if you know where). And for a lot of money, some rubbish obscured by tradition – although this has become less and less common over the last 20 years. Burgundy, quite clearly Read the full article…
Bolgheri: This world-famous wine region, with its reputation, important to Italian wine-growing in terms of image and image-building, is also a wine-growing area of Tuscany: together with Piedmont, the most important wine-growing region of the most beautiful peninsula in Europe. Yet Bolgheri, this DOC of Tuscany, which, like the whole of the Maremma, lies by the sea, only became known at the end of the 1970s, so it has, Read the full article…
Simon Schubert is Viennese, young, and a wine waiter experienced in top-class and Michelin-starred gastronomy. I write wine waiter rather than sommelier because Schubert, together with the Graz chef Julian Lechner, has revived the old Viennese Beisl “Reznicek”. As a Beisl, Viennese for pub, with its ingredients, preparation and composition now renovated and brought into culinary modernity Read the full article…
Hungary, that’s a tricky matter. Can you travel to the country of the dictator Orban? Yes! You should. To celebrate places like a38. It is also a story about our uncertain and strange state of aggregation. Let’s take Budapest. Or Hungary as a whole. What do we know? In Hungary, the former young liberal Viktor Orban rules Read the full article…
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