Wine Fictions

 While listening to the podcast "Auf einem Glas"  I came to a moment when Gerhard Retter , at the end of a fascinating interview says "Trinken bildet, saufen macht dumm!"  or "Drinking educates, to get drunk makes you dumb". This is a sentence that got directly stuck on my mind and it could make no more sense to me. As I am getting deeper into the world of wine, I am subsequently valuing how certain wines translate not only a specific terroir but also the culture of the place where they come from. Authenticity is something tremendously important for me and we, as customers, should always look for something that offers a genuine feeling of belonging. To the people who often complain about the over inflated price of wines which are supposed be good, I do believe you can find great value wines which can still be faithful to its origins.  And that is exactly what I have found in this Der Dritte Ritter from the Frey winery. Original from Rheinhessen this cuvée ...

The year was 2016 when Aldi Nord has launched a publicity campaign which has somehow irritated me:       Translated to English, this would mean something like: "Uncomplicated, because you don't need 10 kinds of lemon varieties, but just lemons." This simplification of products, its specificities and varieties to the general public is one of the main reasons why we are losing a rich heritage of fruits and vegetables a bit all over the world. There are major parts of our society which are ignoring the diversity existing in our nature and how you can use it to enrich your diet.  Exactly the same happens with grapes.  I was born in a wine region that still partially insists on planting "international" grapes  in order to make it more visible and understandable to the external market. Even though you can find some nice examples of Syrah around, I have tried too many Gewürztraminer or Cabernet Sauvignon that do not really reflect the characteristics of the t...

Even though I tendentially try to focus in just one wine at the time of tasting, sometimes it is a more than pleasant surprise to see which wines outstand when you try several ones in a short amount of time.  Recently at a friend's birthday there was an exciting selection of different wines as he is quite a wine afficionate, to say the least. From matured whites from magnum bottles to elegant south african Chardonnay, passing through champagne, Rioja or a surprisingly dense german red, among others. But from all the wines which were opened in the evening, this Pinot Blanc from Krispel was, for me, the one that stood out. Even though it was already 8 years old, it still presented itself with tremendous freshness and complexity revealing an interesting balance between primary and tertiary flavours. In the mouth it has very pleasant creaminess, nuts and green quince in what I consider a tremendously fascinating flavour palette.  This is the kind of wine that you can't just s...

 On chapter 37 from his Story of Wine Hugh Johnson decides to dedicate the whole extension of it to the tax system that the Prussians have created in order to favour some wine regions as it also excluded some others from entering a growing wine market.  This sort of commercial war is more than a current theme for us nowadays as this article from Wein Plus brilliantly summarizes. The way Trump has been playing with tax changes has been disruptive and has been creating uncertainty in the global markets and wine is not an exception.  I am not going to go too much deeper on this subject as there are many articles out there portraying this new conjucture and how it is affecting people all around the world. Now that I am trying to get into the business of importing wine from Portugal to Germany, I have been confronted with an unprecedented bureaucratic monster that I could hardly imagine before. To the promises of having a facilitated and fast online business registration I ...

Working at a wine shop you often fall into schemes of answers that you do not make too much effort to answer and you end up selling mainstream wines that reveal few character or terroir and that, personally, you would never get close to. A major part of the German public asks for Grauburgunder (Pinot Gris) with low acidity levels, not too pronounced primary aromas, dry, are you really sure it is dry, they often ask and, most of all, cheap.  This is often rather frustrating and I just indicate anonymous wines that we have in offer and as the clients leave the shop, I often forget their faces and names.  Sometimes I do fell the ambition of trying to recommend better wines as I believe everyone should be drinking better wines, but my attempts are often met with mistrust.  This is a theme that I am often confronted with when talking to fellows from other shops.  Germany offers a wide range of exciting wines and winemakers and I feel it tremendously frustrating to fight a...

 As I start writing this post I have just finished reading  Drunken Comportment   by Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton. Besides my criticism on how the whole studies that were presented were mainly based on the effects of alcohol in non-western societies and from an outdated anthropological perspective, there were some questions that jumped out. How different people react to alcohol is one of them. Even though there is an attempt to establish a pattern, they do fail to do it. This sends me more to the personal field, saying that it is more dependent on the individual than on a certain culture.  Still,  I do believe that certain moments in certain societies can condition people's reactions to alcohol.  But I do not have a concrete conclusion on the theme due to the amount of thoughts that are still popping up in my mind in a rather chaotic way and that is something typically mine. What I have quite clear is that there is a very strong connection between co...