Wine Fictions

 There are few places where I feel much at home as the central library in Hamburg.  In its infinite chaos of people, events, places to read, work or to have a cup of coffee I feel a tremendous peace and deep sense of order in an almost Saramago 's way when he has written that " chaos is merely order to be deciphered". It is also an endless source of inspiration in what concerns what I will read next and, consequently, what I will be cooking and drinking. I know this may seem a rather wild idea connection but as I am getting older I am growing more sensitive in this very particular issue.  Through books I am becoming what Stanislaw Lem has described as a gastronaut in his The Star Diaries .  After having scrolled through Giorgio Locatelli's Siete tutti invitati I felt an urge of going back to experimenting some Italian food and I have found myself cooking some fregula with aubergine and fennel.  As soon as I have started cooking it, of course that the question...

The moment has come for me to review my first German wine in this blog: due to the Portuguese tax system ( Portuguese wines pay 13% and imported ones 23%), most Portuguese don't even know that Germany produces wine, being normally associated with beer. It is clearly a surprise for most of my Portuguese friends to know that Germany produces not only more wine than Portugal, but especially  when I also say that there are some pretty good wines around. Even though I am pretty critical about the generality of red wines, often lacking some body and complexity due to the general tendency of making monovarietal wines, the whites ones often present a complete different scenery:  A good example of it, it is this Mertz Grauburgunder, or Pinot Gris, as it is generally known outside the German speaking world. If the first impression is dominated by the strong citrus bouquet, the intense minerality comes with the first sip, leading us to one of the strongest features of the Rhein...