Last night I unknowingly walked right into the as yet unopened new home of New York’s self-proclaimed “Schnitzel Mafia”, a bar called The Third Man in a very funky (read low-rent) location in Alphabet City. According to the story titled ‘NYC’s Austro-hungry Empire’ in the New York Post of November 20th the Schnitzel Mafia is a group of cool and creative Austrian expats revolving around restaurateur Edi Frauneder for whom The Third Man (which looks nothing like the movie of the same name) is just the latest and coolest project together with his business partner Wolfgang Ban. It is situated just half a block from his cult restaurant Edi and the Wolf on Avenue C.
Theoretically I was attending a “workshop” (read party) with the theme of Big Bottles from Burgenland. It began at 11pm (read New York’s wine witching hour) and by the time I walked into the room just after 11:30pm the joint was booming, pumping and heaving, as the photo of Ms Summer of Riesling Susanne Winter (left) with two friends shows. Guest of honor (read imported anti-fashion statement) was the Austrian Wine Queen Elisabeth Hirschbüchler, pictured below.
Everyone was seeing and been seen, including my exhibitionist and voyeuristic self. It felt like we were all in the right place and were high up on some intangible list of the cool wine people of NYC. In this Riesling-free-zone I was really pleased to bump into Amy Troiano and Volker Donabaum who’d I’d met during the German Riesling Cruise on the East River back in July. Most of the crowd stood around, drank copiously, gesticulated and shouted at each other, but ‘Relax Don’t do It’ by Frankie goes to Hollywood cranked up all the way makes polite conversation really difficult. I also drank enough, then danced with Amy and Susanne until I faded shortly before 2 am.
There were actually also some wonderful wines, none more so than the 2006 Kirschgarten Blaufränkisch from Umathum which was deep, dark and complex but entirely free of self-important bombast. In spite of fashion theoretically moving in the direction of less massive or pungently oaky reds Planet Wine is still overflowing with purple-black wines that taste to me more like a dry vintage port than anything else. Of the whites the 2011 Leithaberg Grüner Veltliner from the unknown Liegenfeld estate was the most satisfying with a style – restrained power, cool herbal aromas and a dangerous freshness that kept pulling me back to the glass – totally different from anything the Wachau, Kamptal or Kremstal regions of Lower Austria have to offer.
What conclusion do I draw? Well, now I not only have my suitcase, but yesterday the box of books and household stuff I posted from Berlin a couple of weeks back finally arrived. Last night my last doubts were dispelled and I really felt that I’d arrived.
OK sometimes I feel like I walked into someone else’s movie and can’t find the script, so I have to improvise, but even then it seems that something is really happening. And I feel really at home here in Jürgen Fränznick’s East Village apartment (seen above) where my brain has started buzzing with ideas. Pursuing them is the prime reason I’m here and the results will all land here soon. WATCH THIS SPACE!
