Being back in the Wine Metropolis (WM) Berlin after several weeks in New York Wine City (NYWC) feels mighty strange and all too familiar at once. The brief interval between NYWC and WM Berlin was filled by a couple of nights in Cologne practicing British humor with my old school friend Richard Aczel, then the mind-boggling, palate-numbing turbulence of the ProWein trade fair in Düsseldorf. The photo shows one of the few really stimulating moments at ProWein 2013 which had nothing directly to do with wine tasting. It shows Boris from Microsoft (left) and Mr. Dry Riesling Martin Tesch of the eponymous wine estate in Langenlonsheim/Nahe presenting their joint creation, a wine app that makes every other wine app I encountered look dead in the water in comparison.
It will surely became a model for others around Planet Wine, but as Tesch said, “first we have to see who uses it, who uploads photos and comments – our existing customers or people from Brazil and other distant places?” Seldom in its history was the future of Planet Wine so totally unpredictable, as this bizarre combination of a wine producer with just 4 full-time employees and one of the world’s biggest corporations (but not a wine corporation in any sense of that term). Given the creativity Tesch demonstrated since 2001, for which I named him “Winzer des Jahres”, winegrower of the year, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in the December 9th issue last year, I feel sure that he has a bunch more surprises in store for us!
One of the things every trade fair of this kind is about is the delightful surprise that comes with making new discoveries. In their heart of hearts even the dullest realist and the most hard-core pessimist still cling to the hope of discovery, and this time Juliane Eller of Alsheim/Rheinhessen (below) fulfilled that hope for me. Not only because she’s a Jungwinzerin who just made her first solo wines, but also because I remember first drinking Rieslings from her neglected and almost unknown part of Rheinhessen back in the Mid 1980s. They were rather sweet and a bit tame, but Juliane Eller’s 2012 ‘Rüst’ Riesling is properly dry and mingles the wild with the wonderful, the fruity with the funky. Finally a really bright new star from the loess (soil type) terraces of Eastern Rheinhessen where Brüder Dr. Becker were long the only exciting Riesling (also Silvaner and Scheurebe) producer!
Of course, a wine trade fair is also a kind of zoo in which all kinds of wild, semi-tame and completely domesticated animals mingle with each other, and at night the mingling tends to be more direct than during the day. Sunday evening I saw a couple of friends from my two semesters as a guest student at the Geisenheim/Rheingau. Kathrin Engehausen now works for Germany’s most important organic wine merchant Peter Riegel at who’s chill out part we met up, also with Zoli Heimann (see below – more about his wines at a later date) of the Heimann estate in Szekszárd/Hungary. Trying too hard to pronounce this region’s name leads correctly many westerners make embarrassingly crass mistakes. As Zoli pointed out to us it’s actually quite easy. You just say SEX-HARD and you’re spot on! Zoli then insisted that a couple of my observations about the wine scene’s current state were spot on and quoted his father to say just how spot on I was, “as usual you have your finger on the pulse of the main artery of the penis of the times!” No doubt this lost a little of it’s poetry in translation from Hungarian to German, then English, but I think you get his drift. Of course, none of us were sober at that point…
And if your think that is all on the Outer Limits of the wine universe, then either you’ve never taken part in a trade fair of this kind or you were there the whole time in Düsseldorf with your eyes closed. I was seriously shocked to see how a bunch of really big wine companies had stolen the visual imagery and slogans from Germany’s Jungwinzer. As a result I confidently predict that next year’s ProWein will see the first outing of German Altwinzer, self-confidently old winegrowers with a message of power to the silver-haired who are still alive, kicking and sexy. The untapped market for this is huge..
Everywhere I went at ProWein I discovered something more surprising or extreme than what I’d just seen, as the above picture proves. Probably part of my current disorientation is the result of my mind still chewing on weird stuff like this. Give me a couple of days and I promise something more coherent will emerge from the maelstrom in my head…I hope…
