I am always happy when I find essays and articles about wine and wineries in newspapers and magazines. So it was with the above piece, published on January 11, 2013 in the Bangkok Post.
“California Dreaming” is mainly about wine-maker Peter Vella and the wine empire of the Gallo family in California.
The author of this article tries to address the “angst” of people who are new to wine and wine drinking and first-time wine consumers. Fortunately, wine was never the drink of an elite only. This is only so in Thailand because the high taxes on imported and domestically produced wines which are taking wine out of the reach of the common person.
Fortunately, I come from a different tradition. In the Mosel valley where I grew up, it was the simple people, the famous “man on the street”, the villagers, the workers, who were wine drinkers and many of them are experts as far as the quality of the heavenly fermented juice is concerned.
Further down on the page some wines made by Peter Vella are mentioned. These wines are now available in Thailand it seems. Vella offers among others a “Fresh White” (Chardonnay), a “Smooth Red” (Cabernet Sauvignon) and a “Rich Red” (Shiraz).
And then it comes.
The retail price of these wines in Bangkok is 299 Thai Bath only, the equivalent of about 7.5 Euro per bottle. Don’t forget there is almost 400% taxes on these liquids. For this in a Thai context modest price, I would get a solid, hand-made (artisan) Riesling in my native land. Instead, what will I get for my 299 Bath? An industrial product of a mass produced grape by a giant winery in California.
When considering the level of wine prices in Thailand, tears are dropping from my eyes. We need to be happy that we do get wine at all. And that the variety and choice of wines in Bangkok wine shops and wine bars has improved over the almost 5 years that I live in the City of Angels.
How about the wines produced in Thailand? Thailand has a small but vibrant wine industry.
There are about 10 grape and wine-making ventures, some of them boutique family vineyards, others medium to large sized wineries. They have to strive for the premium segment of the market, not the mass-produced base-wines as the ones mentioned above.
I highly recommend you try some of the indigenous products the next time you order a bottle of wine in Thailand.
What to do on the 31 of December? Well, I thought to check out my wine fridge. Small as it is, the review did not take very long.
I was amazed that my wine collection included wines from Germany (yes mostly Riesling wines), Austria, Italy, Canada, Australia, China, Vietnam, Myanmar and of course Thailand. This makes eight countries, four in the West and four in the East.
I also realized that I have no French wine in stock.
1982 Scharzhofberger Spaetlese
Two wines in particular I look forward to taste in 2013.
One is a ‘1982 Scharzhofberger Riesling Spaetlese’ by Egon Mueller from Wiltingen at the Saar river, the second a ‘2009 Pinot Noir Centgrafenberg Grand Cru’ from Rudolf Fuerst in Buergstadt, Frankonia.
2009 Centgrafenberg GG Spaetburgunder
Both wines, both terroirs and both vintners are among the top in Germany.
The Riesling bottle looks OK, just the label has suffered a bit. I wonder what a 30 year old wine will taste like. In any case it is a treasure. I wonder when I shall open it?
The bottle of Pinot Noir I bought from Fuerst junior during a wine tasting at Karthaeuserhof in Eitelsbach last August.
There are of course other treasures in my wine fridge. More about this next year. Now I will get ready for the New Years party.
I wish all of you a good start into 2013, and stay tuned to the Man from Mosel River.
When I visited my home town Trier recently, I came across an article in the local newspaper about the joint marketing efforts of vintners of the Mosel river.
With the help of government (in this case the European Union), producers from three countries – France, Luxembourg and Germany – have united their efforts to promote their produce: wine from the Mosel river.
“Terroir Moselle“ is the name of the undertaking. The project shall benefit about 4,000 vintners across the borders of the three countries. It includes about 229 villages and hamlets along the river Mosel which are involved in grape and wine production.
The project was started in 2010 for a duration of three years. About 20 associations, institutes and other bodies from the three countries had initiated it after preparatory work in 2009.
The total area under vines along the Mosel is about 10,500 ha, 180 ha of which in the Lorraine, France; 1,350 ha in Luxembourg, and the remainder in Germany (Saar 110 ha and Mosel 8,880 ha).
The Moselle
“River, terroir, grape production and wine making” are the unifying features of the project. Producers in the three countries face similar challenges. Many are small family units with insufficient “muscle” to raise awareness for their products: high quality wines from the Mosel river, in highly competitive markets.
Unfortunately, the website does not give an account of the achievements and the impact of the joint undertaking. The newspaper article mentioned ‘joint tasting across borders’ and ‘presentations in international wine shows’ as examples.
The members of “Terroir Moselle” have now to come up with a plan to sustain activities after the end of the funding period (December 2013). The total amount of EU support for the three years is 250,000 EURO.
Mosel in mid December near Bullay (shot taken from the train)
Is the retirement of the Man from Mosel River imminent?
Every December I ponder the very same question. Shall I continue this blog or not?
You might have noticed that I am struggling this year. The last three months were particularly painful. My day job is sucking up all my energies. I have been feeling drained and empty for a while. One could say that I am Gulliverized by my professional responsibilities, which have grown over the years and weigh more heavily on me now that I am getting older.
My stats show this too. I have been sliding a little, and continue to slide a little every month.
I started this blog in January 2007 and have posted a couple of hundred entries. At the end of this month I have six years of blogging under my belt. They say ‘people do not read blogs any more’; these days people are on Twitter and Facebook instead.
So why waste so much energy and time?
When I scroll though older posts I also notice that I am repeating myself. I eat the same food, visit the same places, and tend to drink (if possible) my favourite wines. Am I spent?
Not quite, I think.
Let me tell you what happened to me last weekend in my home town Trier. I had only about 43 hours available. I arrived late the first evening and was much too tired to do anything.
Saturday night, after a family meal, we watched some slides and family photos, before I could go on a stroll and check out the Christmas market. I also intended to have a glass of wine. My favourite wine bar, ‘Weinsinnig’ was my destination.
The place was crowded and I only found a table at the back. That table, however, was reserved and I was asked to swap with a place right across the “wine list”, a wall with about 20 or so wine bottles in metal holders and a description of the wine and the producer. I will tell you another time which wines I sampled that night.
When I went up to that wall with my phone to document what I had tasted (two reds) and returned to my table, a woman approached me and asked: “Are you the Man from Mosel River”? You cannot image how flabbergasted I was. How could she know?
It turned out the the woman was Manuela Schewe, the owner and initiator of ‘Weinsinnig’. She had seen my last post about the wine bar. After the introduction, we had a good chat about wine, wine bars, the vagaries of life and so on.
Well, and when I was leaving I thought that I should think it over again before giving up my blog and retiring the Man from Mosel River.
It has been a while since my last blog entry. Somehow my work does not allow regular blog entries any longer. You will have guessed right: I was on an extended business trip to Germany.
After my official program was completed I also visited my mother in my home town Trier, just for a short weekend only. It was a cold and rainy day when I arrived late in the evening. My beloved Mosel lay in the dark.
Fortunately, a splendid meal was waiting for me. My friend Heinz had prepared roast venison for me. It was the last piece of meat he had left over from his hunting days in Schoden, Saar. In spring 2010 Heinz and his friends had lost their hunting rights to a group of hunters from Luxemburg.
Fortunately, he had the freezer full of delicious meat: venison, wild boar, wild sheep among others. The last piece of a young deer was just the right stuff to make me happy. As you can see from the two pictures below, the meal was awesome.
Roast venison with noodles and vegetables
What a fine consistency
What wine would go with this meal? Well, since the meat came from the Saar, the wine had to come from the Mosel. Fortunately, we had a bottle of ‘1999 Neumagener Rosengaertchen Riesling Spaetlese’ by Rainer Krebs, a winery in Neumagen-Drohn, Mosel.
1999 Neumagener Rosengaertchen Riesling Spaetlese
The wine was amazing. It had the nose of petrol fumes, was full and buttery. Despite its age, the wine still displayed its great character. I do not know how many more year it would have lasted.
It complemented our meal in a perfect way. We were reminiscing about the glorious hunting days in Schoden, the nights we spent together sitting in the cold and waiting for deer or wild pigs to show themselves. It was a wonderful time, and I am sad that the hunting rights could not be retained. But such is life, good things come, and go.
I salute all the hunters who treasured their time in this fabulous place.
The other day, while I was waiting for my flight home to Bangkok, I discovered to my great amazement in the business class airline lounge of EVA Air, that a wine from my native Mosel was on offer.
What a pleasant surprise, I thought, when I spotted the label in the wine cooler. It was a ‘2011 Bockstein Kabinett Grand Cru’ by St. Urbans-Hof in Leiwen, Mosel. The wine village of Leiwen is only a couple of kilometers away from my home town Trier.
I have visited the winery and love their crisp-dry Rieslings. For the first time I had the opportunity to taste one of their off-dry wines. The terroir, “Bockstein” in Ockfen, a small village at the Saar river, a tributary to the Mosel, is also a place very dear to me.
From the raised hides in the hunting territory of Schoden (another village at the banks of the Saar river) one could have a glimpse of the “Bockstein”, a rock formation towering over the Saar valley. It’s vineyards are very steep and the Riesling grapes grown are famous for their high quality.
Off-dry whites are not my favourites, but of course this wine showed it’s outstanding quality. It was full and lush, smooth as silk in the mouth, with intensive and mellow Riesling aromas. It had also a long finish, and I loved the balance of sugar and acidity.
Moreover, I found my beloved Mosel (Saar) here, thousands of miles away in a place of Asia where I least expected it.
If you want to imagine me happy, imagine me in “Weinsinnig”, my favourite wine bar in Trier, Mosel.
Manuela Schewe and her team are doing a great job. I just love, that the wine bar is also a kind of cellar door for quite a few wineries. Most of them do have a cellar door of their own. However, with Weinsinnig they have a cellar door right in the middle of town.
I love this concept.
Among the wine producers you can find: Winery
Bender
Deutschherrenhof
Heymann-Löwenstein
Jakoby Pur
Lauer
Markus Molitor
Maximin Grünhaus
Nick Köwerich
Pauly
Philipp Kettern
Stephan Steinmetz
Van Volxem
Von Hövel and
von Othegraven
The selection of these, mostly local, wineries guarantees to the wine lover that he or she can choose from a broad range of different wine styles, varieties, terroir and even wine regions.
So far I was not able to try all of them as yet, but believe me I am working on it whenever I visit my lovely Trier. Stay tuned.
Actually, ‘traditional German ‘Schwenkbraten’ is when the pork is on a movable gridiron which is beeing moved over a coal fire. The above picture is more of a rolled piece of pork on a rotisserie.
However, that may be, the German love to grill as much as the Australians do. And since the summers in Germany tend to be unpredictable, often short, every opportunity to be outside and operate a grill is used to everybodies delight.
What a delicious piece of meat?
The pork is stuffed with onions, bacon, maybe herbs
My friend Juergen doing the carving job
Ready to be served
Note: Let me tell you that the above pictures were taken in Eitelsbach, Ruwer. My old friends Elisabeth and Juergen Olk had organised a family reunion to which we were kindly invited. It was a lovely summers afternoon, with little children darting through the garden, and adults chatting, telling stories, and drinking and eating. Apart from some Ruwer wines, mostly Riesling, the preferred drink was beer. We had a delightful time. What a beautiful day that was.
My readers know that I adore Riesling wines. Here is another one which we had with a delicious pasta (see photo above) the other day. The intensity of the tomatoe sauce was matched by the vivid citrus aromas, the fine balance of the acids and the mineral character of the Riesling from the Rheingau, Germany.
The ‘2011 Steinberger Riesling trocken (dry)’ by the famous estate of Kloster Eberbach is a great drop for every day consumption. It is their basic wine, and at the cost of 8.90 Euro it is quite affordable. The wine has all what it takes to be an excellent Riesling.
Enjoy.
As the name “Steinberger” suggests, the vineyard is a kind of “stone hill” and just located nearby the monastry. For centuries fine wines were produced from this terroir. The short video below gives you an idea about it.
As you know, I like to eat game of all kind. The best wild boar I have eaten in a long time was served to me by my good old friend Ulrich Hillejan and his wife Elfriede when we visited them this summer near Muenster. The so called Muensterland is a very picturesque agricultural region right north of the former industrial heartland of the Ruhr.
Ulrich comes from a tranditional farming family which goes back a couple of hundred years (he keeps very impressive records). He inherited one of the traditional farm houses away from the manor house, just outside the nearby village.
His mother (I call her aunty Doris) prepared for us the leg of a young wild boar, shot by Ulrich’s younger brother Georg. Let me say from the outset that this was the best piece of game I have ever eaten. I asked her to tell me the secret of this delicacy. Her instructions were rather sketchy. I figured that mustard plays a central role. The meat needs to be rubbed carefully with a mustard-pepper-salt potion.
The following photos show what we had for dinner. Of course the side dish with the carbs consisted of good German potatoes.
The potatoes
The young wild boar’s leg
On the plate
And after….
Needless to say that we had various kinds of delicious wines with our meal. We started the extensive tasting with a white wine, a fresh Gruener Veltliner from Weingut Setzer, Austria. The Setzer winery was decoreated with the “winery of the year 2013” award.
The estate has about 30 ha under vines and produces a wide variety of wines. Main grape variety are Gruener Veltliner, and red Veltliner. Recently, Hans Setzer, owner-operater of the estate, was awarded with the “Vinter of the year award” for 2013. With its low (11%) alcohol content, this wine is wonderful for warm summer days. It is refreshing and shows great temperament.
Gruener Veltliner Vesper, Austria
Knipser Riesling, Pfalz
We followed up with a German dry Riesling by the well-known Knipser Estate in Laumersheim, Pfalz.In 2009 the winery was awarded the “vintner-of-the-year” award by Gault Millau.
The ‘2001 Laumersheimer Kapellenberg Riesling Kabinett Trocken’ was just the right wine to complement the meal. I like the minerally note and the tropical fruit aromas.
Barbera and Nebbiolo blend by Villa Contessa Rosa
Mid-term through the meal, we changed colour and switched to a red wine from Italy. Villa Contessa Rosa has currently about 70 ha under vines. The blend of Barbera and Nebbiolo, produced in the wine region Langhe, was also a good accompliment to the wild boar.
The meat from the forest animal and the red and Forest berry aromas from the wine went well together. Below you see the colour of the drop from heaven.
From here on I lost track of the wines we sampled in the course of the evening. There were a few more red wines, but honestly I cannot recall what they were and where they came from.
The generosity of our hosts knew no bounds, I might say (thank you again Ulrich and Elfriede). It was a terrific evening of reminiscing about the past and making plans for the future.
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The Man from Mosel River 