Vintner Stories

My husband is one of the few real scoundrels in the winegrowing business. He and four other young vintners from the Mosel teamed up to form the renowned/notorious Riesling Kartell.

As a winegrower, you are perpetually at the mercy of nature's whims. Weather-related harvest losses are no rare occurrence. But the Elbe flooding of 2002 caught us absolutely unawares.

My motto is to be open to new things, to try everything at least once and to never stop learning. When it was time for me to look for a practical internship as part of my studies, I didn't want to work at another winegrowing estate like everyone else. I wanted to see something completely different.

Tradition can bind us — but sometimes it can be confusing as well. Our estate has borne the Reuscher-Haart name for centuries, but my grandmother Maria ended up being the last proper "Reuscher" to work here.

Hard liquor has famously powered many a crazy idea among university house mates. Wine is also a well-known 'creative juice' — even if few of the ideas ever come to fruition.

We are the only estate to own a vineyard with its own Roman funerary temple — the only one of its kind preserved in its original form on the Mosel.

"It's good to dream," I used to tell myself back at the beginning of my career. My goal was to get listed in the highly prestigious Gault&Millau Wine Guide.

"Life is too short to drink mediocre wine!" That's the motto at Vier Jahreszeiten Winzer eG, the club for which I've served as chairman for over 12 years now.

Our estate may well be the poster child for a classic family-run operation. Three generations live together under one roof, working together to build the perfect wine. With our tomcat Jacky, of course, our own personal "Zeller schwarze Katz".

They say that hands-on experience is better than book learning, and so back at the start of my studies in the international wine business I tried to put all that theory into practice.

Sometimes the best way to see how much love and passion goes into something is to realize just how difficult the object of that affection can be. At our estate, for example, we work with very old steep vineyards bounded by dry stone walls, a setup that demands a great deal of manual care and physical exertion.

Most estates in Germany are still family run — and many local winegrowing communities themselves behave like a large family. Such as in our wine village, where structures established over centuries are still in place.

My husband and I are academics and not particularly inclined to believe in the supernatural. But even we cannot quite deny the magical effect of our vineyards, which were once owned by a cloister of Cistercian monks.

When people hear the word mining, they tend to think about dust, heavy machines and dirty covered surfaces — not about tender vines. Unless you're my father. Back in 1997 he saw something no one else in Europe did.

German Riesling and Turkish cuisine may sound like an odd combination — until you try it! Then you discover just how well the aromas deepen and complement each other.

They say New York is the city where anything can happen. I was not sure how true that really is, when I first traveled there in February 2013. It was my first time in the USA and I was on my way to the Riesling celebration

What would you do if you had created the perfect sparkling wine - and then the good old German bureaucracy has put a spanner in the works?

I am a trained vintner - and a nun. Our monastery is the only winery in Germany that is run by religious members and in which they also actively participate.

Our winery wasn’t meant to be in Forst where it is today. According to legend, our family wanted to emigrate from Pfeffingen to America.

As owner of one of the best cheese factories in Switzerland, for many years I dedicated my life to the milk of the Appenzeller cows. But at some point, a new challenge had to be found. And since nothing goes better with cheese than a good wine, I decided to turn to viticulture for my livelihood.

"This is the gateway to the Eternal, the righteous will enter there."
Anyone who stands in front of the gate of our wine press and reads these lines, may suspect that this is a very special place. Initially - if you follow the writing - hardly anything is unusual except for the Hebrew tablet.