I strongly suspect that the first thing the first person to eat the first morsel of cooked food said, was “Hey, guys, come here and taste this!”
    Up until that moment, about 50,000 years ago, humans ate their food raw. Thereafter, cooked food was much preferred, even held in high esteem because it required precious fuel with which to build the fire. Among the elite of Europe and Asia raw food was eschewed right up until the 20th century—vinegar-treated sushi only appeared in Japan in the 17th century. Now, raw food of every kind has gone from a fad to a trend to a ubiquitous menu item.
    What kept it from such current acceptance was obvious: Uncooked food—  potentially full of bacteria—carries with it a certain danger, and its nudity on the plate is not without its sexual connotations. (Eating from the naked body of a woman is a Japanese quirk called nyotaimori.) On the other hand, raw food has a certain Zen purity that gets to the essence of food.  These days raw food seems associated with slim people for whom the ingestion of cooked meat is totally un-cool, and you’re far more likely to read about people with names like Taylor, Kim, Charlize and Amber dining at sushi restaurants than steakhouses.
    These days it’s difficult to find a hip new restaurant that isn’t doing some version of raw food, whether it’s an array of ceviches at a Latino place, a tartare of tuna at a steakhouse or fresh, barely seared foie gras at a French restaurant. Japanese  restaurants serve sushi and Italian restaurants serve carpaccios.
    Not very long ago the only raw items any American menu dared list were caviar, clams, oysters, and steak tartare with a raw egg on top, once a requisite excess at high-end restaurants where martinis outnumbered wineglasses on a table.  Steak tartare briefly dropped from menus when the e.coli bacteria scare drifted into the ground meat market, although now it’s firmly back in favor.
   Sushi—which in Japan originally referred to any food kept fresh in vinegared rice but came to refer most specifically to seafood—did not make an appearance in American restaurants until 1957, when Moto Saito opened Saito restaurant in Manhattan and gave lessons to queasy customers on how to eat it.  There wasn’t much appetite for it until well into the 1970s, when sushi bars began to proliferate in the U.S. at a time when many more Asian immigrants arrived here.  Yet, despite a lot of hype about the “art of sushi making,” it was basically just sliced fish and vinegared rice.

        It took twenty years before chef Nobu Matsuhisa at his Matsuhisa restaurant in Beverly Hills and Nobu in New York really revolutionized the genre by adding spices, chile pepper condiments, and other ingredients to sushi he calls tiradito—ideas he picked up when he worked in Peru, which has a substantial Japanese population.  The celebrity clientele and, in Nobu’s case, celebrity ownership that included Robert DeNiro (left), didn’t hurt sales, so that those original restaurants, as well as branches in London, Aspen, Las Vegas and Asia, are among the hottest tickets in town, despite—or maybe because of—their being unbelievably expensive. One can easily spend $100 per person at Nobu, feasting on dishes like “New Style sashimi” of Atlantic salmon spiced with garlic, ginger, sesame seeds, citron, and olive oil.  One can just as readily spend ten times that amount at New York’s Masa for a twenty-course array of sushi.
    Uncooked seafood like sea urchins, in addition to the more usual clams and oysters, have been making their way onto menus, usually in the form of ceviche (also spelled seviche and escabeche), which begins with an acidic marinade of citrus or vinegar and other spices. (Salt or sugar is what cures grävlax.) The acid is said to “cook” the seafood, but I wouldn’t be too sure.  As with the application of heat, citric acid does break down the proteins, but it is far from really being cooked through. Which, of course, is the point.
    I, among many, am very squeamish about raw shellfish, even if treated to an acid bath. Having once gotten severely ill on an oyster, I shall never tempt fate again with that bivalve, and I like my mussels, clams, and lobsters cooked through, past translucence, as recommended by the Center for Disease Control. The fact is, even those state and federal marine organizations in the business of promoting shellfish sales warn that eating raw shellfish can be very problematic.  Many are, after all, bottom feeders through which flows everything on the ocean floor. Allergic reactions can be mild to very serious, including anaphylactic shock, while raw shellfish can also carry deadly diseases like hepatitis and cholera.  They may also carry worms and parasites. People with liver disease, diabetes or cancer should be especially careful. I only eat raw seafood of any kind in those restaurants that specialize in them and that have a high turnover of product.
    Nevertheless, millions of people eat millions of tons of raw seafood around the world and never suffer any deleterious effects. What would New Orleans be without oysters, or Normandy with mussels?
    But on to a cheerier raw food: Carpaccio, the mellifluous Italian name of a Renaissance artist whose work just happened to be on exhibit in Venice in 1950.  Meanwhile over at the celebrated Harry’s Bar, owner Giuseppe Cipriani was trying to please a Countess who contended her doctor said she could eat only raw meat. Cipriani thereupon sliced some fine beef paper thin, dressed it with a little seasoned mayonnaise and created an instant classic, which he thereupon named after Carpaccio, who was known for his use of reds and whites, which were mirrored in the dish. 
    Carpaccio didn’t really catch on in the U.S. until the 1980s—remember we already had steak tartare—when it began to appear on northern Italian menus. Now there are restaurants doing duck and venison carpaccio, but I’d draw the line at chicken, which may contain the salmonella virus, and wild game. (Note well: All game—including trout—sold, cooked and served must by law come from game farms, whose products are carefully inspected. In Europe wild game is allowed to be sold if inspected, as in Scotland, by an expert; hence, the seasonal availability of  grouse and other fowl, which are never eaten raw.)
    I love my steaks medium rare and have no problem eating meat carpaccio, if, as with seafood, I have confidence in the restaurant and the chef’s high standards for ingredients.  E. coli bacteria seems mostly a problem with commercial ground beef, not with steaks and roasts, which in a restaurant would be sliced to order for carpaccio or ground at the moment for tartares. 
   But it was a twist on the idea, and on Japanese sushi, that made carpaccio synonymous with any meat or seafood fanned out in translucent slices and drizzled with a light sauce.  This was first accomplished at Le Bernardin in New York back in the late ‘80s, when the late chef-owner Gilbert Le Coze came up with the idea and told his partner, his sister Maguy (left), what he had in mind. In The Le Bernardin Cookbook, Maguy tells of how Gilbert worked with American tuna on several dishes, always unsuccessfully, to his sister’s taste. “Getting it right wasn’t easy,” she writes. “After several tasting experiments, I told Gilbert the tuna was so bad, it would be better raw. And that is how tuna carpaccio was born.” From near defeat was victory achieved.
    Le Coze went on to make the dish famous, also using black bass, halibut and other unstintingly fresh fish, sometimes treated to a slightly warm bath of vinegar, which partakes of the ceviche idea.  The fact that Le Bernardin was such a chic restaurant helped seafood carpaccio take wing, so that now just about every trend-setting chef in America takes a crack at his own version.  
    Oddly enough, the one thing raw food does not contribute to gustatory pleasure is aroma, unless the thing has gone bad. I’ve had too many fishy-smelling  ceviches that have been hanging around too long in a soupy marinade.  But when it’s good, it’s blissful. The subtlety of flavor in Le Bernardin’s carpaccios, the bite of the wasabi against the coolness of sushi and sashimi, and the delightful spark of the citrus in a good, fresh ceviche are among the great gastronomic experiences in the world.

NEW YORK CORNER
By John Mariani

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

         Nicola spent the next hour and a half nursing a cappuccino and croissant—neither of which tasted anything like those in Milan—and staring up at the Beaux Arts architecture of Grand Central Terminal, its ceiling an expansive mural of the star-crossed sky with its astrological signs. Like the old train stations in Italy, Grand Central was in dreadful shape, its marble cracked, dirty and without sheen, its ceiling darkened by smoke, its once magnificent Tiffany glass without luster.  Whole skylights were still covered by material put up during World War II to block out light from any possible air raids. A huge modern clock obscured the sculptured details on one wall, a wide Kodak ad another. The waiting room was drearier still, with benches where homeless people and college students waiting for a train slept, left alone by the transit police.
        But there was beauty beneath the grime, and Nicola saw it for what it was.  More and more was she thinking that it was her destiny—if that were not too grand a word—to restore the tarnished old world to grandeur, whether it was a mural by Leonardo da Vinci or a train terminal in Manhattan.  So much had been compromised, so much obliterated, even more destroyed. 
        Nicola looked for the twentieth time at the huge lighted clock on the east wall and saw that it was time to take the subway down to the magazine’s office in SoHo, two miles from those of the Condé Nast and Hearst fashion magazines like Vogue, Mademoiselle, Glamour and Harper’s Bazaar located in midtown skyscrapers.  SoHo had, by 1985, gone from a derelict neighborhood to prime territory for artists and galleries, offering relatively inexpensive lofts in historic, landmarked cast-iron buildings.  Willi magazine was on the fifth floor of such a structure, which still retained an ancient freight elevator as its principal means of ascent.
        Nicola entered the building, where an all-around maintenance-receptionist-elevator operator called upstairs to announce her arrival, then pulled down an apparatus that separated the large elevator doors, yanked the gate to the side and invited Nicola in.  The doors closed, the man hit a button with a loud, piercing buzz and the room-like elevator rumbled upwards, opening onto a door-less newsroom-like floor, with desks arranged in some incomprehensible order, all with IBM electric typewriters and orange phones. Some staff members wandered from desk to desk with reams of newsprint paper over their arms.
        There was no receptionist, so Nicola just went up to the first desk and said she had an appointment with Elena Duran. The young woman at the desk, not even asking Nicola’s name, waved to the rear of the loft room and said, “Well, her desk’s over there in the corner, but I’m not sure if she’s back there.”
        Nicola said thanks and walked the long room towards the general location the young woman had waved at, reaching a desk beneath an expanse of windows below a soffit on which were stenciled the words,  “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months—Oscar Wilde.”  That told Nicola something, though she wasn’t quite sure what it was.
         Suddenly from across the way, she heard, “Nikki! Oh, I’m so glad you’re here!”  It was Elena Duran, in blue jeans, oversized white blouse and paisley foulard scarf tied around her neck into a European knot. “My God,” she continued, “You look more gorgeous than your photos.  How was your flight? You get some sleep?  Want coffee?”
         Elena had a way of asking far more questions than she was actually interested in having answered, so Nicola just responded, “I’m good.” (She'd already sent over her clothing measurements.)
         “Well, you look fabulous.  I can't wait for you to meet Diana, our makeup artist and our stylist Banks.”  Then, shouting to anyone who could hear her in the echoing room, “Anybody see Diana and Banks?”  Someone motioned they were in the art director’s studio, partly sectioned off by Sheetrock from the rest of the open room.
         “Here,” Elena continued, “grab a chair, if you can find one in this mess.  Sit down, sit down. So. Here you are. I have so much to tell you.
        “First, let me fill you in on what we’re trying to do with this magazine.  You know we call it Willi, which is kind of uni-sex for a good reason: It’s the first fashion magazine that is aimed at both women and men.  Not like Vogue and Bazaar, which are for women only, or GQ and Esquire, which are for men, straight and gay.  We are going to try to prove that by putting both sexes on the same fashion pages we create an enticing synthesis.
         “Yes, I know that putting men and women together in a fashion lay-out is not entirely new, but we’re going to do it with every lay-out.  We have a woman in a beautiful Armani gown, the guy is in a gorgeous Armani suit.  She’s lounging around in a bathing suit, so is he.  It’s like one of those ideas someone should have thought of a long time ago.  But didn’t.  So, we get two groups—not to mention the gay readers—to buy the magazine.”
         Nicola was struck by the simple logic.
         “So,” Elena went on, “the other thing is that we skew young, but not too young because we want readers who can actually afford to buy good clothes, and along with those we’ll show plenty of moderately priced stuff.  And we do it with a brash, in-your-face edge and a lot of wit.  Of course we’ll promote the most creative established designers—they pay the bills—but I don’t want to show those haute couture idiots who make their mannequins look like they come from Uranus or off a pirate ship; I mean we’ll show really good designers like Versace, Armani, Mugler,  Alaia, Guy Paulin, whose clothes you can actually wear.  We are not out to shock but to shake, understand? So we’re beating the bushes to find undiscovered new designers—Patrizia Palma when her collection goes global—and especially ethnic American kids—Black, Latino, Japanese, all of them—like the kids who work for us here.  I tell every one, get out of this goddamn office and walk around downtown.  See what the street people are wearing, which is always a combination of what they can afford and facsimiles of what they can’t. 
         “We don’t give a shit what Cher or Goldie Hawn wears. But Kim Basinger, Jennifer Beals,  Cyndy Lauper—those are our girls.  Have you heard of this new black singer—used to be a model—Whitney Houston, just came out with her first album?  That’s our girl.
        “Guys, well, that’s tougher: so few showbiz men know how to dress well.  It’s easy enough to fall for Johnny Depp or Mel Gibson, but they don’t give off any real when it comes to men’s fashion. Prince is a little out there—did you know he’s only five-feet-two?—guys are not going to wear purple high heel boots. Richard Gere is perfect.  So is Sting and Harrison Ford, Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger. See what I mean?”
         Nicola just kept nodding.
         “Well, that’s Willi in a nutshell, and I intend you to be part of it.  So, I am very happy to tell you, Nikki—by the way, did you think about the two k’s in your name?—that I want to do a five-page spread on you, with different men, plus the cover.  Our first issue.  September.  Comes out in August. Whaddaya think?”
         To say Nicola was nonplussed was barely to hint at her state of mind.  Grateful as she already was to Elena, Nicola had no idea how much the editor intended to put on her un-tried shoulders.  Nicola Santini stammered, “Give me time to digest this.”
         “And this part, you’re really going to love,” said Elena. “I saw in the Herald Tribune that crazy woman wrote about you as the girl from `Duh Bronx.’ Well, you probably don't know it but I, too, am a Bronx girl.  My parents are from Puerto Rico and I grew up in Parkchester, not too far from where you live up in Belmont, right?  Believe me, it was not easy making my way in the fashion business as a Latina, even if I didn't have an accent. Started as a secretary, worked my way up, wrote stories for  Cosmopolitan en Español and People en Español, then some of the Condé Nast titles, and here I am.
         “Anyway, for the debut issue now I want to exploit the hell out of the Bronx!  You do know that Ralph Lifshitz is from the Bronx?”
         Nicola knit her brow and said, “Ralph who?”
         “Oh, he changed his name to Ralph Lauren when he was sixteen.”
         “You’re kidding.”
         “Nope. Also, although he never changed his name, Calvin Klein is a nice Bronx Jewish boy, too. So’s his business partner, Barry Schwartz.”
         “I had no idea.”
         “Of course, their designs aren’t particularly edgy.  Ralph always wanted to believe he was born on a Palm Beach estate next to the Kennedys and grew up playing polo with Gary Cooper.  But what I’m looking for are the young designers in New York, Europe and Asia who have street cred and who design around what they are and where they came from.”
         Nicola’s head was swimming, quite happily. “This is all amazing to me.  I mean I knew about Bronx people like Tony Curtis and Peter Falk  and Billy Joel, but. . . .”
         “Hm. I wonder how Billy Joel dresses,” Elena said. 
        “Okay, so here’s what we’re doing for the next four or five days.  We are going to shoot you in five different Bronx locations—some familiar, some not—if possible, with a guy who’s associated with the place.  You’ll be wearing a Bronx designer’s clothes, and it’s going to be fabulous!  You agree?”
         Nicola was speechless but finally managed to answer, “Even aside from my being a tiny part of it all, this is an incredible idea!”
         “I knew you’d like it, Nikki. So, let's get to work.”
          Elena stood up and shouted across the room, “People! Listen up!   I want you all to meet our new cover model—and she is going to be very big!—Nikki Santini, a nice Bronx girl like me. And I want every one of you to think how we can capitalize on her undoubted success with Willi.”
         The staff at other fashion magazines were dutifully reserved and cynical about anything anyone else considered novel, but the young hirees at Willi roared out their approval, applauding, whistling and shouting, “Yo, Nikki!”
         When things quieted down, Elena pointed to the soffit above her head and said to Nicola, “You see those words up there? Sounds snarky, right? Well, that is our philosophy.  Fashion can indeed be ugly—but it can be really, really cool for a while—and that’s why it has to be changed every six months.  That is what we intend to do. Every month! Well, every two months. We can only afford to come out six times a year for now.”
         From there Nicola was ushered into the art studio to meet Diana and Banks, who welcomed her warmly.  Diana, a woman about thirty-five, with a pixie haircut and wearing jeans and a Sticky Fingers t-shirt, looked at Nicola and said, “I saw pictures of you from Milan.  You really can look like Claudia Cardinale.”  Banks, who had spiky hair frosted at the top, was in rolled up jeans and sneakers, with a white t-shirt and short toreador jacket.
         “Hi, Nikki—okay if I call you Nikki?—we are going to have a buh-last!  Wait till you see the clothes we have planned for you.”
         With that, a benevolent assault began, the three professionals, joined by a few others at various points, assessing every inch of Nicola’s anatomy—“This hair is fabulous!” “Her figure will work for the clothes.” “Her lips are killers.”
        Then Elena clapped her hands and said, “Okay, people, let’s head up to the Bronx. The photographer is already there.”
         “Who are we using?” asked Banks.
         “A new guy, from Brazil, Hector Saint-Nazaire.”
         “Oh, I know his work from WWD.  He’s fabulous!”
         With that, assistants packed up the last items of clothing and accessories they would need for the day’s shoot, and six of the staff, along with Nicola, filled the freight elevator.  Downstairs were three vans.  After a few minutes double-checking that all was loaded, the entourage left SoHo, headed across Houston Street, got on the FDR Drive, then headed up the Deegan Expressway, to north of Yankee Stadium in the West Bronx, and exited, following directions to Sedgwick Avenue.

© John Mariani, 2020

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR

    The respect for great German Rieslings has long been higher than sales of this classic varietal. Once, such wines were distinguished by their degree of sweetness, but the worldwide preference for dry wines blunted the appeal of German Rieslings, whose producers re-formulated many of their wines to be “trocken,” dry in an attempt to win back wine drinkers. Germany still makes superb sweet wines, but the future of Rieslings is in the hands of German’s young winemakers at small estates like Gut Hermannsberg in the Nahe region. The winery dates back to 1902 as a Royal Prussian Domaine, but today winemaker Kasten Peter makes dry Rieslings, noting, “Dogmatism isn't our thing.” I interviewed the winery’s CEO Achin Kirchner (left) about the current state of Rieslings.

1.What is there are about your Rieslings that make five years of aging ideal?

    We now release our top dry Rieslings from the legendary Kupfergrube vineyard site as a GG Reserve five years after the harvest. The decision to switch from release at two years of age to five was based on our experience with earlier vintages. We are convinced that great wines must be vinified very cautiously and without any haste, gently guiding the natural processes. At Gut Hermannsberg this means long skin-contact of the grapes to extract aromas, minerals and tannins from the skins in a similar way to red winemaking, but before the alcoholic fermentation starts. We need the tannins to harmonize the pronounced acidity typical for our seven terroirs (GG, or “Grand Cru” sites). The same is true of the wines’ long aging on the lees in cask, which for the GGs lasts between one to two years. All the wines from our 30 hectares (74 acres) of vineyards are wild fermented and we don’t fine them, preferring to let time deal with potential instability problems in the natural way.
    Whenever we do a vertical tasting of the GGs from the Kupfergrube or the Hermannsberg sites (the latter is a monopoly site of Gut Hermannsberg), then we always come to the same conclusion: The older the wines are the better they taste. Five years is really only just the beginning! When asked, we always recommend more aging than that. How much? We’re cautious, but don’t want to underestimate their aging potential. Recently we tasted a 1949 Kupfergrube with a group of journalists and top sommeliers. They all agreed that it tasted unbelievably fresh and complex.
    The principal of giving great Riesling wines long aging before release was normal in Germany into the early1970s. It was the arrival of modern cellar technology that abolished this by accelerating the clarification and maturation processes. So, we and some other top German producers are now returning to that tradition. Perhaps some people will say that’s old-fashioned, but we all think it’s simply the best way for the quality and character of the wines.

2.  As I wrote last week in a column, most white wines of the world should be drunk as soon as you buy them at the store. Does that mean that when I buy your wines they are ready to drink and need no further aging?

    For 99% of modern white wines it’s true that they should be drunk right away, but great Rieslings belong to the 1% that have as much aging potential as any reds on Planet Wine. You can compare our GGs to a special sauce that a top chef prepares. He could knock out a tasty sauce quickly using cheap ingredients, but to make a really delicious one he must use only the best ingredients and take several days. 
    Easy-drinking wines are professionally made winemaker-wines, and they’re ready for consumption from the moment they go into the bottle. Our entry-level dry “Just Riesling!” also belongs to this category. In contrast, our GGs only develop their full complexity and harmony through further aging in bottle. We refer to this potential that slowly unfurls with time as the Third Dimension of Wine. The best thing is to put a number of bottles of one (or more) of our GGs in the cellar so that you can enjoy following the wine’s development over years, or even decades.

3. Tell me about the “transition phase.”

Every great wine has its own aging curve. For example, the 2016 Hermannsberg GG (delicious now, but with many years ahead of it) isn’t comparable with the 2018 Hermannsberg GG (only just beginning to go through its paces, but with decades of aging potential). The variation in vintage character in the cool climate Nahe region is immense! Although our climate warmed during the last decades, like everywhere else, climate change hasn’t altered at all. It can be the case that certain of our wines are very attractive in the first year, but then close up and go through a long transition phase before awakening to a second life after five or more years. If you encounter a three- or four-year old GG from us and it is a bit closed, then it’s definitely not finished, rather it needs yet more aging. Each of our seven terroirs has its own special character and personality, so this is a factor too.

 

6. On your website you write, "The Kupfergrube wines have been dividing opinion since the first vintage in 1910 due to a pungent smoky minerality that many wine lovers find electrifying.”  Can you explain where this flavor comes from in the soil?

    The Nahe region is of great geological complexity with volcanic soils like the melaphry of the Kupfergrube, clay-slate as in our Hermannsberg monopoly site, but also loess, loam and gravel, for example around Bad Kreuznach where “Just Riesling!“ grows. This is an important reason why the region’s wines are so fascinating. The smoky minerality of the Kupfergrube comes from the melaphry soil and this is underlined by the special microclimate of the site with its extreme day-night temperature fluctuations.
    Along with the Hermannsberg, the steep and terraced Kupfergrube is the most famous of Gut Hermannsberg’s seven terroirs. When the estate was founded as a Royal Prussian Wine Domain in 1902 (it’s the Prussian eagle on the label!) a great many climate and soil tests were done to find the perfect location for the new vineyard sites they created. Back then where the Kupfergrube stands today there were only volcanic cliffs, stunted oaks and an abandoned copper mine (the vineyard name means copper mine in German). The interaction between the vines and the soil, also the microbial life of the soil, is still being researched, but is extremely complex. Although we cannot precisely explain it, experience teaches us that the Kupfergrube always has this special character and enormous aging potential.

7. What is the Verband deutscher Prädikatsweingüter (VDP)?

The VDP is an association of around 200 of the leading German wine estates founded a little over a century ago. They are the elite of the roughly 15,000 wine producers in Germany and membership is a kind of estate classification. Strict rules must be followed in order to put the VDPs eagle symbol on the label and capsule of your wines. The VDP’s classification of the vineyard sites for the production of dry GGs/ ”Grand Crus” is modeled on that of Burgundy.  

8. German wines have lagged behind in sales of wines globally for many years. What do you believe are people’s reasons for preferring French, Italian, California, etc wines?

Germany is famous for automobiles, engineering and machine tools: the exact opposite of wine! Wine is rooted in the soil and the best producers are nearly all small companies that combine a great deal of manual work with low tech. This side of Germany is still too little-known.
    Riesling is the German grape and it’s a great ambassador for the nation’s terroirs. However, many of these are really small. For example, Gut Hermannsberg is the largest owner in the GG sites Kupfergrube and Bastei, but our holdings in these sites are respectively 12 hectares (30 acres) and less than one hectare (two acres). This situation is incompatible with modern marketing and branding. In contrast, Château Mouton Rothschild produces about 250,000 bottles per year, roughly 50 times the annual production of the Kupfergrube GG!
    It helps us a lot that many top sommeliers regard Riesling as one of the most exciting grape varieties, and these wines therefore have a firm place on top restaurant wine lists around the world. German Riesling isn’t well-suited to the mass market, not because the best wines are not only limited by the size of the best terroirs, but also by the high production costs in the steep vineyards.

9. What is the current state of the sugar levels in the finest Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese?
    Nobly sweet BA (Beerenauslese) and TBA (Trockenbeerenauslese) made from shriveled botrytis-affected grapes are a very special niche not only for Germany. It’s a wonderful tradition, but at Gut Hermannsberg we only produce them in ideal years, like 2015 and 2019. The sugar content can be as much as 300 grams per liter (30%), but it matches the enormous aromatic concentration and structure of these wines that are made for eternity. We recently auctioned a bottle of the 1921 TBA from the Kupfergrube for almost 15,000 Euros! The total production of the 2015 TBA from the Kupfergrube was just 20 liters, because the grapes were so shriveled and the selection was so time-consuming. The wine was rated 100 points by Robert Parker’s The Wine Advocate. However, we are most famous for the dry wines from our seven terroirs and they account for 90% of our production. 

 

10. Describe what makes the Nahe region different from others in Germany.

In spite of climate change, we are still able to produce elegant and precise Rieslings with fine aromas and intense minerality, meaning wines with a pronounced cool climate character. The complex interplay of our stony soils and the special climate of the region is really perfect for dry Riesling!