Ursula Heinzelmann, Wein- & Essenschreiberin
Dedicated Heinzelcheese followers will have noticed that I’ve been into Turkish red wine since a year or so… Well, I’ll be completely honest with you: I fell in love with Öküzgözü, one of Turkey’s many indigenous varieties (for German readers: here is the full story from Effilee). And our little fling is still going strong. » Weiterlesen…
Some NYC wine guys recently had a discussion about tasting notes on Twitter. One of them pronounced a stranger’s tasting notes about as meaningful as a Beijing bus schedule. Which tells me that a) presumably Beijing busses don’t run on time, b) these guys are tired of writing them (tasting notes, not bus schedules), and c) they might not read the right ones (tasting notes, again). Of course, translating sensual impressions into words is as tricky to get right as any other translation, perhaps even more so. » Weiterlesen…
That’s one of the beauties of wine: it can transport feelings and memories through time and space. In early October I’ve been to the Alentejo in Portugal where it was still summer, the golden sunlight bathing the beautiful roughness of the landscape. Of course, that trip was all about wine and food and the first stop was at Herdade de Esporão, the region’s most important wine producer. But instead of a wine tasting, we went first to their vegetable garden and then straight to the kitchen. » Weiterlesen…
It’s really nice when people stay on one’s radar through several lives. I met Anthony Hammond when I was at sommelier school in Heidelberg, back in 1992, when our motley bunch of wine-crazy fulltime students went to every single tasting we could possibly fit in, geographically, financially and timewise. He worked for some wine merchant then and we kept running into each other, then lost touch and for a while I wondered what had become of that nice guy who is just as American as he is German. But the big plan hadn’t finished with us: In my next life, in Berlin (November, grey) and jobless, I walked past a wine shop and suddenly stopped in my tracks: I had just caught a glimpse of a familiar figure… you guessed it, Anthony. » Weiterlesen…
The sweeter the wine, the older it should be, as the sweetness over the years gradually recedes into the back of the taste spectrum – at least for me. However, that’s easier said than done, as my squirrel gene seems kind of underdeveloped. So it’s extremely nice to come accross a wine such as this Málaga from Dimobe where the ageing has been done at the winery. » Weiterlesen…