Ursula Heinzelmann, Wein- & Essenschreiberin
A truly festive, pre-holiday HeinzelCheeseTalk, as blue as the summer sea around the Greek Cyclades, the Icelandic salt virgin, the jellyfish aquarium in Californian Monterey, the top of the Empire State Building in New York, and the icy Canadian landscape on the way to it… Oh, you ask if there was any cheese? Of course, dear friends, of course. And wine! » Weiterlesen…
Dearest and nearest friends in cheese – we have cheddared, we have cheddared intensely… Now we know that Cheddar isn’t only the supermarket stuff to put on sandwiches and melt on burgers. Or, at the other end of the wide spectrum, exclusive farmhouse cheese handcrafted in Somerset. » Weiterlesen…
And the cheese goes on… the first Sunday in November was a big day: cheese was reigning high at Markthalle Neun. From 11am till 7pm we’ve been celebrating the third annual Cheese Berlin with old friends such as the Rheingau-Affineur and Fritz Blomeyer, market mongers like Menze and Knippenberg as well as regional producers (Capriolenhof, Pimpinelle, Ogrosen…), and others who had to travel a little longer, from the Allgäu, England, Sweden, Spain… » Weiterlesen…
Life is hard: late October saw me traveling to Piemont in northern Italy. Think Barolo, Robiola, Nocciole… but hey, for you, my valued cheese friends, I’d do (almost) anything! One gloriously sunny day we were even up and down endless serpentines in the remoter parts of the region to get to the organic farm Amaltea. » Weiterlesen…
Regular readers of this blog-cum-website will have noticed that in HeinzelCheese land just as anywhere else, summer is traveling time. After Greece, Turkey and the Allgäu I recently went to Poland to find out about the food scene there. Finally! I mean, I grew up and live in Berlin, an hour from the Polish border! Cheese was of course very high on my list of things to research and I did indeed discover lots of good stuff. » Weiterlesen…
To be able to experience the past in a kind of time machine instead of just reading about it is for me one of the most exciting experiences ever. And ever since my first Turkey trip (I know, it took me an awfully long time to make it to the Bosporus), the close connection with the historic beginnings of our civilization has been one of my main fascinations there. And yes, „experience“ does include wine, a serious advantage in the Heinzelcheese universe (it also includes cheese, but that’s a different story for another day). » Weiterlesen…
Is it about the birds singing me cheerfully into the day now every morning, or about the still low rising sun I then greet on my run? The giddiness of the people on the street, drunken with light and mild air? The promise of evenings outdoors after the winter? Probably all at once – and we didn’t even have a really hard winter this year, here in Berlin; I’m told snow flakes are still flurrying on the northern end of the American east coast. So no matter if you feel like celebrating the end of it or need to cheer yourself up due to the perseverance of winter: drink pink! » Weiterlesen…
It’s been a great winter and I loved our Friday Eatdrinktalk sessions at Markthalle Neun. But all things must change to stay the same – spring is looming, summer will come and I’ll be travelling again, always on the lookout for great wine, cheese, and stories around them. Which is exactly what I’d like to share with you from now one, once a month, at Markthalle Neun: the Heinzelcheese Talks. » 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…