The longest wine counter in the world
A lotta libation: Rheingau and Stellenbosch and Franconia wines. Beer from the 18th century. Coffee in the biggest train station in Europe. Plus tarts and biscuits and cakes because Germany.
I experienced the packed revelry of the Rheingau Wine Festival for the first time three years ago. For the past two years the event didn’t take place due to Covid, but it made its triumphant return to Wiesbaden this August – albeit without the giant gold helium balloon wine glass floating overhead that used to herald its arrival.
Dubbed “the longest wine counter in the world” by the city’s marketing bumf, the festival is a 10-day drinking extravaganza and an unrivalled opportunity to get to grips with riesling (a varietal that originated in Germany), grauburgunder (pinot grigio), spätburgunder (pinot noir), müller-thurgau and sekt (sparkling wine).
From train station platforms to high street shops selling bedding – and many settings and sites in between – it would not be an exaggeration to say that almost all locals I’ve chatted to in Germany have either been to South Africa at least once or are about to go. It’s also a common refrain to hear about friends, colleagues or family members who have moved to South Africa for part or all of the time.
While pouring his riesling and sauvignon blanc at the wine fest, Frank Nikolai from Heinz Nikolai told me about Pia Watermeyer and Paul Barth, and how he’d spent time with them at their wine farm in Stellenbosch. Considering Pia is South African and Paul is German, I contacted them and wound up hearing a story from Pia fit for a screenplay:
When Pia met Paul (“my Gruffalo – German buffalo”)
“Paul and I met 11 years ago at his niece’s wedding here in South Africa. He couldn’t speak a word of English; I couldn’t speak a word of German except hello, how are you? We spent such a lovely evening together dancing, drinking wine and I don’t know how we laughed, but we did laugh a lot.
And then he went back to Germany and got one of his nieces to write me an SMS in English to say that he had had a lovely time, and invited me to come to Germany for his 50th. Long story short I did go over and we travelled Germany for a week with a little English/German dictionary (before Paul and I were a little bit tech savvy).
So he would mumble something to me because he had learned a little bit of English and I’d kind of look at him and go, huh? And then he would look up what he was doing in German and pass me the dictionary and I’d go, oh, okay, that’s what we’re discussing now. And that’s how Paul and I learned to communicate with each other. We were just, like, best friends from the day we met. What we can say now in five minutes, it used to take us an hour.
When he was in Germany of course he couldn’t really phone me because he couldn’t say much to me. So he would be at a wine farm and he would for instance bump into you not knowing you at all but realising you speak English, and he would say: will you phone my girlfriend for me? Her name is Pia. And then he’d get me on the phone and he’d say: wait schatz, here is Dominique. And you would then be able to say: we’re on this wine farm and these are the views and blah, blah, blah.
So through people who could speak English, I was contacted by him every day, I knew where he was, what he was doing. That’s how we got to know each other. Then his English got better and his staff managed to get him onto a smart phone, and they bought him a computer, and then all of a sudden we could chat to each other daily on Skype.
And then he said he wanted to be in a relationship with me and I said I don’t want a long distance relationship, that’s bullshit, and so he said, okay, what would be your maximum time apart? So I said, one month. And so he changed his whole life in Germany. He’s got a building finishes company and he got partners in and his daughter involved and he started coming out here once a month for probably a week to 10 days.
We got bored of it eventually: I had to work and it was just lunch and dinner and lunch and dinner. He wanted us to live together and he wanted to find a place together. He didn’t want to live in Paarl where my house was, and also we needed something for him to do.
As a young boy, his father had vineyards in the Rheingau region, in Rüdesheim, and he used to work the vineyards with his dad as a really young boy. And so we kind of looked for a wine farm, a small little farm, and we found this farm in Stellenbosch.
Toddling up and down the vineyards with a tractor wasn’t cutting it for him. Then he wanted a small wine tasting facility. The only thing I knew about wine at the time is how to drink it.
We’ve now got this beautiful Kunjani building: it’s really funky, it’s modern, it’s out there. We did that because we knew that we’d never have our roots in wine and we’re going to need to have something to attract people to come here. We don’t offer technical wine tastings; we offer stories, we offer a fun dining, wine experience.
When we bought this it was kind of our new beginning, and our beginning had started with a greeting. And so we used the most used greeting in South Africa as our brand, which is Kunjani.”
Another Frank, another wine tasting
The Rheingau wine fest was the culmination for me of a tasting jamboree that began at Frank Kastien’s South African wine shop in Wiesbaden, where Thomas Webb from Thelema guided a select group of Kastien’s customers through 10 wines, starting with the 2016 MCC Brut (with grapes from the winery’s Elgin vineyard, Sutherland) and concluding several hazy hours later with the Muscat Late Harvest 2020.
“It’s really special to be here,” Webb began the evening by saying, “because with a small wine business like ours, we put so much work into growing fantastic, healthy vineyards. We put a lot of work into making wonderful wines out of these amazing grapes, and then we put the wine on the ship, and it goes overseas, and then we don’t see it again. And what is vital for a business like ours is having people representing not just Thelema but representing South Africa and telling the story for us. So we’re very appreciative of you, Frank, for being here, for having a very proudly South African wine store. You’re a very important part of our business.
“We’re quite new in a South African sense: we’re only 40 years old. Before the 1980s there weren’t that many great South African vineyards. It was in the late 80s and early 90s when SA guys started really improving our viticulture and as a result our wines got a lot better very quickly, and my father was one of that first generation (Gyles Webb). He was looking for a site to plant a vineyard and he found an old fruit orchard on the Simonsberg mountain looking over Stellenbosch, and that was called Thelema, and he bought the land in 1983. He pulled out all the orchards, he planted vineyards, built a winery, built a dam, fixed up the whole house, and we moved onto that property and we just started from scratch.
“He could really do what he wanted to do, he could have his own signature on the wines. And as some of you have mentioned, how our wines are so consistent over three decades, it’s because we don’t buy in any fruit. It’s all from the exact same site with my father making the wine in his style. We’re not just trying to make a commercial product. We’re really trying to make a Thelema wine which represents the site and the people on the site.”
The 40-year-old-only comment made me think of a visit late last year to the first and oldest riesling winery in the world, Schloss Johannisberg. That establishment is 1200 years old and in its dark, dank 900-year-old castle cellar, in which I spent an hour enduring a tour exclusively in German, one can gaze at 25 000 rare vintages that spend centuries maturing in there behind the iron bars that secure them.
I mentioned to Webb during the evening that my first experience of riesling was actually at Thelema and I recall it tasting quite different from the rieslings I’ve subsequently sampled in Germany. He said that the Thelema riesling was the very first vineyard planted on Thelema, in 1984. The last vintage made from the grapes was in 2019 and then they pulled out the vineyard after harvest, planting cabernet franc in its place in 2020 – a varietal, he says, much more suited to the site.
“Riesling is a noble and internationally well-respected grape variety, but its sales are very low compared to other varieties such as sauvignon blanc and chardonnay,” he wrote in an email weeks after the event.
“I do not understand why that is, as it has no obvious flaws. I would think that the problem is that you need a very specific site to make a really good riesling (it doesn’t seem to work well in warm/hot sites), and hence it is just as easy to choose a less good riesling than it is to choose an excellent riesling. And I think this is highlighted by low demand in SA (where the climate is less suited to grow riesling; less popular) and the high demand in Germany (better climate; more popular).”
The wine and company both sparkling
At the Thelema tasting I met Florian Jaeger, who mentioned that his five-year-old son was conceived on a holiday in South Africa with his wife. A week later, the German and I were guests of Florian’s and his wife, Heike, on a tour of the largest sparkling wine producer in the world, hosted by a local chapter of the Lions Club. The president of that chapter is Dr. Kim Katja Brade, an oral surgeon who during her studies spent several weeks at Groote Schuur and Christiaan Barnard Hospitals in Cape Town.
At Florian and Heike’s home later that evening, he pulled out one glorious bottle after the next, beginning with sekt from Vaux and ending with red from Black Print (“they also have a fantastic sauvignon blanc”). He told us about some of his favourite local wineries and, at a session together at the wine fest a few weeks later, introduced us to Frank Nikolai and sekt from F. B. Schönleber.
If you’re new to German wines, the ones listed above and below are a superb bunch to get started with. Suffice it to say, at the end of the night we abandoned the car and took the bus home.
Nil
Manz
Knipser
Künstler
Bibo Runge (“great sparkling wine plus great people and you have to try their Revoluzzer wine”)
Dönnhoff (“our pinot gris was from this winery”)
Sohns
Bottle paillard
In Würzburg, a city encased by hills lined with vineyards, the wine bottles look like fat pancakes.
It’s the first place I’ve encountered a vending machine for wine.
It’s also the first time I’ve seen a “freestyle” menu at a restaurant. At the one Michelin starred-Reisers, three, four or five-course options are constructed around combinations of goats cheese, purple curry, lavender, wild cauliflower, olive, wild shrimp, vanilla, bouchot clam, black garlic, veal sweetbread, meagerfish, corn, potato dumpling, tomato, apricot, flank steak, paprika, mint, pea, red currant, bergamot and eggplant. These 22 ingredients alone constitute the menu.
I’d heard a lot about the Franconian demeanour not being the warmest, to put it demurely, and was given a masterclass when we popped into the slick, glass wine tasting and sales area at Weingut am Stein opposite Reisers. One of the sparkling wines there is called “Trouble Bubble”. The alcohol-free version is “No Trouble Bubble”. I wrote to South African-turned-Franconian Shaun Behrens afterwards that the guy manning the tasting counter could have told us to bugger off and it wouldn’t have come as a surprise after that interaction.
Behrens and his wife left Johannesburg 15 years ago. They lived in Würzburg for a while before moving to a village in the Franconian countryside, about 40kms from Nuremberg. Three years ago he started a podcast called The Germany Experience. If I had to take the Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire, my answer to the question “What do you most value in your friends?” would be the ability to make me see things from a different point of view. The conversations on his podcast do that.
Lastly, at the risk of repeating myself, it’s the first time I’ve seen a mixed use development where a company’s hospital (krankenhaus) shares equal billing and square metreage with its wine bar (weinstuben).
The Aachen prescription
In the achingly quaint old toytown of Aachen, one can’t toss a printe without hitting a cake shop. These ginger cookies, alternately plain or dipped in a variety of chocolate or yoghurt coatings, are similar to lebkuchen but unlike lebkuchen, which usually only make their appearance countrywide around Christmastime and tend to be soft and doughy, printen are available year round and are hard and crunchy. They’re also a geographically protected confection and available only in Aachen. And they really are available. It’s difficult to round a street corner in this town without spotting a window display that’s wall to wall biscuit.
At a requisite afternoon stop at Café Van Den Daele, the oldest cafe in Aachen, where a statue of a little girl outside grasps a giant printe, a friend who grew up in Aachen and was in town that weekend ordered a rice pudding-filled Belgischer reisfladen. According to Markus, the cake is originally from Belgium and its reach is typically limited to the region of east Belgium, the Dutch province of Limburg, and Aachen. “Nice example of cross-border culture, I guess,” he said.
Aachen is the westernmost city in Germany and it borders the Netherlands and Belgium. According to food blog, Herd(s)Kasper, if you encounter one of these cakes “with a relatively uniform, fluffy-brown surface, then this is an Aachener”.
“One thing I’ve really loved here is the bakeries. Sometimes I feel like a little kid in a candy store but, like, I’m a big kid in a bakery.” This is a quote from Lawin Ileto speaking on an episode of The Expat Cast. Ileto is from the Philippines. After studying in the nearby Dutch city of Maastricht, he is now based in Aachen where he has started his own podcast.
He mentioned there were two bakeries opposite each other on the street where he lives. Out of interest, I asked him which ones. “Nobis Printen and Kickartz," he replied. “They both have multiple locations, with Nobis Printen being the main bakery in Aachen. A couple of smaller ones, but these two along with Moss are the big bakeries in the city. Plus they can only be found in Aachen and the nearby towns.”
Since 1998, Aachen and Cape Town have had a city-to-city partnership, although from what I’ve deduced from the Cape Town city council about that, it doesn’t involve the opening of any of these German bakeries or cake shops in my home town.
Supplying the fillings, creams, gels and glazes for this smorgasbord of patisserie, spreads and confectionery company Zentis is headquartered here, along with another global confectionery manufacturer. The town house pictured below was built as a pharmacy in 1663 (it was renovated in the late 1700s to look like it does today, and continued to be used as a pharmacy). In those days, the pharmacist prescribed chocolate to cure ailments or fatigue. Today one can head over to the Lindt factory outlet in Aachen to fill one’s own prescription.
Bach and his beer
Leipzig is a city with some heavy-hitting musical and literary associations. Richard Wagner was born there. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy died there. Johann Sebastian Bach worked there. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe set a scene from one of his plays there. When he wasn’t composing masterpieces or fathering offspring, Bach drank Gose (reputedly four pints a day on average).
“Gose has a particular salty coriander flavour that, depending on your point of view, is either an acquired taste or a revolting blend of last night’s dregs and the washing-up bowl,” writes James Runcie in the Financial Times. “It’s said to be aphrodisiac, especially when taken with a dash of cherry liqueur but perhaps people only agree to the sex as an excuse to stop drinking it.”
The musos probably munched on Leipziger Lerche, little pies made then with lerchen (larks) until their mass consumption led to the decimation of the local songbird population. Now they’re made of marzipan with a blob of cherry jam or a whole glazed cherry in the centre, supposedly to symbolise the heart of the lark.
While Starbucks wasn’t around in their day, presumably if it had been they would have enjoyed a cuppa here. A room that in non-European countries would be the venue for grand gatherings and state events, in Leipzig is located in the train station and houses a branch of the ubiquitous American coffee shop.
Notes from the archive
Wagner, Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Bach knew their way around a piano. Me, not so much.
Originally published in the Cape Times in 2014
I have a bad habit of choosing music teachers based on their looks. This has not resulted in my becoming a virtuoso or the girlfriend of a gorgeous musician, so I don’t recommend it as a strategy. In university, I took drumming for a semester. This wasn’t some hippy-dippy establishment where that counted as an academic requirement, but it was the sort of place that recognised tertiary education is supposed to be fun and varied, and so it offered classes such as “Drum Kit 101” to supplement one’s course load.
Having said that, there was a school in my university that offered courses with titles such as “The Experience of Childhood” or “The Meaning of Silence”. One of my roommates was in that school. Her major was tap dance. I foolishly selected the school where numeric subjects were mandatory – even when my major was journalism. For someone like me, who turns into an instant halfwit the minute a calculation is involved, that degree was hard-earned.
In the music fraternity, drummers are the butt of every other musician’s jokes. I’ve discovered this from actual musicians, since I am not a member of that fraternity just yet. What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A drummer. What’s the best way to confuse a drummer? Put a sheet of music in front of him. You get the picture.
Having actually attempted to learn how to play the drums, I will say that I think drummers get a bad rap. It’s certainly not easy. It’s tapping your head and rubbing your tummy amplified by a thousand.
Now I’m learning the piano. I had one lesson about twelve years ago. Locating Middle C I had down pat and now it was time to learn a bit more. So after going to a concert a few months ago starring a pianist who would not look out of place in a GQ fashion spread, I decided to ask him to teach me. He didn’t teach beginners, he said, but he was willing to give it a go.
Our first lesson consisted of us chatting. I did not lay one finger on one key. When he asked me what I wanted to learn, I said I wouldn’t mind learning Fly Me To The Moon – a jokey reference to having heard the student before me playing it while I was waiting outside. He spun round to his computer, printed it out and spun back to the piano. After a most splendid private performance of that and of I Could Write A Book – another of my all-time favourite jazz standards that I said I wanted to learn – he handed me both pages of printed sheet music.
“Right,” he said. “Figure these out for next week.” I took the sheets and chuckled. Then it became clear he was serious. That he had never taught a beginner before was now glaringly obvious. My expression must have morphed into perplexed as he then said, “A good teacher teaches a student how to teach herself.” That’s quite a good tack, I thought. I could also become a piano teacher on that basis, not to mention a drumming one.
Suffice it to say I came to my senses and tracked down a teacher who could actually teach me. So with some practical instruction and a piano stool upholstered in chartreuse leopard print, I’m bound to turn into Liberace any day now.
Addendum to last month’s newsletter
It turns out Jason Starmer is spot on when he says, “it’s a small world, this Berlin food scene, it seems”. At Le Slam, the restaurant in Berlin where food critic Jane Silver suggested we meet last month, she raved about Starmer and his brunch eatery, Two Trick Pony (TTP). Once I had published the interviews with Silver and Starmer, he got in touch to say that “bizarrely and coincidentally”, Patrick Blasa, the man behind Le Slam, had filled in briefly last year at TTP when another staffer was on leave.
Blasa said: “Since I left The California Breakfast Slam in 2017 (I’m from LA, therefore the name), I decided I should learn how to do catering and work in other eateries to better myself in kitchen organization. I’d been working different stints at different day places like TTP, 19grams and Daluma, all with varying menus and interesting ways of offering, but also people solidly running the kitchens. I’d also been out of gastro for the Covid years, so working in places this year seemed like a good way to slowly feel my way back in, and see what people are doing.”
That’s it till next month when I’ll be back in South Africa. That newsletter will feature a long overdue story on the ever-expanding food scene in the bucolic Western Cape Overberg town of Greyton.
Till then, may your biscuits be crunchy and your bubbles all trouble.
Nicely written & good photos, really enjoyed it! Proud to have made it into your newsletter 😊. Markus
Love your interesting subjects Dominique. And the photos. And the peek into your life. ❤️