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Wine and Food

Alexander van Dülmen

Month

March 2015

Merengö, St. Andrea, 2006

Merengö Egri Bikavér superior 2006, St. Andrea, Red wine from Hungary

6,5 points

My favorite Hungarian wine maker is St. Andrea (http://www.standrea.hu/). So far I haven’t had a chance to visit them, although this is a producer I would really like to get to know. They produce a variety of wines: white and red, from typical grapes of the Eger wine region in Hungary, but also Pinot Noir. Most of the wines of St. Andrea are cuvées.

While I’m a big fan of their Pinot Noir, the most prestigious and certainly also their top wine is called Merengö. It is a cuvée made from ca. 50% Kékfrankos, then Syrah, Merlot and Cabernet Franc.

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Weinbar Rutz, Berlin

Restaurant and Winebar in Berlin

7 points

As many of my friends know, my favorite restaurant in Berlin is WEINBAR RUTZ . There are hundreds of trendy places, a remarkable number of Michelin star restaurants in the city and probably some location with a lot of good wine as well. But there isn’t any other place comparable to this one.

It is an easy but unique concept as at the lower level you have rather a food-bar or tavern with slightly more basic but fantastic dishes along the motto “Save the German Food Culture”. You get blood sausages or some liverwurst or rutabaga stew or – at least at the moment “crispy haddock, chestnust, red cabbage and baked kale – but also just a solid “home” aged steak. All this usually is not served with a typical German beer but with the best mostly German (white) wines. You would only very seldom get such high quality wine by the glass anywhere else. This place offers you even sometime a Großes Gewächs (which is similar to a Grand Cru) by the glass and if you become a “friend” of the house, they might open a bottle just for you without letting you buy the entire bottle if you didn’t drink it. If you go for first floor, please ask for the table in front of the kitchen because then you can watch my friend Marco Müller preparing the plates with his amazing and always surprising culinary art and extraordinary taste experience. Here you encounter Chinese or other Asian flavors combined with regional ingredients and condiments. Marco is always spunky enough to present unusual and sometimes, I would say, experimental combinations of taste.

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Terra Soprana, Cucée MORE

Terra Soprana, 2012, Red wine from Portugal

bad
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This worthless cuvée is made of Portugese grapes: according to the back side label is Touriga Nacional, Castelâo and Trincadeira.

It tastes artificial, uninspired and just flat. Nothing really happens even if you wait some hours after opening it.

This wine isn’t some stuff from any winery in particular but probably shuffled together by some wine importeurs. If you’d like to read something about these types of wines, you can find some stuff at (http://www.cmweine.de/sortiment).

Jos. Christoffel Jr, Erdener Treppchen, Riesling Spätlese, 1996

Jos. Christoffel Jr, Erdener Treppchen, Riesling Spätlese, 1996, White wine from Germany

7 points

Yes you can keep white wine for decades: Many Mosel Rieslinge can be stored for years. Many of them get better.

This wine is such a classic that many people would think: “oh god, this looks like stuff my grandparents would have in their pantry: sweet German white wine which gives you a headache.

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Grignano, Chianti Rufina, 2010

Grignano, Chianti Rufina, 2010, Tuscany, 2010, Red wine from Italy

3,5 points

Even though this wine is already four to five years old, surprisingly you don’t really taste the aging. There isn’t maturity or richness and dry fruitiness you usually experience when you open a “red” from Toscana. It is rather fresh, still very young, somehow a bit sour but pretty full of its own character. You may like it or you may not, but this wine doesn’t deliver any kind of Mediterranean flair like sun, heat, dry earth or straw. With my limits of tasting I guess – in the case I would have to taste the wine blindly – I would even tend toward some flavors I associate with nebbiolo. Nebbiolo is a grape of Piedmont. If you translate Nebbiolio into German something like “nebelig” would be a reasonable translation. “Nebelig” means foggy or misty.

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