Lessons From Germany: On Culture, Craft, and Winemaking as Narrator

Peace y’all,

Guten tag from Berlin.

I’ve spent the last week or so in Germany. Most of my time has been in the southwest region based in Mainz, founded centuries ago as part of Ancient Rome and now the capital of Rhineland-Palatinate. Hosted by the German Wine Institute and my friends at Karakterre, I joined a global crew of writers, journalists, restauranteurs, and wine program directors at a series of wine fairs and visiting producers who are innovating practices in how they think about, grow, and make wine.

We were welcomed into the homes, cellars, and tasting rooms of producers like Schäetzl, Odinstal, Piri Naturel, Brand Bros, Glow Glow, and Georg Lingenfelder, all of whom I hope to see fully represented in the New York market (and throughout the U.S.) soon. We tumbled into and out of vans, buses, and rideshares day after day, hiking up slopes, digging into soil, getting fussed at by the occasional rural cyclist, and watching sheep watch us. I managed to get carsick only once.

(A mysterious, grey-haired, wears-shades-in-the-nightime NYC man of means joined the trip toward the end and he explained to me how to avoid getting carsick, by sitting in the front and keeping your eyes on the road. Mind you, this was after a brief ride where I’d directly asked him if he would mind changing seats so that I could—ahem—sit in the front passenger seat to avoid becoming car sick. I put my hand on his shoulder and essentially told him quietly that while I was born on a Saturday, it was not, in fact, last Saturday. I don’t know why, men.)

I’ll share more details about my time in Deutschland in the near future. For now I’ll say that I’ve been noticing more intimately how the vestiges of war continue to shape terrain, farming practices, and infrastructure, even 90-plus years after treaties were signed and troops returned home.

Christine Pieroth, the young producer of Piri Naturel, drove us to her sloped vineyard with a stunning view of the valley floor. She pointed in the direction of the nearby Rhine river, and shared how locals are now required to pay for the ferry to traverse it, even for the local agricultural workers who need to make multiple trips for their work. “We used to have bridges,” she said, almost offhand. “But they were blown up in the war.”

I was taken by the notion that 1) she could casually account for a time when transportation infrastructure affected how the land was managed decades prior to her birth, and 2) that a bridge or two wouldn’t be rebuilt even eight-plus decades later, especially when communities seem to have a pressing need.

But I knew my instant thought revealed a lack of experience, as I have never lived in a region blown to bits and ashes once over several years, then again a few years later. It can be easy to look across a verdant landscape on a clear, sunny day and oversimplify the decisions had to make at the time they had to make them. After a generation or two, you end up with a population who never had a cultural memory of a bridge to begin with. For them, there is nothing to miss.

Perhaps the community didn’t rebuilt because they were too devastated by the losses of the war, locked in grief and bewilderment. Perhaps it was a combination of a massive loss of residents (as in, a brain drain), or a lack of budget to redevelop rural areas when the focus was on rebuilding city centers and sites of major commerce. In the parlance of my familial lineage, You got bridge money? Probably not if the world has isolated and sanctioned your homeland, and the result of the defeated government creates political divisions that would last (at least symbolically) until 1989.

I’m closing out my time in Berlin with a focus on art and history. I just came from the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where their current exhibit is Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations From Cannon Fodder to Avant-Garde—The Forgotten Soldiers Who Freed Europe. The photographer Dawoud Bey recommended the exhibit to me; he’s here as a recipient of the Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy of Berlin.

The show is a moving tribute across mediums showcasing the remembrances, artifacts, and memory of the African and Asian people whose countries were extracted from to create modern, twentieth-century Europe, then used to absorb the first-wave shocks of battle in countries they didn’t have the right to live in. I’d understood that people from the colonies were rigorously deployed, but I hadn’t been aware of the degree of displacement. I watched a video recording of a Vietnamese woman who ended up in Senegal as a result of all the war-machining, an Angolan woman who fought for local independence in disputes stimulated by the conflicts in Europe, and heard a gutting lament recorded in the first World War by a Senegalese solider.

I’ve appreciated allowing myself to experience this country in present day, even while the architecture, street names, and evolving maps mirror a cultural memory that’s been ingrained in so many of us. The German Wine Institute coordinated a tour for the group in the city center of Mainz. While walking through a historic district, our guide Helga said the city was bombed to smithereens during the wars. Was it a strategic stronghold for the Third Reich, I asked?

“No,” she said. “But the Allies had no choice.” These wars were as much about defeating spirit as they were intended to defeat a tyrant and his armies. All this on the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s nuclear disaster in Chernobyl (now Ukraine), where a complex web of lies and obfuscation attempted to conceal a K-Mart quality nuclear reactor program that cost the lives and futures of thousands. (The Russian official casualty count remains at a mere 31.)

I just watched the Chernobyl series on HBO before arriving in Germany. It’s a difficult viewing. I suppose I wanted to see evidence of life going on after absolute, manmade disaster, although I realize the proof is all of us being here, moment to moment. War leaves permanent changes in our terrain, which shapes where and how we live, what we make and for whom, and ultimately the story we tell about all of it. My takeaway from being with the wine growers is that the greatest proof of life is to continue to make what matters to us, and to create with the belief that surely, a future someone will want to do the same. ⭑