Weird and wonderful – probably my favorite reaction from a lady tasting our 2013 Heimat Silvaner at the the RAW. In case you don’t know it: the RAW is a fair for natural / low intervention wines which took place in London for the third time last weekend. And after attending as visitors the first two years we returned as producers this time.
I have to confess it was a little scary, at least in the beginning. Being the newbie showing the first two wines while colleagues across the hall discuss the impact of different vineyard greening for different vintages. Phew. Thank god the natural winemaking community is a very friendly and open one. So it was just again a great opportunity to listen and learn. You might remember me thinking about stirring the wine in the barrel? I got some excellent input from the Austrian winemaker Karl Schnabel who makes his whites in a very similar way.
Having Oskar with us we shared table duty and baby care time. With quite a bit of overlap as Oskar seemed to enjoy the fair as much as we did.
We had a small but very pretty flat in East London allowing us to walk to the fair which was taking place at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. So how did it go?
Short answer: pretty damn good. Traders, importers, bloggers, journalists, sommeliers, sommelières and winelovers gave so much positive feedback – we are still stunned. We did a very encouraging tasting the day before the fair at “our” old wineshop in Archway / Tufnell Park, the Theatre of Wine. Jason, the store manager, seemed a little skeptical in the beginning but then quite amazed by what he got in the glass. I remember him indicating ginger and camomille tasting our Silvaner, I think there was “clear and delicate” as well. He recommended chilling our red a little to support its freshness – which we did for the whole rest of the fair.
@voelker @RAWfair And we're faithfully polishing them off! Thanks for bringing them to taste. Great things to follow! pic.twitter.com/bhzwvP4CEK
— Theatre of Wine (@theatreofwine) May 17, 2014
For the Silvaner we often heard things like “creamy”, “fresh”, “surprising” and – my favorite – “weird and wonderful”. The Regent had a good time with its super light 11,5% alcohol (it was really hot in London and the Truman Brewery worked as a greenhouse), the fresh cherries and the little fizz it has as a young wine. It did find a lot more friends than I quite frankly expected.
And while we got fantastic feedback from London’s wine loving hipsters, seriously interested wine professionals were mostly coming from Scandinavia. It’s going to take a few weeks to see where it goes and we can’t wait to share with you where our wine is going to end up!
Last but not least it was extremely exciting to meet so many people reading our blog, following me on Instagram (hey Paul!) or on Twitter coming to our table to say hi and have a sip. We’re thrilled to have readers & friends like you. And nobody can summarize our feelings better than the little one.
