What do people have against German wines?
That Germany produces some of the best wines in the world is incontestable. Winemaking in Germany is actually a much more highly skilled and up-market craft than the mass production wine businesses of France and Italy. German winemakers do not make wine for quaffing; there is plenty of beer for that purpose. They battle steep slopes, cold weather, and low crop yields to carefully produce a distinctive, individual, and refined wine. Most of the better German winemakers, for example, will not mix the grapes harvested from disparate parts of their vineyards, refusing to dilute their best wines. Not even Romanée-Conti or Chateau d’Yquem pursues such triage. Yet these wines languish in obscurity outside their homeland. Apart from a fading enthusiasm among the British for “Hock” (the generic term they use for German wine, after Hocheim, a town in the Rheingau region), there is little international interest in them. In the midst of a raging market for all sorts of unusual grape varieties (Mou
