Stories to Sip: Collective Wine Share
‘Wine Share’ is the perfect term for what we have going on here.
Over the past decade or so, we’ve met with dozens of wine distributors, most of whom we end up thanking for their time and moving on to the next. For the few that we have made a meaningful connection with there is one commonality, they all know their growers and can share personal stories about the families that make the wine, the vineyards where the wine is grown and the trials and tribulations that come with all of it. Through these relationships with our suppliers, we have had the opportunity to personally meet many of these growers, either at their wineries, as they visit the area, or at wine fairs. There is something about bridging the gap between just a bottle of wine and who and where that wine came from that completes the experience.
On a particularly rainy day in the Mittelrhein, a tiny region in Germany, I was visiting the Ratzenberger family and tasting through their wines when the proprietor told us he had to go to a school function for his daughter, but one of his vineyard workers would show us the vineyards. Only three problems: the vineyard worker didn’t speak English (and we didn’t speak German), he didn’t drive, so it was up to us to drive a massive, manual sprinter van. The third problem was that the roads we were driving on were a single lane, bracketed by vineyards that on one side rose nearly straight up and on the other, dropped nearly straight down. Between my traveling companion and me, I was the more experienced driver of manual transmission vehicles, so I took the wheel and white knuckled it through some of the most dramatic and beautiful landscape I have ever seen. We ended up back in the village safely, where we thanked our tour guide and went to dinner, where there was presumably a cocktail or three involved in debriefing on the experience. That drive through the vineyards of the Mittelrhein has cemented the wines of Weingut Ratzenberger as some that I go back to year after year. It also helps that they are incredibly delicious. It was a couple years later that a friend who had also visited the Ratzenbergers told me about the pile of tractors they have at the bottom of the vineyard that had been lost to rolling down the steep slopes...
It’s stories like this, either first, second or even third hand that make wine so special. It’s an agricultural product that translates personality, culture, history, geography and so much more. All of that is to say that we’ve got a lot of wine and wineries that we feel strongly about because they make compelling, singular wines and we know the people behind them or at least feel like we do because we’ve heard stories from the people who represent them. We want to share these wines with you and one of the best ways is through the Wine Share, where we find out what you like and match that with wines and wineries we love.
