About the Wine Rambler

Our Mission

The Wine Rambler was born out of curiosity and love for wine. German wine in particular. Writing from the UK and Germany, we bring together both local and international perspectives on German wine - wine that, as we strongly believe, is not only quite underrated beyond a small circle of wine professionals, but also much more diverse and fun than most people realise.

This seems to be particularly true of Kingsley Amis, who in 'Everyday Drinking' remarked: 'A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for, a daunting testimony to that peculiar nation's love of detail and organization.' We are here to show you that it can be well worth spending time on German wine as it is a pleasure, a miracle and also great fun - as is good wine in general, which is why we focus on, but do not restrict our wine ventures to, Germany.

Our History

Once upon a time two friends lived in the town of Munich. Their names were Julian and Torsten. Every once in a while they meet over wine and food to ramble on about this and that - mostly about German wine. These were happy times, until one day Torsten moved away, across the sea to the town of London. So all that was left to them was to meet up every once in a while, and in the meantime to share the occasional virtual drink and ramble. And after doing this via email for two years, a ramble over a good bottle of Riesling in mid-2009 gave birth to The Wine Rambler.

Ramblers We

So here we are, all about, to quote the late great Townes Van Zandt, 'lots of booze and lots of rambling'. We are not wine professionals and we do not believe in arguing whether a particular wine should be rated 84/100 or 85+. We just enjoy what we do and like to share it. We are well aware that rambling on about those intriguing mineral undertones of the 2001 Piesporter Goldtröpfchen Spätlese Riesling will make us sound like armchair-sitting, wine-sniffing snobs. Becoming that is in fact one of our goals in life.

Even worse, we are also historians by training, and we sometimes still make use of it. One of our role models, for instance, is the English diarist Samuel Pepys, who on Tuesday 2nd May 1665 in his famous diary exposed himself as a lover of German wine: 'to the Rhenish winehouse at the Steelyard'. So let's expose ourselves too:

Julian

My wine biography would have to begin around the year 2000, when, out of curiosity, I first set foot into the local franchise of a well-known German wine retail chain. Their selling point is that you can taste all of the wines they offer before buying. Having only ever had supermarket wine before, I was hooked immediately by the variety I found there. The really great thing about this chain, though, was that they had an extremely strenuous process of blind tasting every new vintage, selecting out of hundreds, nay, thousands of available wines the 20 to 30 that they were offering each year. Isn't that fantastic? After about two years, I started to wonder how a process like that could result in the exact same wines from the same wineries being chosen year after year. It's a mean trick to play on a naive person. Disappointed, but undaunted, I turned to the internet, specifically a German wine merchant who only, and I say only, dealt in stellar vines from miraculous vintages that they could offer at laughable prices. It took about the same amount of time for me to realise that...- well, you get the picture.

I am, today, still frighteningly gullible about wine and still, I hope, as curious. But it became clear to me at some point that, in order not to fall for each and every ruse of wine marketing, I would need some, maybe not expertise, but working knowledge of my own. That was when I decided that while I would not refuse any wine that brought itself to my attention, I would need some kind of focus, based on wine styles that had impressed me most so far. The first, as you can imagine, is Germany. More on that all over this site. My second love is French wine. I like the enormous regional variety there, the traditionalism of many wine styles, and the way wine is viewed as a part of a cultured life. I am even inspired by the utter arrogance with which the French look at other wine nations, as I figure that if I am ever to reach the stage of full-fledged wine snob, I too need to take the high road to it.

A historian by training, I work as an archivist for a Bavarian archive.

Torsten

My wine biography started at an early age, even though I only realised that more than two decades later. My dad had a keen interest in wine through his career in gastronomy, but I decided to grow up a Puritan, shunning the evils of alcohol. Eventually it was my love for cooking that made me think about wine as a food companion. Back then I was mostly influenced by a Zeitgeist that dictated that wine had to be dry; in Munich, it also had to be Italian (maybe French, maybe). Eventually it was a Riesling, a half-dry Kabinett from the Mosel paired with a Thai dish, to be specific, that made me see the errors of my ways. I wanted to learn more about this wine, and so I had to turn directly to the winery. And then I ordered my first case of wine. This made me realise that if one random wine could be exciting enough to overcome the lazy habit of buying from supermarkets, how much more excitement might be out there, waiting to be discovered?

I embarked on a mission to learn more about wine, following the example my dad had set years earlier. Specifically, I got interested in Riesling, as I learned to embrace the liveliness of acidity and the yummyness of sweetness that a good Riesling can bring to the table. Almost naturally, this led to an interest in German wine and a desire to understand it better. After I had moved to London I started to share what I had learned about German wine with British friends. To my surprise none of them had anything to teach me about English wine, which curiously made me more interested in looking into the lesser know wine countries. Among the established ones it was easy to fall in love with Austria, and it is impossible not to be fascinated by France. Some of the great Bordeaux blends, for instance, can still make me speechless. Having said that I tend to buy Spanish reds a little more often, especially as they are not priced beyond reach.

A historian by training like my co-Rambler, I work in information management and digital research in the humanities at a London university.

Afterthought

So here we are. Keen to learn more about wine. Keen to hear from you. And keen not to suffer the same fate as Samuel Pepys in that process, even though it may be inevitable:

I being much troubled to hear from Creed, that he was told at Salsbury that I am come to be a great swearer and drinker, though I know the contrary; but, Lord! to see how my late little drinking of wine is taken notice of by envious men to my disadvantage.
Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 27 September 1665