Kreuznacher

Last week I saw a wine which reminded me of one of my first major wine encounters. The wine was the 2007 Paul Anheuser Kreuznacher Mönchberg Scheurebe - not a wine I've had before actually, and in the end, not particularly good - oh, it had Scheurebe's characteristic black-fruitedness and grapefruit, but the palate was just too soft and flabby. It was the Kreuznacher that drew me in.

At the end of 1998, I spent my first graduate school winter break traveling around Germany seeing friends, old and new - one, a high-school foreign-exchange student classmate, another a German friend I met in Korea, and also some folks I had only just met at Oxford. One of these classmates, S., invited me to spend Christmas itself with his family, who lived in the district of Bad Kreuznach, in the village of Feilbingert.


Feilbingert is just one of many wine-growing villages in the region of Nahe, and I can't say if it is particularly famous for that, but nonetheless, it is what they do. And it happened that S.'s mother's boyfriend was a winemaker in Feilbingert. What I remember of those few days in Feilbingert is hazy - it started out with an afternoon tour of the winery, followed by a drive through the vineyards to the neighbouring village for the Christmas service.


Feilbingert was apparently so small that the minister was shared amongst a couple of other local villages. It was all very charming and rustic, but perhaps I should have taken warning by the fact that my S.'s family did not join us. For when we returned, they were assembled around the cellar hatch, from which cases - not just bottles - of sekt would appear, and disappear with alarming frequency. There is little evidence of the proceedings from that evening, apart from these two photos, taken in S.'s mum's kitchen, as we sat around drinking apricot brandy at 5AM on Christmas morning:


The rubber eye is relevant, as S.'s sister was an ophthalmologist, who ended up being so, um, caught up in the Christmas spirit, that she managed to fall down the stairs and lose a contact lens behind her eye and had to, embarrassingly I'm sure, have it emergently extracted at the hospital she worked at. And all that glorious hair!


Meanwhile, having concluded my ode to blumenkohl, I would wake up a few hours later with the mother of all hangovers. S. and I were in no condition to face the world, let alone a sumptuous Christmas lunch, or the compendium of Udo Jürgens tunes I received as a gag gift.



Instead, we were driven back to Bad Kreuznach and delivered to the local sanitarium to soak in the region's famed salt baths. As we sat in the outdoor hot salt bath, with the wind and snow whipping across what little of our heads remained exposed, I recall using for the first time the expression, "feeling delicate" to describe my general sense of being. I won't soon forget the look of the bath attendant's face when I crawled into a tanning booth to receive some restorative UV.

Nor will I forget my hosts' wistful look of "perhaps having laid it on a bit thick" when I announced my approval of "traditional German Christmases."

Outstanding!