There’s a particular kind of madness in German wine writing.
It’s not the glossy Napa brochure fantasy, not the Tuscan sunset cliché.
It’s colder. More precise. A little obsessive. The kind of thing that comes from a country where people will argue for an hour about whether a Riesling is feinherb or halbtrocken and then go home and alphabetize their spice cabinet.

Now imagine all that Teutonic intensity filtered through one of Germany’s most serious newspapers—a place more associated with politics, economics, and the slow death of the European project than with vineyard dirt under the fingernails. That’s where the wine columns of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung come in.

And an anthology of those columns?
That’s not just a book.
That’s a passport into how a nation that invented bureaucracy also learned to fall in love—again and again—with fermented grape juice.

The Newspaper, the Nation, and the Grape

If you don’t know the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—FAZ to people who pretend they read it every day—it’s one of Germany’s heavyweight dailies. Conservative-leaning, serious, buttoned-up. The kind of paper you imagine being read with black coffee, a hard-boiled egg, and a low-level sense of existential dread about bond yields.

So why does a place like that bother with wine?

Because in Germany, wine isn’t just lifestyle fluff—it’s culture, agriculture, politics, identity, and history poured into a glass. The Mosel slopes aren’t just pretty; they’re economic risk, climate-change battlegrounds, and living archives of pre-war and post-war survival. The Rheingau isn’t just river views; it’s centuries of monasteries, aristocrats, and obsessive monks trying to figure out how to coax something transcendent out of thin-skinned grapes in a cold climate.

The FAZ wine columns sit at the intersection of all that. They’re not just tasting notes; they’re dispatches from a country that’s been quietly making some of the world’s most precise, soulful wines while everyone else was busy chasing over-oaked Chardonnay and jammy Cabernet.

An anthology of those columns is like a time capsule:
what Germans were drinking, what they were worrying about, what they were proud of, what they were ashamed of—and how all of that showed up in a glass of Riesling.

From Liebfraumilch to Redemption: The Long Hangover

German wine has a reputation problem, and it didn’t come from nowhere. For decades, the country’s global calling card was cheap, sugary garbage: Blue Nun, Liebfraumilch, and anonymous “Hock” that tasted like someone dissolved gummy bears in tap water. It was wine for people who didn’t really like wine.

The FAZ wine columns chart the slow, painful, and fascinating process of coming down from that long sugar high.

The Sweet Shame

The anthology’s older columns often read like therapy sessions. There’s this recurring tension between national pride in historic vineyards and deep embarrassment about what the world thinks German wine is. The writers wrestle with questions like:

• How did a country with 1,000-year-old vineyards get reduced to supermarket plonk?
• Why did producers chase volume and sweetness instead of character and place?
• Can you still defend the great noble sweet wines—Beerenauslese, Trockenbeerenauslese, Eiswein—without being lumped in with syrupy crap?

You can feel the writers trying to drag the national conversation out of the swamp of sugar and into something more honest, more grown-up.

The Dry Revolution

Then you see the turn. Columns from the late 1990s and 2000s start talking about trocken—dry wines—with evangelical zeal. The anthology traces how German producers, especially in places like the Rheingau, Pfalz, and Rheinhessen, began to reimagine themselves:

• Less “cute sweet wine from the cold north”
• More “razor-sharp, bone-dry Riesling with enough acidity to strip the enamel off your teeth—in a good way”

The FAZ writers document this swing: the internal fights, the generational clashes, the confusion of consumers who thought German wine = sweet. They talk to winemakers who ripped out high-yield vines, lowered production, and bet the farm on quality and dryness.

You don’t just read about changes in wine style; you see a whole country renegotiating its taste.

Riesling as National Mirror

If there’s a protagonist in these columns, it’s Riesling—not just as a grape, but as a symbol.

Riesling in Germany is like Pinot Noir in Burgundy or Nebbiolo in Piedmont: a neurotic, high-strung diva of a grape that reflects everything—soil, climate, vintage, winemaker mood, probably the phase of the moon. Get it right and it’s electric, crystalline, and haunting. Get it wrong and it’s sour or flabby or just depressing.

The anthology shows Riesling in all its split personalities:

• Steely and bone-dry from the Pfalz and Rheinhessen: wines that feel like licking wet stones and lemon pith.
• Delicately off-dry from the Mosel: low alcohol, high acid, a little sweetness riding shotgun—like a samurai sword wrapped in silk.
• Aged, petrol-scented unicorns from the Rheingau: the stuff that smells faintly of gas station and honey and old books, and somehow that’s a compliment.

The writers use Riesling to talk about bigger things: restraint versus excess, tradition versus innovation, the German love of precision, and the quiet thrill of something that doesn’t scream for attention but rewards patience.

You get vintage reports that read like war dispatches:

• “A cold, wet year where only the obsessively selective survived.”
• “A hot, ripe vintage that tempted everyone to make fat, obvious wines—but the best resisted.”

These aren’t just tasting notes. They’re moral fables, told through acidity and residual sugar.

Beyond Riesling: Pinot, Sekt, and the Quiet Overachievers

The anthology doesn’t stop at Riesling. The FAZ columnists drag the spotlight over some of Germany’s supporting actors—many of whom are now quietly stealing scenes.

Spätburgunder: The Pinot That Grew a Spine

Spätburgunder—German Pinot Noir—shows up in the columns first as a curiosity, then as a revelation. Early pieces are skeptical: “Can Germans really make serious red wine?” Later ones read like love letters to producers in Baden, the Ahr, and the Pfalz, who figured out that Pinot doesn’t need to cosplay as Burgundy to be great.

The writers talk about:

• The move away from over-extraction and heavy oak
• A new generation obsessed with elegance, tension, and terroir
• The sting of climate change making cooler regions like the Ahr suddenly red-wine-friendly—right up until catastrophic floods remind everyone how fragile it all is

Through Spätburgunder, you see Germany wrestling with red wine identity: not Bordeaux wannabe, not Burgundy copy, but something leaner, nervier, distinctly its own.

Sekt: From Afterthought to Serious Sparkle

Then there’s Sekt—German sparkling wine. For years it was the fizzy afterthought, the cheap party fuel. The FAZ columns chronicle its slow evolution from industrial filler to something producers can say out loud without blushing.

As the anthology moves forward, more and more space is given to:

• Grower Sekt made from estate fruit
• Traditional-method bottlings with long lees aging
• Bone-dry, structured wines that can stand next to Champagne without apologizing

You can feel the writers rooting for Sekt like it’s an underdog boxer finally learning how to throw a proper punch.

Wine as Culture, Not Decoration

What makes these columns—and their anthology—worth reading isn’t just the roll call of vineyards and vintages. It’s the way the FAZ writers treat wine as a cultural artifact, not just a beverage.

Food and Wine, German-Style

The columns dig into how wine fits into German eating habits, and it’s not all sausage and sauerkraut. There’s a real curiosity about:

• How dry Riesling cuts through pork belly and roast goose
• How off-dry wines handle the landmines of German cuisine: vinegar-based salads, pickled vegetables, mustard
• How Spätburgunder plays with game, mushrooms, and the deep, foresty flavors of German autumn

They write about wine at the table like it’s a conversation partner, not a prop. Sometimes it argues, sometimes it harmonizes, sometimes it just sits there and broods.

History in the Glass

The anthology also leans into history, and not in a sanitized, tourist-brochure way. You get columns that:

• Trace how war, land seizures, and border shifts carved up vineyard ownership
• Look at how the Nazi era distorted wine laws and cooperatives
• Examine post-war agricultural policy and its obsession with yield over character

There’s a quiet, unflinching acknowledgment: the story of German wine is tangled up with the story of German guilt, recovery, and reinvention. The vineyards don’t exist in some timeless postcard; they’re part of the same history that produced everything else in the country, good and bad.

The Voice: Serious Paper, Human Writers

You’d expect a newspaper like FAZ to write about wine like it’s tax code. And sometimes, yes, the German love of classification and detail is very much on display:

• Prädikat levels
• Oechsle degrees
• VDP hierarchies
• Village names that look like someone fell asleep on a keyboard

But what the anthology reveals is something else: personality.

Over time, you start to recognize different columnists by their quirks:

• The romantic, who waxes poetic about mist over the Mosel and late-harvest magic
• The skeptic, who calls out bullshit marketing, inflated scores, and oak abuse
• The historian, who can’t taste a wine without dragging in a century of context
• The pragmatist, who cares about what regular people can actually find and afford

They bicker—gently—on the page. They contradict each other. One year a vintage is “classic,” the next year another writer calls it “overrated.” That friction is the good stuff. It tells you this isn’t a monolithic voice; it’s a conversation.

Why This Anthology Matters (Even If You Don’t Speak German… Yet)

Why should anyone care about an anthology of wine columns from a serious German newspaper?

Because it’s a rare thing: a long, consistent, intelligent record of a wine culture waking up, looking in the mirror, and deciding to change.

Across the pages, you see:

• A country clawing its way back from the sugary abyss
• Winemakers risking their livelihoods to make better, more honest wines
• Journalists trying to educate readers without boring them to death
• A national grape—Riesling—slowly reclaiming its dignity on the world stage

You also get something wine books often lack: time. Most wine writing is snapshots—one vintage, one region, one trend. An anthology of columns is a film reel. You watch opinions evolve, producers rise and fall, styles shift, and anxieties change as climate, economics, and taste all move underfoot.

If you’re a wine nerd, this book is catnip.
If you’re a German wine skeptic, it’s a challenge.
If you’re just someone who likes to understand why things taste the way they do—not just how—it’s a roadmap.

And if you don’t read German? Maybe this is your excuse to start. Or at least to hunt down translations, excerpts, or to let it guide your buying: track down the producers and regions that keep showing up in those columns, the ones the writers return to again and again. The patterns tell you what matters.

The Takeaway in the Glass

In the end, what this anthology really does is remind you that wine is not a lifestyle accessory. It’s a living, changing, slightly chaotic intersection of:

• Weather
• Soil
• Human stubbornness
• History
• Regret
• Hope

The FAZ wine columns don’t pretend otherwise. They don’t treat wine as an escape from reality; they treat it as one of the sharpest lenses on reality. Through these pages, you watch Germany negotiate with its past, adapt to its present, and nervously taste its future.

So pour yourself a dry German Riesling—something with a bit of edge, maybe from a steep slope that looks like a bad idea until you taste the result. Take a sip. Think about how many years of trial, error, shame, pride, and ink went into that bottle being what it is, instead of what it used to be.

That’s what this anthology captures:
a culture, one column at a time, learning how to drink better—and, in the process, how to see itself more clearly.