It’s about time for a love story, involving wine, a rather large vegetable garden and two ex-chefs.
As I begin another producer profile, I feel like I have to apologize for, once again, the rather circuitous route to the wines. Or, correcting my own instinct to apologize for everything, I have to point out, once again, that the people really are the wines.
That’s a clumsy intellectual construction, perhaps, but it’s true in ways that are hard to articulate.
Emily Campeau – one half of Wein Goutte – I met many years ago, not at Racines in New York City where she was the opening sous chef under Frédérick Duca, but years later, after she had moved back to her native Canada to work as the wine director for the inspired Restaurant Candide in Montreal. (She in fact remains the wine director at the inspired Restaurant Candide in Montreal, even though she lives in Franken, Germany, though we’ll get to that.)
She was a German wine dork, I was a German wine dork. She had no problem telling me exactly what she thought of any wine, person (including me), idea, recipe, musician, artist, affect, phrase, etc. And I very much like people with very specific thoughts on everything.
We have been friends ever since and when she told me I should get the hell up to Montreal to check out the wine scene there, I listened. Emily is the reason we trade in some very rare and beautiful wines from around Canada.
Emily left for Austria in 2018 to work a harvest there and met a kind bear of a man (a German in fact) named Christoph Müller who was at the time part of the cellar team at Weninger in Austria’s Burgenland. Christoph is also an ex-chef and they fell in love over wine and food.
There they started their wine project – Wein Goutte – and made a very little bit of wine in 2019. We imported a very little bit of this wine.
Looking to expand, to deepen and to broaden their interaction(s) with the soil, they happened to find a small winery with a large garden in the eastern part of Franken – not all that far from the tiny village of Iphofen with its famous sites and exploding flower boxes that remind one of Alsace. An older couple had farmed both the vegetable gardens and the vineyards organically for well over three decades and, well, they wanted some help.
So Christoph and Emily live something of a fairy tale life there now, though this fairy tale includes perhaps more manure and home-made vermouth than most. They are working the vineyards, tending a rather large vegetable garden producing and selling, among other things, vermouths, ciders and wines, but also schnapps and vegetables, fruit and herbs.
In other words, this is a farm as much as it is a winery.
Now, around two years at their new house, with their new gardens and vineyards, they are just beginning to feel at home. And you can taste it.
As we deal more in wine than vegetables (at least as a business and this is only a matter of bureaucracy), vintage 2021 represents their first vintage in Franken, which, when you really think about it, is truly exciting.
This is watching – tasting – the first lines of a long story being written, in real time.
It’s a concise set of wines for this vintage: a still and sparkling apple cider, two whites, a rosé and one red. You can read about them, in depth, here.
The aesthetic is brisk, vibrant, punchy, with a lightness yet structural severity that is for me, in many ways, the essence of Franconia. While Emily and Christoph are certainly working along many “natural wine” tenants, including longer lees contact, no filtering and lower sulfur usage, the wines are clear and even open for many days, they remain as fresh as, well, a garden.
