Tall, blonde, and under his John Deere baseball cap, beaming, Dirk Würtz does wine in a former water mill in the now tranquil village of Gau-Odernheim, Rheinland-Pfalz.
Würtz describes himself as a ‘Web 2.0 nerd and avid Twitterer’ – he in fact started the Twitter Wine Awards, endorsed by the German Wine Institute. But Würtz’s blog came first – an antidote to boredom and despair during hospitalisation. Perhaps quizzing him on the cause – a horrendous cycling accident which wasted the muscles of his leg – was misguided whilst trying to take his photo. Seeing his smile momentarily disappear whilst recounting the details as like watching a dismal cloud eclipse the sun. Fortunately, he soon bounced back, as this image attests.
Bladder Pack vs. Bottle
Until social media found him many followers at home, Würtz focussed almost entirely on export and Scandinavia is still Wuertz-Wein’s key market. Not only is his crisp style of organic riesling a slender bedfellow with Nordic cuisine, but over Brits and Germans, Scandinavians are far more open-minded to how it’s transported, rarely acting the snob over the ‘bag in box’ (aka. bladder pack).
On the plus side, the format requires 90p/c less CO2 then glass and may be packed in tighter when shipping in container. On the minus side, shelf life is shorter. Würtz, who is a proud keeper of biodynamically farmed cows also drew my attention to Werner Boote’s ‘Plastic Planet’, a shock-doc depicting entire islands spontaneously formed of coagulated waste plastic.
Realising the wine’s place in the market, Würtz said: ‘it’s just a beverage,’ adding: ‘there’s really no need for another first growth here!’
‘Riesling Love Song‘
As he celebrates two years blogging this month, Würtz confessed to rather liking the offline aspect of his online fame. Notably, ‘King Cocktail’, Dale de Groff lunged into the lyrics of Würtz’s ‘Riesling Love Song’ on noticing him in a SoHo bar. ‘All of a sudden people think I’m important,’ he said, briefly pausing. I sensed cogs begin to grind in his brain. ‘I wonder if there’s money to be made in the blog? But I’ll stay authentic – you have to or you’re fucked…’
Intriguingly, Würtz consults for another winery, Balthasar Ress. An idea which courted much publicity was to lay 200 magnums of special cuvée, ‘Resspekt’ 14 metres deep in a lake for three years. That was in June. Already, half have been auctioned on E-bay. ‘We might have to be careful of divers,’ he half joked.