Dr Vino's wine blog

Guess which wine is sponsoring Fashion Week in New York? You might think that it would be part of a conglomerate with wine, handbags and scarves in the portfolio. But you’d be wrong. I’ll give you a hint: Heidi Klum.

That’s right, Wines of Germany will be this year’s wine sponsor according to this article in the NY Sun.

It’s not usually worth commenting on who’s sponsoring what (their ad dollars are speaking for them after all). But this year the fashionistas will be sipping on Kabinett, Spatlese, Auslese and Trockenbeerenauslese. Or will they?

German wine makers have been trying to make their labels easier to read. “People are tired of these Prussian-style labels. They say, ‘I don’t want to have a language barrier before I can drink.” Thomas Haehn, national sales director for Rudi Wiest Selections, the largest importer of German wines to the United States told the SF Chronicle in a story about the trend.

The Mosel-Saar-Rewur recently shortened its name to simply Mosel. And a new crop of wines, mostly entry level, are losing German altogether.

While it may be sweet for producers to target a larger, younger, global market, how will we know just how sweet the wine is without the olde tyme nomenclature? Since the word dry has been corrupted in the wine world I would propose another globally recognized form of communication: numbers. Tell us the grams of residual sugar on the back label. Now that’s something even the fashionistas could be interested in.

Related: last year they drank “eccotinis”
In case you don’t remember Sprockets