When you make wine, you harvest the grapes, press them and let them sit around while the yeast does its job on the sugar in the murky brew.
This what Kurt Vonnegut had to say about it all in “Breakfast of Champions”
“Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. They killed themselves by destroying their environment.
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”
But if you get in quickly, you can get Federweisser before everything gets too alcoholic and the yeasties shit themselves to death..
Murky, not too sweet, not too acidic and just the the thing to wash down a decent-sized slice of Zwiebelkuchen (onion flan)
Standard fare in virtually every wine bar around here from September until well into October.
(Which means you’ve just missed it…)
Wildly varying quality and price, so I suggested to the regional newspaper, the Mainzer Allgemeine Zeitung, a few years back that they did a not-very-serious series, comparing the various offerings on parameters other than taste – price per square centimetre, thickness of the base compared with topping, base sogginess index, that sort of stuff.
“Oh, no, we couldn’t do THAT! We might OFFEND someone”
I might get round to doing it myself at some stage….
In the meantime, here’s one that’s pretty much at the top of the heap.
We use pizza dough, which stays thin and crisp, and the topping comprises Vidalia-ish onions, 3 eggs, creme fraiche, creme double and pancetta.
And I get to eat the leftovers for lunch.
Lucky me..
Mainz Daily Photo 