Glow Glow "Four Fruits" Nahe, Germany 2023

FROM VOM BODEN:

THE CIDER: The apples and pears were harvested from an old orchard in the Hunsrück, their own trees around the winery, and a befriended local farmer. Together they were mashed, pressed, and mixed with fermenting grape must, then a shot of fresh quince juice (also from good pals) was added before bottling as a dosage (aka adding sugar to feed yeast and create C02, aka bubbles in the bottle!). Quince flavoured rockets, slightly bruised apple, voluminous sugar cone & a dissolved clay texture with feverish bubbles.

THE PRODUCER: After questioning many of the basic assumptions of their traditional family estate, daughter Pauline and son Carl Baumberger began in 2019 to experiment with a micro-production line of wines they would eventually call Glow Glow. It all began with two half-barrels. It was (and remains) a focused project, humble in scale, using fruit from the family’s vineyards in the tiny village of Mandel, nestled into one of the many overlooked and largely unknown side valleys of the Nahe. The kids had the very earnest desire to simply see what would happen if they employed organic farming, relied only on natural fermentations, combined grapes with more creativity and freedom, and bottled the wines unfiltered and with no sulfur.

This was one of the first “natural wine” projects in the Nahe, which is interesting when you consider that even in the rather staid and traditional Moselle, there exists a long list of contrarians and rebels going back three decades at least, from Trossen and Stein, to Thorsten Melsheimer and now to an ever-growing group of younger-generation growers just beginning their careers including Philip Lardot, Julien Renard, and Jakob Tennstedt to name only our favorites.

Glow Glow quickly went cult in Germany, marrying the punk-rock, kumbaya vibes of the natural wine world with bottles that were actually clean, balanced, representative of variety and place… and easy as hell to drink. As such, we look at anything cool with some trepidation. At some basic and probably shallow level, I don’t know if we thought of ourselves as quite hip enough to import wines called Glow Glow. But then we tasted the wines. And then there were Pauline and Carl just standing there smiling at us as we stood there smiling at them. Both of them somehow seemed to, well, glow. I have met few people (and then later, after we met the family, few families) who simply effuse goodness, sincerity, honesty… to a degree where it almost seems like a vulnerability, maybe a naiveite one could exploit – until you realize that it’s actually a profound strength.