10/31/25 - 

It's always a special day when we get to write about wines made by someone truly close to us, in this case, a dear friend who enriched our lives while she was in New York City, and who went on to champion real wine at Restaurant Candide in Montreal before winding up in Austria and settling down in Germany, where she now makes delicious, soulful wines that we get to share with you today! Wein Goutte is the project of Christophe Müller and Emily Campeau and is a small winery and vegetable farm located in Franken, Germany. Emily, otherwise known as Emy, was the original Chef de Cuisine at the first iteration of Racines NY. During the first 6 months of Racines NY, I helped open the restaurant as the head bartender, and I got to experience firsthand Emy's passion for cooking, hospitality, and wine, and her infectious warmth and hilarious sense of humor that she shared with the staff and clientele. Now it's with great honor and excitement that I get to share her wines with folks near and far. These are bottles that I can imagine drinking happily with Emy and our friends, they are not precious or complicated, but they are by no means simple. Invigorating is a word that comes to mind! 
-Eben Lillie

I was more recently introduced to the ethereal, precise, yet playful wines of Emy Campeau. In a tasting last week of her lineup that just arrived in New York there was a clear vision and style across the four wines. For those who are familiar with her wines, a heads up that she makes slightly different blends each year and changes the cuvee names so here's a little guide to help! 

Pasta Buzz became What Time is too Late to go to Bed
Snapping Crocodile became If Only If Only
Beach Goth is most similar to Newstalgia Rotling (but a light red instead of a rose)
Du Bist Du became Schlado

Each new cuvee isn't an exact match to last year's wines but an outline. It is important to note when talking about these wines that aside from a 100% Silvaner, all the other bottlings are blends. The Rotling combines 50/50 Muller-Thurgau and Domina to create a fresh, joyful, light red, and for What Time is too Late to go to Bed and Schlado, each individual grape is fermented and aged separately before being blended together. Their importer Stephen Bitterolf describes it perfectly, "I do think Emily and Christoph think about combining, about blending, about composing wines in a way that is not unlike how chefs think about composing dishes with the ingredients they have. And so the wines we have, year after year, are tweaks on blends in the way a chef tweaks a dish, always searching for that elusive…  something." And what more could we expect from two chefs turned winemakers! The quantities for this vintage are incredibly limited so keep that in mind.     

To continue our journey into Franken, we have the energetic wines of Andi Weigand. Andi's father was the first in his family to make wine and when Andi took over the family vines he made the conversion to organic farming and natural winemaking. Almost a decade into winemaking, Andi has shown his skill at making bright, complex, fun wines. Today we offer a trio of white wines (one with a bit of skin contact) that are distinctive and playful. Zusammen is a wine made in collaboration with his importer Jenny Lefcourt, and means "together," relating to their teamwork and the wine being a blend of indigenous grapes, 45% Scheurebe, 25% Riesling, 20% Muller-Thurgau and 10% Silvaner. This is an incredibly lively, zippy wine with notes of peaches and apricots that move towards lemon. Amphora is a blend of Muller-Thurgau and Bacchus from 30+ year old vines. Everything is hand picked and then macerated as whole bunches for 9 months in amphora before being pressed. Super textural and playful with tart fruit, and a little popcorn! Just a full flavor, tasty, playful wine. Lastly is his Silvaner, from 50+ year old vines on Keuper soil. Grapes are hand harvested then direct pressed to 10-year old 1250 liter barrels, spontaneously fermented and then left on the lees for 10 months. The nose is full of light white flowers. It is fresh and lifted with a lot of depth - a really beautiful representation for silvaner!
 
-Hanna Krilov Cohen 

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