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It is not easy to find the simple, the ordinary, the everyday, and to be happy when we have found it. We have long since banished it from our lives, we look for the extraordinary, the unique, the special and do not notice that the special has meanwhile also become everyday, at least ordinary. This life experience - no matter how precocious it may seem - also applies to the search for the best, the most extraordinary wines. I am sitting on the terrace of a castle, which has long since become a museum, in glorious autumn weather. In front of me is a glass of wine, further down is a small castle vineyard that has been replanted in recent years. Not a yield garden, but rather a reminiscence of the times when wine came to the area. But everything is dominated by an open landscape in which villages and hamlets nestle close together and wooded hills border the horizon. Above them the blue sky, lightly dipped in mist. Again, "drinking wine in beautiful places" comes to mind, and I spontaneously add: "drinking good wine in beautiful places".

Wartenfels Castle% Lostorf% Canton Solothurn% Switzerland; first mentioned in documents in the 13th century. (Photo: P. Züllig)

Is it really a good wine that I have in my glass? Certainly not a bad one, but rather an ordinary, everyday one, a country wine of the kind that can be found almost everywhere. The extraordinary is the place where I drink it; the extraordinary is probably also the vineyard from which the grapes come, a castle garden at my feet, and extraordinary - at least not everyday - are also the grape varieties: New varieties, so-called PIWIS, which were cultivated here - about 15 years ago: Cabernet Jura, Johanniter and Seyval Blanc. Is that enough for an exceptional wine experience? Or put another way: What must a wine be like, in this very special situation?

View of the vineyards of the castle (Photo: P. Züllig)

I think of the hustle and bustle at the wine auction the day before, where the top wines - the extraordinary ones - were chased with big money, while others, the ordinary ones - like a wine like this one - went unnoticed, quickly discarded as too ordinary, too mundane, not worth the money to invest. Are wines too - like so much, indeed almost everything in the world - to be divided into simple categories like "ordinary" and "extraordinary"? If you measure their value by their prices, by the scale of wine evaluation (which is always reflected in the price), then that may be true: They exist, the nameless and the famous, the ordinary and the special. I think of my wine cellar, of the visits of wine friends, of yesterday's wine auction, everywhere everything revolves around the special: especially good, especially expensive, especially rare, especially valuable a wine must be. Only then can it survive, where wine has become a cult quantity, a prestige object or a return on investment.

Auction of the "Weinbörse" in Zurich (Photo: P. Züllig)

Yes, this little wine, from the small vineyard in front of the castle, the preserved witness of former power and greatness, carries me away with my thoughts, to questions that lead far beyond the wine codex. How much is the ordinary worth? And the extraordinary: How quickly does it become ordinary, commonplace? I look down into the valley where human works and values are increasingly displacing nature: Roads, houses, factories, factory buildings, railways... In the middle of it all, towering over everything, seemingly determining everything, the plant of a nuclear power station, with its huge cloud of steam pouring incessantly from the tower. My neighbour, with whom I toast the beautiful day, says: "I couldn't live here", and points his finger at the cooling tower.

Value order in the 21st century - visible from afar in the landscape (Photo: P. Züllig)

And again my thoughts revolve around the terms: Value and stock. The castle walls, which were once valuable to their owners, at least for a few centuries, were much more valuable than everything else that was built and created around them. But the old walls now only have museum value. The valuable thing (for the people of today) is, for example, the nuclear reactor that rises up in the middle of a rural living space down there, far larger and more dominant than the castle that was built on the mountain specifically for representation - witness to the values of that time. My thoughts return from the "great values" to the "small wine" and thus to all the "small wines" that I have already drunk and will still drink. They document and guarantee the existence of wine culture, as an agricultural product that has been refined and refined through the centuries, but ultimately has remained the same.

"Wartenfelser"% the small wine from the small castle garden (Photo: P. Züllig)

The Schlossrebberg is back, not much different from 100 or more years ago. The vines produce fruit, grapes from which wine is made, not much different than centuries before. How valuable the product - the wine - is, is determined solely by the value thinking of people, who mostly no longer perceive the ordinary and almost always hunt for the extraordinary. What happens when we stop this hunt, when we recognise and acknowledge what is special about the ordinary? When we give it a value again? My "little wine" in the glass is now drunk, I return to the material world. The wine is called "Wartenfelser", vintage 2013, grape varieties Johanniter and Seyval Blanc. There are not much more than 1,000 bottles of it, it is only marketed in this region and costs around 16 Swiss francs; brief description: fine to strong bouquet, racy, harmonious, reminiscent of Riesling and Pinot gris. Parker points: none, of course. Almost the usual! But in my mind I stay with the special, with the uniqueness of this ordinary wine. I know that it was already grown here in the 13th century and was probably drunk by Wernher von Wartenfels, the lord of the castle. The conviction is growing in me that every "little wine" also carries the special (whatever that may be) within itself and would deserve (more) attention. As Oscar Wilde said, "In the average (or ordinary) lies the stock."

Sincerely
Yours

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