Grape Pretenders - Munich has been outed as Germany’s secret wine capital

... The trend has taken off to such an extent that Munich-based wine guru Bernhard Messmer has decided to launch a series of wine events and seminars in English, prompted by demand from Munich’s English-speaking community.
“It started when I was asked to run a course for Siemens staff in English,” says Messmer, who grew up among the vines of Germany’s Palatinate (Pfalz) region, where his family runs a successful winery. “Since then, I’ve been approached several times by individuals from the international community keen to learn that bit more and enhance their wine enjoyment.” As a result, the founder of wine-experience business www.einfachgeniessen.de has teamed up with the ess-art cookery studio in Schwabing and this month, they launch their English-language wine and cookery courses (the first takes place on June 24 and costs € 90). Messmer is also organizing English-language wine-tasting sessions and courses aimed at sharpening people’s tasting sense (July 5, € 33). To register, check out the aforementioned Website.
Messmer’s strategy is a good example of the sort of initiatives undertaken by the German wine industry in general to boost a reputation that had fallen victim to a severe lack of inspiration. Having rested on their laurels too long, German growers began to realize they could no longer expect internationally unknown wines with old-fashioned, complicated labels to be a success on what is an extremely dynamic, competitive market. Therefore, companies began redesigning labels and marketing the “wine experience” as a whole.
“When I started out, two years ago, I knew I had to offer something different,” says Messmer. “So I began running things such as wine-tasting games, wine and chocolate-matching sessions and wine and book-reading evenings.” ...