Wein Goutte: Don't Go to Bed With Unresolved Beef

Emy and I met for the first time in Montreal, I think it was in 2016. She was highly knowledgeable about wine and her enthusiasm was infectious. Since then, many many things have happened, and the French-Canadian sommeliere became almost my neighbour, creating their WeinGoutte winery (website / Insta) just across the border in Austria, before later moving to Germany.

Funnily enough, it feels like I actually ran into Emy more often before she moved to Central Europe – and that's part of why I was curious to learn about the journey she and Christoph had taken over the past ten years.

Mirroring the name of the Montréal restaurant whose wine program she ran for a while, Emy provided very Candide answers to our curious questions, and I hope you'll enjoy this wide-ranging yet in-depth conversation as much as we did!

Words by Milan Nestarec and Lucie Kohoutová – Photos courtesy of Wein Goutte / Katharina Pflug, Fannie Laurence, Sam A Harris

You were both chefs before becoming winemakers. At what point did cooking stop being enough, and was the switch a slow burn or a single moment of clarity?

We went through a similar transformation almost simultaneously, on two different continents, prior to our meeting. Both of us still loved cooking deeply, but since we had started when we were quite young, the lifestyle was getting tiresome at the end of our twenties. Christoph had always had an interest in wine, so after having a think, he decided to enroll in Viti-Oeno school in Neustadt at 30 years old. His classmates were all very young.

For my part, I quit cooking after my last position as a cook in NYC left me broken into a million pieces. I had been studying wine for a little while as a side interest while I was a chef, so when an opportunity to write a wine list came around, I decided to take the plunge and moved back to Montreal. I had been working at Candide as a sommelière for a few years when Christoph and I met in the fall of 2018.

Everything accelerated greatly from there. Wein Goutte, our first and only child, was born not long after.

You met during the vintage at Weingut Weninger in Burgenland, Austria. So you fell in love at harvest, which is either very romantic or a terrible idea. How do you know if someone is a genuine partner when you're both running on adrenaline and grape juice?

Never underestimate intuition! And timing. To be fair, after working in kitchens for over a decade, adrenaline was kind of our default mode…

There was an instant pull between the two of us. Things fell into place quickly and naturally. When you know, you know, as Lana del Rey would say. It is safe to say that at the moment we met, we were both ready to lean into a serious relationship, so it did not feel complicated. Except that we lived in different countries, and that I was three months away from turning thirty, which was the cut-off age for a working-holiday visa to Austria.

On a rare half-day when the winery was quiet that September in 2018, we drove across the border to the city of Sopron, and while eating the worst burger ever known to humankind, we laid down the realistic options we had if we wanted this to continue after my internship was over. Since there were virtually no jobs in wine in Quebec at that time – this has changed since – we came to the conclusion I would be the one moving.

Emy, you were the wine director at Candide in Montreal until summer 2023, working remotely from Central Europe for years. Is running a wine program from across the ocean challenging or actually easier than it sounds?

There were a few reasons why this was doable. First, there always was a sommelier on the ground who would assist me in all the various tasks required to run a wine program. Second, the service staff was incredibly wine-savvy and experienced with serving and selling wine. Third, the owner of the restaurant allocated a budget for the staff to meet – on the company time – every Thursday, and open one of each bottle that was entering the list on that day. Our work as a team made it possible to have this peculiar arrangement of having the wine director living overseas.

By the time I left, the wine list was already starting to feature a large amount of Quebec wine, and that grew exponentially in the first two years I was away, as new projects continued to pop up and quality soared. While being in Europe, I was free from the monopoly at last – the damn SAQ! –, and I could order wine straight to my door if I wanted to taste and discover. I was also traveling around wine regions quite a bit, which I believe had a positive effect on the wine list.

What did that split existence teach you about the difference between talking about wine and actually making it?

Many things. For example, that wine is a lot less romantic than we package it to be. It certainly has many dreamy aspects, but the sunsets and dogs running through the vines are only a small proportion of the daily struggles and stress a winemaker goes through.

Sometimes wine was aged in a tank because there was no more space in barrels, for example. This was a reality check when we started Wein Goutte.

How did you end up in Franconia, was it thanks to ties to the other natural wineries in the area, such as 2Naturkinder, or you had your eyes on the region for other reasons?

When we decided to move to Germany, we roughly classified all the wine regions in our heads from most to least desirable to move our project to. It appeared very quickly that we were both attracted to the regions that were a bit more fringy, less part of the square narrative about German wine.

Since Christoph is from Württemberg and this was my favorite of all German wine regions as a sommelière, it was naturally the first place we started looking, helped by a few friends. It came very close. But life had other plans for us and this is how Franken, our next favorite region, was thrown our way.

The fact that Franken doesn’t have Riesling in its three most planted grapes was really exciting for us, even though we both love Riesling. Franken just stands out on its own, with a sinuous and interesting story, and obviously a few pioneers of German natural wine, notably Michael and Melanie [read our Winemaker2Winemaker interview with 2Naturkinder here], as well as Stefan and Katja Vetter, two wineries that were featured on the list at Candide since day one.

There was hardly any convincing to do. Though it was hard to swallow the idea that we would never grow Trollinger.

The story goes that you found your plot in Hüttenheim through a note posted on a wine trade ad board, essentially a blind agricultural date.

Yes! That is not an agricultural legend, it is truly how it happened. We posted this ad for what I think was 10 euros, with the thought of “Well, if nothing comes out of it, we only lost ten bucks”. We were a young couple looking for vineyards (minimum organic), a place to live and a space to grow vegetables. Linda and Erhard Hassold contacted us and said: We might have what you are looking for.

The four of us gave ourselves a year to see if things would work out… and we are still here.

Quite a bold move! What made you say yes to that particular place, and what surprised you most when you actually arrived?

Many things, but the two main elements that tipped the scale were that the farm had been converted to organic in 1991, thirty years to the date of our arrival, and also that a bit more than one out of three hectares were planted with PiWis!

You indeed took over from a couple who have been farming organically for over 30 years. What does it mean to arrive as newcomers onto someone else's land and philosophy? How do you earn that trust?

It is quite the ride, I’m not gonna lie. But since Linda and Erhard were the ones who contacted us in the first place, it was implied that they had an open-mindedness for people to enter their lives and change things around a bit. Since their sustainable farming was the heart of the story of their farm, we trusted that we had a common vision even before we came here.

We slowly made a home here in Hüttenheim, piece by piece, and honestly, I think it will be an ongoing project for the rest of our life here. This is very different from taking over a farm from one’s parents, where you have lived most of your life; we need to all be diligent and vigilant about boundaries and everyone’s feelings a bit more.

There are so many things uniting us. The love of this land, which has now passed down to us. The dedication to hard work. The strive to grow healthy grapes. The will to keep this company healthy, in a market that is unstable. We are bonded forever, and that trust will continue to grow and transform throughout the years.

As you mentioned, about a third of your vines are PIWI varieties, fungus-resistant crossings that most established producers still look at kinda sideways. Is that a conscious choice of yours or they were part of the farm when you took over, so you had to find your way to work with them?

Oh no, we were EXCITED! They were part of the farm, since the Hassolds had planted PiWis almost as soon as they were added to the German grape catalog in 1996. The Regent and Johanniter vineyard on the hillside – the latter will be released as a single vineyard wine, in 2027, under the name Johnny on the Hill – were over 20 years of age when we arrived and in excellent condition.

We both had a great interest in hybrids. In Quebec, we grow a lot of them, and even though mostly are different varieties than the ones found here, I knew it was possible to make excellent wine with resistant varieties. Memorable wines even.

We obviously had a lot to learn because they were varieties we had never worked with, so we vinified everything separately in the first few years. We made mistakes too, notably a batch of Johanniter with a bit too much maceration that made your saliva completely disappear like a cruel magic trick.

Five vintages in, we have changed our process slightly. For example, we know that macerating Muscaris with Bacchus somehow tames the intense muscat notes, so we mix them at harvest now, since they end up in the same wine. We know we love a very light maceration on Regent, about one night, to bring out its charming fruit. And we have also pivoted to making our rotling (a blend of white and red grapes, named Newstalgia) with hybrids only, blending Johanniter and Regent. It tastes quite promising in barrels.

Your wine names tend to change from vintage to vintage as I guess you're still figuring things out. At Nestarec, we've also played a lot with formats and labels — I know it can confuse the audience and buyers, but I see it as a natural part of a learning curve, especially in a region without established crus and traditions, or when the roster of vineyards and varieties you farm keeps evolving. Or simply when your own taste shifts and gets reflected in the wines.

It took us a few years to find our footing, and that was the reason why we decided to change the names for the first few vintages. We needed to learn and experiment, and it felt right. It was interesting to see how it was confusing for certain markets, and how others were completely unfazed by the ever-changing visuals.

We are both transplants to this region, we make natural wine in a place where our wines won’t pass through the taste committee to label them with “Franken” on the bottle, so we needed to find a way to let our identity shine through, instead of rooting it in names of places we didn’t identify with yet, like the Hüttenheimer Tannenberg, for example.

How do you decide when a wine has finally found its identity versus when it's still in conversation?

From Puffy Shirt to Schlado, the names and labels truly represent who we are as people. We are creative and funny, we don’t like things to be static and expected. And certainly, we found a similar vibe in our friend and graphic designer Simon Roy, who made this idea come to life.

The intense colors and playfulness of our labels is something we stand by, even though it might sometimes have done us a disservice; I think some people have judged our wines to be simple and trendy, whereas they contain a product that is serious and focused, if I do say so myself.

However, in 2023 and subsequent vintages, some labels are starting to come back. We have found the style we like for many of our wines. But as it always is with us, we can’t leave things exactly like they are, so there will be some perceptible details that will change a bit on the labels, so if you collect them all like Pokémons, there will be a transformation over time.

In 2023, you made a conscious decision to do less maceration. What pushed you in that direction? Was it the vintage talking, or a shift in your own taste? And is that a style that you’ve kept ever since, or that might change again?

It all started in 2022. We had to do a bit more maceration that vintage because of the extreme heat, to feed our fermentations and give them a better chance to reach the finish line. While we loved these wines, and they still hold up, we found that we lost a bit of individuality by doing longer maceration – even though we still talk about 6-7 days max – and that our lineup felt less distinctive.

One of the reasons for this could be the soil type here, which is gipskeuper all around, a loamy clay rich in gypsum, which tends to decrease acidity at the speed of light, the faster the closer to the harvest we get. We are constantly running after acidity here, that’s why we harvest so early. Franken has a dramatically continental climate, and it gets very hot in the summer months.

Maceration is also an acid eater, so we just found the wines to lose their electric bite when we macerated too much. We still do it, but much shorter, to build structure in bigger blends and/or extract taste from the skins.

You run a vegetable garden, make vermouth, cider, schnapps – one could say Wein Goutte is a farm as much as a winery. Is that diversification a financial necessity, a philosophical statement, or just that you can't help yourselves?

Probably a healthy amount of the three! It was always the dream from the beginning to be slightly more diverse than just wine, so when the opportunity in Franconia landed on us, we knew we wanted to try some things out.

The cider and vermouth clearly came from the desire to diversify our lineup of beverages, and keep things interesting for ourselves and our clients. In time, they became a strong part of our identity. The apples were here on the farm, so it went without saying that we would transform them, and the vermouth is something we had already started when we made our first vintage in Austria-Hungary.

The vermouth base changes based on what wine color we have available for it, because we always make it with wine that we love drinking, not with “experiments we would rather forget”. We have also decided to focus on still cider, because there is less of it out there, and it’s a way to stand out. We love selling to restaurants to use for pairings, actually that’s why we started doing it, because I wanted to put it on the list at Candide!

And the garden?

The vegetable garden is quite big, but has gone through some changes since 2021. We realized that growing and selling vegetables was something we would never have the time to do properly while taking care of 4 hectares of vines. We sold a little bit to some friends with restaurants for a while, and then started planning the garden exclusively for us, to have vegetables, fresh and frozen and pickled, throughout the year.

However, we will be taking over the guest house that is in operation on the farm very soon (watch out for Goutte Haus!), and the garden is slowly getting transformed to provide for our future bed and breakfast needs. I’ve planted more berries, more perennials, more flowers, etc.

Given your “not-so-secret obsession” with vermouth, and the fact that herbs, botanicals, and produce are central to what you do at the farm, I'm curious where you stand on non-alcoholic drinks, which have been shaking up the industry conversation for a while now. Is this something that interests you, or does it feel alien to what Wein Goutte is about?

We are very, very excited about the no-and-low movement, as we don’t drink much when we are at home, so we love to have options to reach for when we want taste, but no buzz.

There have been some discussions about trying some things out. I think we were just lacking the confidence that we could make something distinctive, not too sweet and delicious.

But you are absolutely right, we are already growing all these botanicals, so the jump is not that steep. Let’s see what the future brings! I’d love to do something in cans, for example.

You’re a couple working every single day together on something you both care deeply about. Where do creative disagreements actually live – in the vineyard, the cellar, or at the dinner table?

In all honesty, creative disagreements don’t happen very often, because we are quite aligned with the direction we want things to evolve.

Normal plain disagreements, however, happen here and there, like in any relationship. Perhaps even more often, because of the vast amount of time we spend together. Arguments tend to ignite over workloads and splitting of tasks, different views on organisation, unbalanced energy levels, etc.

Thankfully, both of us have good conflict resolution skills, and we are not scared of saying we were wrong or that we overreacted. We don’t go to bed with an unresolved beef: that’s probably the number one secret about being in a partnership with your spouse for the long run.

Emy, you've written about the specific kind of gatekeeping women encounter in wine production, the mansplaining that is constant and relentless. As a French-Canadian woman making wine in rural Franconia, how do you navigate that in a region where you're also an outsider by origin?

Despite investing thousands of euros and hundreds of hours of my time, I’m still far from being fluent in German, even though I understand it very well. So I would say that perhaps a part of it goes over my head because of the local dialect.

The perniciousness of it all can sometimes catch us off guard; when a man stops our employee on the tractor to tell her she is not doing her task properly, for example, or when a female winemaker friend has no time to speak on a panel because male colleagues had to explain their philosophy in such details there were no minutes left on the clock.

Countless times, I’ve seen women in wine expressing themselves being described as “opinionated” or having “intense energy”, while their male counterparts expressing the same exact ideas being called “the voice of a generation”. No need to look very far, just read a few producers' profiles online and the language divide quickly appears.

Some days it feels right to push back, other days, retreat is all we can muster energy for.

There is a lot of invisible work done by women in the wine world so that their partner can shine and get the accolades, especially in more traditional and rural settings. This is also the case in Germany, and it is something we continuously need to talk about to raise awareness of the feminist discourse within the agricultural/viticultural system.

Between the two of you, you've seen natural wine from pretty much every angle – Emy, years of curating and championing it as a buyer, and Christoph, coming through formal oenology training and working harvests at places like Weninger before making your own. How do you each see the movement having evolved over all these years, and where do you think it's going?

The past ten years have been a wild ride for the movement; from catching on to the mainstream to being the butt of the joke, natural wine has been through a lot. The post-pandemic comedown was a bit of an exalting time, when the sales and distribution of the wines we love to drink and/or make was at an all time high.

But the bubble bursted, and the deflation was real. New importers in up-and-coming markets folded, and those who survived often cut their buying by more than half. At some point, we realized that everyone we were talking to was struggling, including us, and it was a sad blow.

But things ebb and flow in life, and natural wine is not going away. It has been here for a long time, and continues to evolve and transmute with the times. In my opinion, a lot of the wine is getting better and better, as winemakers refine their approach, without sacrificing their beliefs.

What excites you, and what are you less sure about?

We are excited to see how vintners are including hybrids in their fields more and more, and look forward to seeing this becoming slowly unavoidable for the customers, for it to be in their field of vision at all times, whether we are talking about retail, or Michelin-starred restaurants.

We hope sommeliers and retailers keep their curiosity muscles well-trained, and also that Franken continues thriving as one of the most exciting places for natural wine lovers in Europe!

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