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And what do you drink with it? Help, I don't want to cut a poor figure!
How do you eat this?
How do you eat that?
September 2021
The strict & not so strict, the serious and tongue-in-cheek practices of our times
Behaviour - of course in the sense of: c-o-r-r-e-c-t behaviour is a matter of luck! Sometimes bad luck also comes into play, for example when a snail slips out of the tongs across the table and into someone else's plate. Or when an olive stone or a cherry stone or some other seed is shot at your shirt from an unknown direction as if it had come from a catapult. Adolf Freiherr von Knigge, the pioneer of good etiquette, also turned a blind eye in his famous guide to behaviour and wrote: "Don't be too much of a slave to others' opinions of you, be free! In the end, if you are doing what you are supposed to be doing why do you care about the rest of the world's opinion?
Attentive waiters and waitresses at Vinum Hotels South Tyrol are not only superbly-trained, they also cultivate the typically relaxed South Tyrolean way of being with guests.
According to Baron von Knigge, even guests at luxury hotels should be allowed to uninhibitedly pluck and suck, tease and tear, crumble and dunk ...
The September Wine Letter is dedicated to cheerful codes of conduct in Vinum Hotels South Tyrol!
Casual banquet service has become very popular amongst young and old, where a larger number of people are served the same menu at the same time. In Vinum Hotels South Tyrol the food is usually plated i.e. beautifully arranged and served directly on individual plates.
In the past - older, experienced serving staff recount with a wink - the food tended to be served from platters or guests also helped themselves from these presented platters. Sauces and side dishes were usually placed on the tables .... which sometimes led to adventurous jostling, pushing and shoving and which probably also inspired the German singer-songwriter Reinhard Mey to write his famous ballad on the Battle at the Cold Buffet:
"In the hot battle at the cold buffet, the man still counts as a man
And an eye for an eye, aspic for jelly, this shows who can fight, hurray, it shows who can fight
The knives flash, the dishes bounce, with elemental force
On heads and bodies and out of the tangle, a waiter tries to escape…"
And now a few more kind-of-serious sentences about the appropriate wine.
- Normally, wine waiters are genteel, helpful and good at what they do.
- Bad wine waiters can be identified by the fact that they never deviate from their orthodox opinions.
- Let's just take any artichoke dish as an example: if you ask for a Pinot Blanc or a Sauvignon, a stubborn wine waiter will always want to lure you towards a Chardonnay. Why? - he will say - because the powerful artichoke flavour needs a white wine with enormous structure, strength and fullness. At this point, you should courageously remain loyal to your Sauvignon or Pinot Blanc. Structure? Potency? Fullness? – that’s what the Pinot Blanc "St. Valentin" from the St. Michael Winery and the Sauvignon "Lafoa" from the Schreckbichl Winery have. Even if you are still a wine novice, you should face these wicked, orthodox wine waiters without fear.
- Otherwise you will remain a little duckling swimming helplessly in the vast sea of wine for the rest of your life.
Weingut Klosterhof at Caldaro sulla Strada del Vino
- Wine tasting with vineyard visit at our Pinot blanc site, Trifall, plus cellar tour
- Distillery tour with Hannes Andergassen at Klosterhof’s new distillery