The social drinker

Every now and then, you enjoy a meal which you just know will be one of the year’s three or four highlights. It happened to me the other evening, in the flat belonging to wonderful friends, in a small village on the fjord separating Germany from Denmark.

They had prepared a sort of thin onion pizza common in south Germany, and served this with a wine unique to the villages dotted around the Rhine and Mosel.

That wine is called Federweisser, which literally means ‘feather white’ to reflect the wine’s cloudy, apple-juice-like appearance. Federweisser is basically alcoholic grape juice, or a very young wine which is still fermenting as you drink it, and which is popular for just two months a year.

Having crushed white grapes which wiped early, such as Bacchus or Ortega, the winemaker then adds yeast to the grape juice; prompting the creation of a bubbly, alcoholic liquid, with an alcoholic content of somewhere between 4pc and 10pc. A tricky aspect to the production process is the lack of a cork, because the fermenting bottle can only be covered by a cap, which allows the fermentation to continue. This means the wine can only be transported upright. Despite this considerable handicap, Federweisser is available across Germany in September and October, and often forms the basis for mini festivals popular with Germans who avoid the Munich Beer Festival like the plague.

The transportation problem explains why Federweisser is not available almost anywhere else. This column usually takes great care to recommend drinks that are easy to come by. Federweisser certainly does not fit into this category, but sometimes a drink is so unusual and such fun that you have to shout about it from the rooftops. Next year, if you head to Germany in the early autumn, you know what to do.