The cool way to refine wine

QUESTION What is the story of rotspon, a French wine matured in Lubeck, Germany? LUBECk, the second-largest city in schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, on the Trave river, is also the largest German port city on the Baltic sea.

Lubeck was historically an independent city state and came to considerable wealth as the capital of the Hanseatic League, a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and their market towns that dominated trade along the coast of Northern Europe from the 12th to the 17th century.

The city’s red wine trade dates back to the 13th century. Trading ships called cogs or Koggen — squat, square-rigged, oak vessels — sailed to the French west coast to buy Bordeaux wines.

In about 1530, merchant Thomas Bugenhage began importing large quantities of red wine to the city. He discovered that the damp, cool climate of northern Germany allowed the wine to mature and develop more slowly and evenly, producing excellent wines.

He matured these wines in oak barrels. The wine came to be known as rotspon, from rot ‘red’ and spon, the Low German expression of the word ‘span’, referring to the ‘staves’, the narrow lengths of wood banded together to make the barrels.

since that time, and especially from the 17th century, French red wine was brought to Lubeck to be ‘refined and cultivated’. The improvement was famously perceived in 1806 by Napoleonic French officers, who claimed it was better than the native wine.

The German writer Thomas Mann (1875-1955) immortalised the wine in his celebrated 1901 novel Buddenbrooks.

The ‘Lubecker Rotspon’ appellation is legally protected, but outside Lubeck the term rotspon is used on the whim of wine merchants. so Lubeck’s authorities recently appealed to the EU for protected status for their wine.

T. W. Edwards, Hurley, Berks. QUESTION Do any British judges still use a gavel? FURTHER to the earlier answer, there is a single exception to the rule that gavels have never been used in Britain: in Inner London Crown Court, according to HM Courts and Tribunals service, a gavel is used ‘to alert parties in court to the entrance of the judge into the courtroom’. At other courts, judges bang on the door to announce their entry.

They do not, however, use a gavel on the bench.

Rory B. Yates, London E4.