Red Wine and the People Who Mean It

Two things I genuinely worship: people who take a private obsession and build something lasting out of it, and red wine. The second one is more straightforward—late at night when the thoughts are cycling and the creativity is restless and won’t settle, nothing competes with a full glass of something dark and serious. Dry or slightly sweet, I don’t much care, as long as it tastes like someone paid attention to it.

Michael, Sedat, and Kolja paid attention. Coming from entirely different corners of professional life, they pooled their shared love of the stuff and launched an online wine shop called Geile Weine—a name that lands somewhere between "gorgeous wines" and something you’d get arrested for putting on a billboard in certain countries. The point is that they mean it. The wines they stock have names like Mouth Bomb (the winepunk strikes again), Blutsbruder (dense and structured), and Flying Pig (reminds you of a long walk in late summer). There’s vodka and gin in there too, and various other things designed to dissolve an evening.

Online wine shops are not rare. The internet is essentially a liquor store with pretensions. But every so often you find one that feels assembled by people who actually drink the product, who have opinions about it, who made the labels funny because they wanted to and not because a brand consultant told them to. The selections here come from smaller producers and distilleries with a point of view, and that point of view comes through. I’m writing this without being paid anything for it, which makes me either principled or simply out of red wine and looking for an excuse to think about it at length.