Kummerspeck For The Dictionary
TASTING NOTES: “The 2022 Deerfield Roussanne has the crispness of Sauvignon Blanc with the flavor of white peaches and honey.” (AbV 11.8%)
VARIETALS: 100% Roussanne
BARRELS: Not specified.
PAIRS WITH: Light luncheon fare
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Kunster Miers Vineyard.
That’s where these grapes grow — a single Sonoma Valley vineyard — and I can’t move past the name. Kunster. That’s Kunst, German for “art,” with an -er bolted on the end, as if it wants to mean “one who does the art.” Which got me thinking about German, a language that really will build you a word for anything. Torschlusspanik is the fear that time is running out to hit your life goals. Verschlimmbessern is making something worse while trying to improve it. Kummerspeck — my personal favorite — literally translates to “grief bacon”: the weight you put on from emotional eating. The language is a vending machine of emotional precision.
The craft has a name too: Wortbildung, word formation, the systematic process by which German just… keeps building. You take Kraft (power) and Fahrzeug (vehicle) and you get Kraftfahrzeug (motor vehicle). You take Donner (thunder) and Wetter (weather) and Strahlen (rays) and you could hypothetically keep going until you’ve described something so specific it only happened once, to one person, in 1987. English borrowed a few of these — kindergarten, angst, wanderlust — and then got tired and went home. German did not get tired. German will never get tired.
Vineyards usually take their names from the families who once farmed the land, and Kunster Miers certainly sounds the part. But I choose to believe, in the corner of my imagination where it matters, that somewhere in a glossy German dictionary there is an entry for Kunster defined as: noun, archaic. One who grows impeccable white peaches in an unlikely location. See also: Sonoma Valley.
