If the mountain doesn't come to the prophet, the prophet must come to the mountain.
Nobody knows that better than Volker Raumland.
His mountain is the vineyard and his prophecy that Germans can also press champagne.
For almost forty years he came with his mobile sparkling wine system to the vintners of the best German winegrowers to make sparkling wines from their base wines - and traveled almost as long as the Israelites through a desert in which hardly anyone understood his message and to German Champagne thirsted even though he himself was living proof of the profound truth of his prophecy.
And only now, at the zenith of his fame, in the epilogue of his career, can the lonely caller experience how his prophecy swells into a chorus.
The champion in champagne drinking
Jakob Strobel y Serra
Deputy head of the features section.
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No other people drink as much sparkling wine as the Germans, an incredible four hundred million bottles every year. But most of it comes from industrial mass production, is poured together in monstrous steel tanks from dirt cheap base wines of dubious origin and sold at ridiculously low prices in the supermarket. Only three percent of German sparkling wines are sparkling wines that are fermented in the bottle using the traditional champagne method. But even the most renowned winegrowers often only run this business incidentally and rarely with the passion it deserves. "Many vintners sparkle the wines that they can't do anything with, and very few think of sparkling wine from the outset when working in the vineyard, but still in terms of must weights,Which is why they harvest their base wines that are far too sweet, ”says Raumland, for whom 11 percent alcohol is the absolute upper limit, because 1.3 percent alcohol is added in the second fermentation. And that's exactly why most German sparkling wines don't taste like champagne, but like sparkling wines.
Champagne, Volker Raumland didn't want to do anything else in his life as a winegrower, since he won first prize at a blind tasting while studying viticulture in Geisenheim with a Müller-Thurgau sparkling wine. From that moment on, the son of a winemaker from Bockenheim in the North Palatinate was “infected with the sparkling wine virus”, as he himself says. He became a driving champagne maker, tasted thousands and thousands of basic wines, soon blindly recognized the best candidates for an excellent sparkling wine, one day knew everything about ideal maceration times, pressing processes and yeast storage, accumulated a sparkling wine knowledge like no other German winemaker and was ennobled by having his Colleagues proudly wrote on the label who made their champagne. But the decisive step to sparkling happiness was still missing: Raumland had recognizedthat sparkling wines of champagne quality can only be made from his own base wines - and he immediately seized the opportunity to buy a Wilhelminian style villa with four hectares of vineyards in Flörsheim-Dalsheim in Rheinhessen in the early 1990s.