The sanctum of the wine vinegar estate Doktorenhof looks like it could play in any alien scary shocker.
It's a gelatinous lump of extraterrestrial consistency that swims in a turbid liquid, is voraciously voracious, can live indefinitely, and seemingly transforms into a mass-murdering mob should Sigourney Weaver be around in a flash.
Luckily she is in Hollywood, and the lump is not in a spaceship, but in a Palatinate vaulted cellar under a Gothic canopy, illuminated by candlelight like the host in the tabernacle.
It's not the alien fighter either, but Cathrin Wiedemann, the daughter of the house, who takes away the shock and explains the circumstances of the lump: We are standing in front of the mother of vinegar,
Jakob Strobel and Serra
deputy head of the feature section.
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Vinegar is as old as mankind, and without it we might not have survived because no other liquid cleanses us inside and out as well as it does.
Hippocrates recommended it for infections and ulcers, unaware of the fact that vinegar drastically lowers the pH, killing germs.
The Roman legionaries, on the other hand, did not drink liters of wine every day to get high, but to stay healthy and be able to conquer half the world - their wine would taste like vinegar to us.
Despite this, it had a bad reputation for a long time, as evidenced by popular wisdom that one drop of vinegar destroys three drops of blood.
Even in the gourmet kitchen, he remained a stepchild for a long time.
People were content with cheap, sour stuff from mass wines or straight from industrial alcohol,
which only changed with the triumph of the Mediterranean diet.
Not only olive oil, but also good vinegar became popular in the form of balsamic vinegar, especially in its highest category Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena, which sometimes ages for a hundred years and then costs hundreds of euros per bottle.
Does Vinegar Really Destroy Blood?
Georg Heinrich Wiedemann from Venningen near Landau was fed up with bad vinegar forty years ago and decided to do nothing but good vinegar on his family winery.
Since there is no corresponding training occupation, he was forced to become an autodidact, read every line of the narrow specialist literature and was lucky enough to count the Palatinate top chef Karl-Emil Kuntz among his friends.
Kuntz was enthusiastic about Wiedemann's manufactory creations and recommended them to his colleagues.
This is how the vinegars found their way to the three-star chefs Heinz Winkler and Eckart Witzigmann, were sold early on in the delicatessen department of KaDeWe in Berlin and are now in the kitchens of grandmasters such as Sven Elverfeld or Claus-Peter Lumpp,