By Al Drinkle
“Simply for all this,
as if there were nothing else,
heavy wet spring frost”
-Kobayashi Issa
The trip almost didn't happen. When leaving Metrovino the evening prior to my departure, I absentmindedly missed a step while descending a short staircase outside the shop — nevermind that I've used these stairs about 10 times per day for the past 17 years! I twisted my foot, unceremoniously spilled ass over teakettle and ended up sprawled and confused on the pavement. In my infinite wisdom, I proceeded to walk for about 10 blocks before acknowledging how much pain I was in, only then hailing a taxi for the rest of the distance home.
As the pain continued to increase, I begrudgingly went to the emergency room 12 hours before I was due at the airport. As is now the case in Alberta, the proceedings at the hospital moved at a glacial pace, though admittedly there were many people checking in that were in far worse shape than I was. All I could think about was how instead of experiencing the 2024 German vintage with the stalwart vintners who lived it, I might be laid up for several weeks with my foot in a cast. It was a long, depressing wait to find out.
After the passing of several hours, I was visited by an affable and helpful physiotherapist who seemed optimistic about the situation. During his inspection of my foot, I told him about my impending flight and why an expedited diagnosis would be extremely helpful to me. After prying further, more or less extracting my curriculum vitae, he shared that his wife loved wine and was a fan of Metrovino. Small world, but it was to shrink even further.
Shortly thereafter, a doctor briskly rounded the corner saying, “so, you're hoping to head to Germany!" It was a customer of Metrovino's who I didn't recognise at first in his mask! I actually didn't even know that he's a doctor.
“Hopefully in a couple of hours," I replied, "depending on the state of my foot, that is."
No doubt because of the wine-loving doctor's sympathy, everything moved rapidly from that point forward. I was X-rayed, no breaks were found, advice was given for tending to the pain (though none of it would be possible to abide on an overseas flight or during a whirlwind schedule in wine country), and I was discharged before I knew it. Sometimes life plays out like a cheesy movie, and it makes all those cheesy movies — such as those I was about to watch on the airplane — somehow more endearing.
As a result of all this, I took absolutely nothing on the trip for granted and fully immersed myself in the beautiful environs that have served as my spiritual wellspring for so many years. I feel an incomparable sense of peace amidst the vines and the cobblestones of German wine country. And when homesickness confusingly strikes when I’m actually at home, all I have to do is open a good, honest bottle of Riesling and I'm soon consoled.
I was joined by my friend, Sharla Swanson, who's part of the Metrovino family as well as serving as wine director at Calgary's Bridgette Bar. It was her first time in Germany and her perpetually buoyant attitude was a welcome addition to the hectic schedule.
Directly following the last appointment, I flew to Jerez de la Frontera to indulge in some relaxation, imbibe an ocean of sherry, sample every incarnation of Andalusian food, and to take in a couple of heartrending flamenco performances. Amidst this milieu, I also wrote the hopelessly discursive 2024 German Riesling report that you’re about to read.
The 2024 Growing Season: A Story of Many Stories
It would be decidedly untrue to say that after several conversations with various growers, I become bored with the reports of how the latest growing season unfolded. However, in an average vintage these accumulating stories begin to show patterns and repetitions — especially within the same region — and it’s primarily the minutiae of detail that gives them their colour. But 2024 is decidedly not an average vintage, and it contains a multiplicity of stories. I would surmise that if somebody visited 150 different estates this year, they'd hear 150 distinct reports.
The headline of Germany's 2024 vintage is the frost. After a cool and wet winter, March brought with it warm, often double-digit temperatures which prematurely awakened vegetation in the southwest of the country. In some winegrowing regions, budding transpired a full six weeks prior to the feast days of the ice saints — which is when farmers are traditionally considered to be exempt from frost. Sadly, six weeks of temperatures above zero degrees Celsius proved too much to ask for, and the feared frost struck with varying degrees of ferocity.
I experienced this unfortunate development firsthand in Siefersheim, the home base of Weingut Wagner-Stempel in the western Rheinhessen near the border of the Nahe. On April 22nd I joined Daniel and Cathrin Wagner's family dinner where the impendingly low temperatures of the evening ahead dominated much of the conversation. Fellow Calgarians will sympathise with my general incomprehension of places where weather can be forecasted accurately, and I provided a voice of optimism that in a few hours would prove groundless.
At Weingut Wagner-Stempel in the Rheinhessen
Daniel had distributed haybales throughout his most important parcels of the Heerkretz vineyard, later to be set alight in hopes that the smoke would protect the buds from frost. Since I was “sleeping” onsite (highly ineffectually, due to jet lag), I joined him and a colleague during the coldest hours of the morning in a pre-dawn attempt to mitigate the threat that was very much imposing itself upon the environs. Daniel knew it wasn't a fail-safe strategy, but is one to just lay in bed instead? Had the wind been moving northwards — the typical direction of a cold front in Siefersheim — this procedure might have had some efficacy, but instead the smoke sinisterly danced its way to the south and away from the vines.
The following night (two nights for some) offered no respite from subzero temperatures, and this corner of the Rheinhessen was far from the only part of Germany affected. Some regions and subregions suffered more devastation than others, but none were entirely exempt from nature's capriciousness. I spoke to growers who lost up to 85% of their harvests on these nights and I’m told that others fared even worse. Fingers were crossed that second shoots would help compensate for the lost quantities, and sometimes they did — but this phenomenon provides different challenges come harvest time because of uneven ripening.
Many readers will know that if a vintner loses 50% of their crop to frost, for example, they aren't compensated by only having to do 50% of the season's work. Frost-affected vineyards still have to be tended, and in fact, they often demand more work and attention throughout the remainder of the growing season than those bearing fruit. But frost wasn't to be the final challenge for German winegrowers in 2024. As mentioned above, the story of the growing season is actually many stories, varying more dramatically than usual from region to region and even village to village; but a few consistencies can be cited.
After spring arrived way too early, “summer” made its appearance in a drunk and disorderly fashion. High temperatures in May were accompanied by plenty of rain — a downright inordinate amount in some areas — and these inconstant conditions carried right through to the end of July. Developments in the vineyards happened at a swift pace, but it was also a recipe for mildew which usually manifested itself in the form of peronospora.
Conditions stabilised in August, when most of the winegrowing regions enjoyed glorious weather with minimal precipitation, instigating a positive and linear development of the fruit. Vineyard work could be carried out in a comfortable and relaxed fashion (while noting that, especially in the case of the steep slopes, there's very little that can be considered “relaxed” regarding this kind of agriculture), and all of this helped to shape what in many cases resulted in the production of excellent, medium-bodied wines from the earlier-ripening Burgundy varieties. You might recall that in regard to many districts in 2023, the weather was at its most volatile during the harvest of these cultivars (only to stabilise later for the collection of Riesling), and several growers are rightfully pleased with the results of their Pinot varieties in 2024 — albeit many of them have reduced quantities.
A tidy summary of “general” conditions continues to be difficult moving into September, but a consistently cold — and too often rainy — autumn plagued the final development for Riesling in 2024. Andreas Adam of Weingut A.J. Adam (Dhron, Mosel) commented that, “after its satisfactory progress in August, ripeness seemed to halt at a certain point in September”. Likewise, Antonius Leitz of Weingut Leitz (Rüdesheim, Rheingau) noted that there was a two-week period near the end of that month when Oechsle only increased by two degrees!
Piesporter Goldtröpfchen in the Mosel
Oskar Micheletti of Weingut Von Winning (Deidesheim, Pfalz) noted that there were times that certain vineyards being monitored for sugar development actually lost ripeness some days due to water absorption. Veronika Lintner of Unterlind (Trittenheim, Mosel), an estate very much in its infancy, shared that although they're attempting to move towards organic farming, the retreat towards conventional combatants of fungal pressure probably saved them from losing their entire crop.
Riesling was very much on edge and one had to be patient for ripeness — which is easier said than done when the forecast continues to be dismal and the often-present mildew is beginning to transform into the deleterious form of botrytis. In most places it was a real struggle to get beyond Kabinett levels of ripeness, nevermind degrees of sugar that would engender strapping GG-styles of Riesling. Andi Spreitzer of Weingut Spreitzer (Oestrich, Rheingau) claimed that in central Rheingau, waiting out the rain was a gamble that paid off. Though harvest didn't commence in shorts and T-shirt weather, he reports that after a season of hard work, they were able to collect healthy, modestly ripe fruit in mostly dry conditions.
Oliver Müller of Wagner-Stempel pointed out that, “the key for Riesling in 2024 was chaptalisation. Everybody did this… especially in the common ‘Gutswein’ vineyards.” This of course applies to a particular but prevailing style of Riesling, namely dry with some modicum of weight and body. One major exception would be all Prädikatsweine whereby chaptalisation is forbidden, but I was certainly surprised by some of the producers who conceded for the first time since I’ve known them that the addition of sugar for their dry wine production was necessary. For the judgmental amongst you, please keep in mind that chaptalisation is still more or less systematic at your favourite artisanal Burgundy domaine.
Sometimes depending on intricacies of place and sometimes depending on harvest timing, there were wild variations of reports as to rain during the harvest itself — never a happy ending, even when the lead-up isn't as challenging as it was in 2024. So is there a silver lining to any of this?
Well, some of the positives could only be said to be categorised as such in a relative sense. Alexandra Künstler of Weingut Weiser-Künstler (Traben, Mosel) delighted in the fact that — unlike in 2023 — when it finally came time to collect what fruit was spared by frost and downy mildew, it was clean and healthy and there was no need to subject it to a multi-sensory triage of optics and aroma. Stefan Jakoby of Weingut Jakoby-Mathy (Kinheim, Mosel) suggested that, at least in his village, the yield-reduction due to frost ended up helping with the ripening of what fruit remained. In other words, he wonders if a full crop would have been able to achieve sufficient ripeness given the precariousness of the growing season.
Kinheimer Rosenburg in the Mosel
Just a short ways upriver from these two growers, Matthias Kerpen of Weingut Kerpen (Wehlen, Mosel), whose vineyards barely suffered any frost, somewhat sheepishly reported that they actually made almost 20% more wine than in 2023 — which is to say 20% more than average for this estate! This was definitely an anomaly amongst the growers whom I personally visited, but it proved that such a thing was possible.
Many growers (most of them too young to have experienced this firsthand) pointed out that 2024 was an “old-school”, 1980s-style growing season, and in previous times might have been an immediate failure and dismissed like so many vintages from that decade rightfully were. But good producers are farming in a far more meticulous way than virtually anybody was in the 1980s, and there's an overwhelming drive to pursue quality above all else — which sometimes means sacrificing a startling amount of fruit, even if you've already lost quantities to frost.
In a general sense, and despite the absolute abundance of challenges, two major factors of the growing season can be said to have positively benefited Riesling in most of Germany's disparate regions. One is that, given the early start to the season and the stubborn way that sugar accumulated from September onwards, Riesling generally received a long hang time. Notwithstanding that some of this was due to dilution from rain, one might credit this for the degree of complexity that the best 2024s boast. Secondly, many growers shared their conviction that the cold nights during the final ripening period was essential to the development of aroma — and many of the 2024 Rieslings certainly do smell fantastic.
Virtually each detail above could be contested by some winegrower somewhere in Germany. The unfolding of the vintage truly seemed to have more localised nuance than I've ever witnessed before. As a succinct validation of this, I only met with one vintner who is directly involved with two distinct wine estates, namely Veronika Lintner who works at Egon Müller/Scharzhof and also makes up half the team of Unterlind (the other half being her husband, Heiner Böllig, who is also the vineyard manager and cellarmaster at Scharzhof). While recognising that these estates are 45 kms apart, she shared two stories of 2024 that were so disparate they hardly seemed as if they could have unfolded in tandem — which undoubtedly leaves one curious about the wines born in this vintage…
2024 Riesling - The Lon Chaney Vintage
I don't know what to write. I've been fearing this moment for days. How is one to tidily summarise the results of such a complex, variable Riesling vintage when even macro details shapeshift around each corner? Somebody will attempt it, no doubt, although to be accurate such a report is doomed to be opaque with caveats. I kept looking for patterns, motifs, vintage thumbprints, headlines… Interregionally these barely exist, except for a few analytical consistencies that I'll mention later¹.
One might point out that perhaps a bigger copout than writing a verbose mess of a vintage report would be to entirely forgo an attempt at a summary of the wines based on its professed impossibility. After all, one needn't abide a rigorous tasting schedule for two weeks in Germany only to decline comment — I could do that while plucking lint from my navel thousands of miles away! So to avoid being an outright charlatan, let me attempt this cautiously, noting that each generalisation will have many glaring exceptions. What this report may lack in specificity will be made up for in my individual offers from the various producers that Metrovino works with. An estate by estate basis (and sometimes a wine by wine basis) is really the only accurate way to approach the 2024 Rieslings. (If you're not included in these offers and would like to be, please let me know via email).
All too frequently, the challenges of the growing season show themselves in Germany's 2024 Rieslings. There are many wines with prematurely clipped finishes, bitter flavours, unsavoury textures, absent midpalates, fruit profiles that lack vividity, wines that seem cryptic and stoic but then reveal that they actually have little to say… sometimes I saw these shortcomings within a lineup that also featured Rieslings of sheer brilliance. I've made this self-serving comment before, but you'd really do well to align yourself with a reliable wine merchant or sommelier when it comes to this vintage. Metrovino got through the pandemic without huge problems by ordering the 2019s blind, but I'm grateful that I was able to taste the 2024s prior to making our selections.
Mosel slate
In no way should you stop reading at this point, thinking, “okay, sounds like I can sit this one out". By sitting out you'd be missing out — big time. The best 2024 Rieslings of all the myriad categories dazzlingly combine intensity of aroma and flavour with lightness of body — perhaps my favourite trick that wine is capable of, and arguably the epitome of what makes German Riesling distinct and unique. The vintage includes wines of charming immediacy that you'll derive great pleasure from drinking and others that you'll be grateful to have in your cellar. At times these virtues combine in the same wine, and such wines are frequently singular in their charms, not at all resembling their counterparts from other recent vintages.
Perhaps the only thing that can be said almost across the board for the 2024 Rieslings is that an excess of ripeness is virtually nonexistent, and when quality was achieved, it’s rarely ever accompanied by power. Even those who strive to build monolithic styles were unable to do so without excess chaptalization, and thus the resulting alcohol levels are lower than average on the dry wines and sweetness is often discreet in the fruity wines. I feel that this is a positive thing, but that's probably more a reflection of my personal preferences than it is a categorical virtue.
Because of their importance in terms of profile and the marketplace, those who usually make Riesling GGs (or the stylistic equivalent) probably did so in 2024. The most successful ones are those that lean into the elegance and detail that were possible in this vintage, and achieving this probably meant succeeding in making several commendable wines. The reason for this is that in order to make an appealing GG or equivalent in 2024, one probably had to mercilessly declassify fruit from that site. If they were scrupulous enough in their vineyard selection then their high-profile dry wine would be a success, but the declassification of fruit from a Grand Cru (or Grand Crus) would also be a significant boon to their village and/or estate wines. Almost certainly for this reason, several producers whom I visited made excellent estate Rieslings this year.
Marking an exception to the widespread use of chaptalisation mentioned in the previous section, there's a minor pattern of dry wines from 2024 with only 9 or 10% alcohol that are beautifully — albeit precariously — balanced. Partisans like me would consider the best of these to be exhilaratingly diaphanous, while some would dismiss them for being overtly lean. Regarding the fruity counterparts of these wines, one grower (whose name I won’t publicise here) bottled their iconic, residually-sweet Kabinett at 6.7% alcohol and without an excess of residual sugar! Not only is this illegal in the eyes of the German wine law², but it would have been considered an abject failure in the 1980s. In 2024 it was one of the most scintillating and profound wines that I tasted from the vintage, and many other Rieslings from throughout the country with analogous profiles — whether dry, off-dry or fruity — were similarly successful.
Better vineyards clearly made better wine in 2024. It's nice when this happens, and it makes sense that sites that achieved their reputations in cooler decades of the distant past would be an asset to quality in a growing season where the accumulation of sugar was a challenge. Given their modest ripeness, the best wines tend to demonstrate their place of origin with triumphant clarity. It would make sense if soils with greater drainage capacity fared better than others this year, but I personally didn't taste much evidence of this — although it might be a factor in regard to the noteworthy success of so many Mosel estates in particular. More on this later.
Dhroner Hofberg in the Mosel
If one were to offer an unfairly generalised summary about the aromas and flavours of 2024 Rieslings, one might suggest that they run in the direction of soft tree fruits — peaches, apricots and Mirabelle plums. There's an abundance of blossom too, all underlined by more elemental references like ozone, alpine herbal notes and stony detritus. Some of the most enchanting wines simply smell like fresh air! In fact, one of the shining points of the vintage is the informal but compelling charm of the aromatics, as the flavours themselves don't regularly achieve the breathtaking spectrum of the great vintages. But some collections, and more often individual wines, serve as spellbinding exceptions to this.
Much less ephemeral than the aromas and flavours are the textures of the '24s, which are frequently informed by how and where the acidity sits in the wine. This issue is as complicated as anything else in this vintage. Acidity levels were generally higher in 2024 than in 2023 (or 2022, for that matter), but as you might have expected by now, there are exceptions to this too. Many cuvées that typically harbour an electric presence of acidity are tame — and sometimes even feeble — this year.³ Other wines are sharp and brittle with textures that certainly aren't enhanced by the low levels of residual sugar that so many growers seem to value over harmony. But in deference to this, the acidity occasionally feels so unripe and jagged that I doubt there's a corresponding amount of RS, extract, or anything else that would cajole it into balance.
Of course there's a middle ground populated by brisk, tonic, and energetic Rieslings that compel with their sense of animation. The Mosel and its tributaries (which had its smallest harvest in the last 50 years) certainly doesn't have a monopoly on this in 2024, but it deserves special mention in that acidity levels here are more or less uniformly high, yet almost never egregious. When balance is at its precarious best, which is quite frequent at the good German addresses that I visit, the wines showcase a “hall of mirrors” type of phenomenon whereby the bright, vibrant acidity seems to reflect and refract the tasty flavours in every direction upon the palate. This doesn't always make the wines more complex, but even when they’re unelaborate it means that their dialog of flavour is rather fascinating.
Niersteiner Pettenthal in the Rheinhessen
Since the Kabinett level of ripeness served as a sort of natural average limit for sugar accumulation in 2024, there's an absolute abundance of Kabinett. But just because there’s an abundance of Kabinett doesn't mean that it's a good Kabinett vintage. Besides, some of this will be labelled “Kabinett” (particularly regarding regions or producers who value this style), but given the marketing landscape of many German regions, even more will be absorbed into lighter-than-usual wines at the modest end of a grower's portfolio. This might include estate bottlings, village cuvées, or those bearing names like “Blauschiefer", “Muschelkalk", “Quarzit”, and the like.
Two thousand twenty-four is not a Kabinett vintage of the same calibre as 2021. On average, the former lacks some of the concentration, length, intricacy and abundance of riches of the latter. But many of my favourite wines of 2024 feature the word “Kabinett” on the label, and the best amongst them are absolute fucking showstoppers. Whether dry, off-dry, or residually sweet, they are electric, thrilling, crystalline, gossamer, excruciatingly flavourful, and — particularly when from the Mosel or Saar — virtually fruitless with nuances that instead channel rocks, vapours, and dreams. At the top level they tattoo themselves into the tongue with their unyielding saltiness and distinguish themselves from their ‘21 counterparts by being even more compact, dazzlingly pixelated, and precarious in their sense of harmony.
Given that ripeness was a struggle and that healthy botrytis wasn't particularly abundant in 2024, much of the fruit that reached higher levels of Oechsle was directed towards commercially viable dry cuvées instead of residually sweet Spätlese or Auslese. But a pattern that emerged was that when producers chose to make fruity versions of these styles, it was probably for a good reason and in my experience the results weren't as qualitatively variable as they are for the other categories.
I made a habit of asking growers if 2024 reminds them of any other recent vintages. Some mentioned 2004 or 2008, but with obvious hesitance. Others categorically said that it was unique. Andreas Adam, for whom 2024 was his 25th vintage under the A.J. Adam label, claimed that it didn't resemble any vintage that he had ever produced, but suspected that there would be parallels in decades of the distant past. Helmut Dönnhoff said that he had never seen such deleterious frost in his fifty-plus years as a vintner, and therefore the season that unfolded upon this premise also has no reference point.
German Riesling in 2024 is qualitatively, quantitatively, and stylistically variable, not only from region to region or village to village, but often from grower to grower and even from wine to wine. Amongst its mercurial forms, it's almost never corpulent — it can be sinewy, but not brawny or flabby. There’s an adherence to the classical hierarchy of site, but the pricing pyramid dictated by the market or the VDP is frequently corrupted. The very best Rieslings are great, and uniquely so in that they don't resemble the motifs of recent vintages. They combine levity and intensity in a way that will reinforce the reasons that many of us seek German Riesling in particular.
The Weingut Schätzel cellar in Nierstein, Rheinhessen
German Riesling in the Marketplace
The “market”, that is, the avenues in which German Riesling and all other wines are traded, is completely fucked. I daresay that not since the trifecta of bullshit that was prohibition between two World Wars have there been so many encumbrances to the trading of wine, even when it's as good as the German wine that Metrovino works with.
Speaking of prohibition, the liquor industry at large is up against a somewhat inexplicable wave of neo-prohibitionists, and a multiplicity of organisations within the medical industry are directly or indirectly siding with them. There’s an international trend to drink less, and despite the fact that culturally-imperative, artisanally-made wine is the form of alcohol least likely to be abused, it’s suffering a decline in sales along with everything else. Shipping rates are the highest that I've ever seen in my career, the Canadian dollar has hardly ever been so weak for so long, and international inflation is making every aspect of wine production, transport, storage, and marketing more expensive than ever.
Some recent exacerbations of this problem have come in the form of international tariffs, and perhaps unique to our wine industry here in Alberta, Canada, our very own Conservative government has chosen this special and challenging moment to introduce a 15% tax on any wine worth drinking. Since I've written extensively on a couple of these topics elsewhere, I'll spare you the details here.
Germany is not an inexpensive country in which to produce wine. It's true that it's been regarded as such for a long time, but this is partly due to generations that were willing to do the work for a pittance, and partly because for several decades, German wine was so patently and globally unfashionable that the pricing of the wines couldn't be anything but low. These two issues are merely bifurcated nuances of the same problem. Recent generations have been largely uninterested in winegrowing, and those that embrace it these days are almost invariably formally-trained, well-travelled, and are following this lunatic destiny with the intention of producing the very best wine that they're capable of — and they don't want to do it for free.
When I stumble across German wine propaganda that I wrote even as little as 10 years ago, one of my most urgent, if hyperbolic, strategies to encourage people to drink Riesling is that even the best examples were borderline “free”. Indeed, for most of my career, the value of German Riesling has been criminal on one hand, and irresistible on the other. I practiced what I preached, and consequently my basement is stuffed with schlegelflasche. Only recently have I had to be more mindful for strictly financial reasons. There are now examples of dizzyingly expensive German wine in all stylistic categories, and though bottles from most good producers can still be said to offer exceptional value (especially in a relative sense), Germany is no longer a country that one would seek wine from simply because it’s so affordable.
However, German Riesling is the greatest wine on the planet, and the country also excels at innumerable other categories — I’m inclined to mention sparkling, Weissburgunder, and Spätburgunder in particular, but could go on and on. We have to pay a bit more than we used to for these wines, but there are no other wines in the world more worthy of your money than good German examples. To single out Riesling again, even when I open an entry-level estate-grown wine from a top producer — which in Alberta will inevitably retail for somewhere between 28 and 45 Canadian dollars per bottle these days — I can't even believe how much intricacy, persistence, terroir-transparency, and aging capacity the wine has. And with the exception of a handful of elite producers, even the apex of most of these grower's portfolios is “touchable” by virtually any wine lover. It goes without saying that this makes German Riesling more approachable than any of the other classic wine categories of the world.
Niko of Griesel & Compagnie
Sharla with Johannes of Weingut Am Schlipf
Of all the issues impacting the cost of wine, vintners seeking a fair compensation for their hard work is the one that simply cannot be criticised. Almost all of our German winegrowing partners have kept their prices consistent with last year, and that explicitly includes those who suffered devastating losses in 2024. This hardly makes any sense, but the common explanation goes somewhere along the lines of, “given the global uncertainty and present economic climate, this would be a very stupid time to increase prices". However, for the reasons cited at the beginning of this section, and especially thanks to Alberta's Conservative government, Metrovino's prices on German Riesling will be at least 15% higher than last year. It’s never too late to file your complaint about this.
If you have to make compromises as to which wines to buy, or if you notice that your budget provides you with less bottles than it did last year, please keep in mind that this has nothing to do with the growers themselves, nor is it reflective of a greedy tactical move on the part of Metrovino. I hope with all my heart that when sacrifices have to be made, German Riesling is recognised as the essential, life-affirming serum that it is, and the heroic growers get the support they need to continue to do their valiant work.
Jerez de la Frontera, April 2025
Special thanks to Lars Carlberg and various Metro Mates for proofreading sections of this article.
