Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

Text: Stuart Pigott / Title photo: Thomas Florscheutz

Not long ago I told a couple of friends that my life story wasn’t worth telling and they vehemently dissented: “what about all those great stories you tell?” So, here it is. Constraints of space mean that I can’t tell all those “great stories” here, rather just the outline within which they happened. Don’t worry though, I will be telling those “great stories” shortly on my new website: 

StuartPigott.com

Those of you who’ve met me or seen me on the screen may find it hard to believe, but until I joined the school theatre group aged 12 I was a shy and introverted child. The background to this was the ever-present threat of violence at Langley Park School for Boys in the leafy London suburb of Beckenham. That made me an anxious 12 year old, but I somehow I sensed that the stage might help me escape from intimidation and bullying.

For that production I was given the smallest speaking part, but my parents didn’t believe that I could pull even that off. Somehow, I did, and I was given a much more important parts for the following productions, until, finally I was made the male lead. The important thing about this was how, step-by-step, a new Stuart Pigott stepped out of the old one and onto the stage. It is he who writes these lines.

My old introverted and anxious self hasn’t entirely disappeared, remaining as a slimy residue in a dark corner of my mind. When things go badly wrong, he reappears and I turn to jelly. However, this strange state never lasts long: my transformation into a player on the stage of the world has long been almost complete. Of course, in my 65 years many other things changed, not least my transformation from a child totally disinterest in wine into an adult who is fascinated with it, and sometimes obsesses about it.

It would make writing this biography easy if I could tell you that there was one life-changing incident that pushed me in the direction of wine, but life isn’t a movie! The reality is that between a school exchange visit to Germany in April 1976 and the publication of my first article about win, in the April 1984 issue of Decanter magazine, I stepped, slipped and slid into wine.  

Although that article was a turning point, shortly after it another article of mine on a totally different subject appeared in the contemporary culture magazine ZG. It was never only wine that I wrote about. When I do so what I learned during my cultural history studies at the Royal College of Art in London 1984-86 makes me continuously aware that wine always exists in multiple contexts. (Thanks to my professor, Sir Christopher Fraying!)

I did not get on well with my father, because he wanted me to realize his unfulfilled dreams. However, I didn’t expect him to die of a brain tumour aged 52. I was just over half that age when it happened and occasionally I still feel after-tremors of this earthquake. That word isn’t an exaggeration, because within the space of a couple of weeks I learned that he would die, was dropped by my girlfriend and lost my place in the shared student flat and went into psychological meltdown.

At the very beginning of 1989 I finally got firm ground back under my feet when I rented a flat in Bernkastel/Mosel and began learning how that German wine region ticked. It was just emerging from the crisis prior to its present one. I would have travelled to experience the collapse of communist East Germany, but chronic back pain caused by multiple slipped disks kept me in Bernkastel. My first visits to Berlin in July 1990 were a turning point. I pursued the wrong girl, but ended seeing Roger Waters play The Wall where the Berlin Wall once stood, and I fell in love with Berlin.

It took some time for me to move there, but from the 1^st January, 1994 I was an official resident of the city and of Germany. For the twenty years beginning in late 1992 I was together with the sommelier, and later food and wine journalist, Ursula Heinzelmann. In many ways and for many years we were a great team, and I couldn’t have written the string of wine books I did without her help and support. (Thanks to Ursula, for everything!)

The first of those books in German (published by ECON in Düsseldorf in 1994 – see below for all German language book titles) catapulted me to B grade national fame thanks to the controversy it caused. Wie eine Wildsau or like a wild boar, was the title of the story about me in Spiegel magazine, and it was a quote from aristocratic winemaker Michael Graf Adelmann. Another winemaker sued me, but I think he greatly regretted that when the court vindicated the publisher and I. Nobody attacked me like that ever again.

For more than a year in 1998-1999 I worked on and off as a presenter in the TV documentary film Ein Weinjahr that was later aired on Norddeutscher Rundfunk, the public service broadcaster of Northern Germany. I was a bit shaky at the beginning of the shooting, but by the time we finished work on it I was confident enough to philosophizing about wine in German while riding a bicycle between rows of wine barrels in a dark. (Thanks to filmmaker Thomas Struck, also for Hauenstein about whom you can find out by read the stories below).

During the first decade of this century I wrote a trio of books about wine and globalisation (published by the S. Fischer publishing group in Frankfurt in 2003, 2006 and 2009). The research for these books took me to new winegrowing locations like China, India, Thailand, the Dakotas in America, Denmark and Norway. These journeys of discovery were mind-expanding, and I became a much better writer through this process. These books might have been hailed as a revolution in wine journalism if they hadn’t only appeared in German. (Thanks to my editor at S. Fischer, Martina Seith-Karow). 

To research another wine book I attended the Geisenheim Wine University as a guest student for two semesters in 2008-2009 and also produced an experimental wine in a steep vineyard in the Franken section of the Tauber Valley. (Thanks to Professor Hans-Rainer Schultz in Geisenheim, and to winemaker and chef Christian Stahl).

That book was never published because S. Fischer dropped me, but this entire process radically changed the way I see wine. It led to the marriage of wine science and the art of winemaking in my mind. They aren’t opposites as commonly supposed, but can be complementary if the path of dogma is rejected, as I decisively reject it. On a practical level, by the end of this I’d also undertaken almost every aspect of vine cultivation work and the winemaking process, giving me a deep respect for those who regularly do this hard work.

My winemaking experiment resulted in a meeting with Prof. Dr. Thomas Gruber, then the Director General of BR, Bavaria’s public service broadcasting station. Three seasons of a TV series entitled Weinwunder Deutschland were filmed 2010-2012, and through them I learned the basics of filmmaking from the team. (Thanks to director Alexander Saran, cameramen Sorin Dragoi and Florian Schilling, soundman Peter ????, and camera assistant Flo Bschorr for that great and challenging time). 

Not long after this I shot, with some professional help, my own 65 minute movie Watch Your Back, a mockumentary about my life as a wine journalist. It’s premier was at Michael Moore’s Bjiou movie theatre in Traverse City/Michigan in July 2014. Another product of what I call my New York period had just been published, the book Best White Wine on Earth (Stewart, Tabori & Chang). Sadly, it was my last original wine book. (Thanks to Michael Jacobs of Abrams in New York, and to Ralf Frenzel of Tre Torri in Wiesbaden who published the German language edition as Planet Riesling). 

My four years exploring New York City culminated in a series of articles about The Hipster Somms of New York published on www.grapecollective.com that caused a tidal wave of criticism from somms and hipsters. My sociological and anthropological approach plus my satirical humour made many of them to spit venom in my direction, and one of them even accused me of being the devil incarnate! I always felt comfortable with this kind of criticism, because it leaves no doubt that you really had an effect. (Thanks to Christopher Barnes of Grape Collective for sticking his neck out and publishing this Gonzo extravaganza).

Between September 2016 and December 2025 working for the James Suckling website led me to explore much of France (Beaujolais, Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Rhône, Champagne and Alsace), Spain (Ribeiro del Duero, Rioja and Catalunya) and Italy (Alto Adige/Südtirol, Trentino, Campania and Sicily) intensively. It took me to Chile and Argentina for the first time plus back to California and Australia, plus I also visited Hungary, Serbia and Israel during this period. (Thanks, James Suckling and the current team, plus ex-team members Claire Nesbitt, Nathan Sloane and Nick Stock).

And now a new period begins that will doubtless bring many surprises. Building something new is always more complicated than expected. Germany is not a friendly place for innovation, nor do its bureaucrats smile on independent action. However, my wife Alexandra Pigott is always there, and with that support I know that I can handle any problems that come my way. (Thanks Alexandra for everything!)

29.03.2026, Eppstein/Germany

HAUENSTEIN GROWING PAINS 4/5

My interview with Alexander van Dülmen in Effilee magazine #64

Nothing I’d experienced before was quite like my first couple of Hauenstein brainstorming sessions with Alexander van Dülmen at his townhouse in Berlin. Everything he said more or less precisely hit a nerve in me, so everything had to be noted down in some form. Even the least good ideas suggested other, better ideas. I marked the best ideas with a large exclamation mark and they were immediately incorporated into my scripts. 

More important than any details of what Alexander said and how I noted it down was the way this process led to a heightened state of consciousness. Looking back from a distance it strikes me that  this was the moment I overcame the shock of first seeing Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death (see 1/5). More than 35 years later I was finally responding actively to the painting , rather than recoiling in fear. 

During the next phase of writing one by one the central characters gained clearer contours, becoming three-dimensional figures and friends I knew I would put through hell. That was essential, because when I approached Alexander had written about 90 minutes of material, but he saw Hauenstein as a 6 episode series with an episode length of 60 minutes.

 It was clear to me that through the new energy the story had gained to would expand to fill 3 episodes without losing the pace of action.  There would therefore have to be an entirely new story for episodes 4-6. This demanded that several secondary characters turn into central ones, and I added an entirely new central figure. The shadow of death fell very differently on each of those figures, so, I went with my new friends.

What I didn’t realize for quite some time was how my work was not in classic movie script form. Instead, my texts were an odd mix of theatrical plays and movie scripts. That might sound like a detail, but it was a problem, because it made them confusing for people in the film industry.

I also didn’t fully appreciate how extreme the four central characters and some of the secondary characters are. This is necessary in order to take the viewer to extreme places they would otherwise wouldn’t go. However, extreme characters tend to polarize. 

In July 2023, I was confronted by all this when Alexander made an application for support for Hauenstein to one of Germany‘s regional film boards. It was an important learning process and it had a silver lining in what he wrote in the producer‘s note: just like in the mid-1990s , when Thomas Jahn who was working as a taxi driver and sent Til Schweiger the script for the movie Knocking on Heaven’s Door, so, at the beginning of that year I had sent him rudimentary scripts for the first episodes of Hauenstein. 

Jahn is now a successful director, so clearly, it is possible to make the leap into scriptwriting and filmmaking from outside the movie and TV bubble. It also confirmed that I was on the right track with Hauenstein, even though the film board felt that the scripts were not far developed enough to demand their support.  More or less directly this lead to Alexander‘s decision that a director needed to be brought on board.

I first met Ziska Riemann at my small Berlin place in late October 2023, before we walked to Alexander ‘s townhouse for an initial brainstorming session. He also showed us one of the 11 „songs“ that make up his movie of the Peter Weis play The Investigation (Die Ermittlung in German), which was premiered in Berlin in July 2024. Watching this roughly 20 minute segment of the movie was harrowing.

The Investigation is about the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt/Germany in 1963-65. It is composed almost exclusively of the testimony of witnesses who were Holocaust survivors, and the responses of the accused. We all have images in our minds of the skeletal figures of the inmates and the piles of possessions stolen from the more than a million Jews murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis. Of course, it’s not hard to see crude similarities between these images and Bruegel’s  The Triumph of Death, but I think it’s essential to acknowledge the historical uniqueness of these terrible events. 

Good as the connection between Alexander, Ziska and I was from that evening, the two nights we spent at Hotel Döllnsee in the Schorfheide heath north of Berlin at the end of January, 2024 were decisive. Ziska showed me how to reorder the scenes for the first episode of Hauenstein and add a couple of new ones that really focused the story. Later I would be surprised how easily I had sacrificed the first couple of scenes of the story I wrote in this process. She also pushed me into using a scriptwriting software called Drama Queen, now my main tool.

Several brainstorming sessions with Ziska at her home in Berlin followed. One day in the spring of 2024 I told her about how the Hauenstein story channeled my own feelings about death, and she encouraged me to intensify this aspect in the scripts . It was advice I followed, and this took the first episode to its present form. 

At the end of May,2024 the three of us agreed that the decisive steps in the process of finding funding for the project should be taken during the following months. I continued work constructing the scripts for episodes 2 and 3, but both Alexander and Ziska were distracted by other projects. This was understandable, but slowly, over the following months it felt like the ground under my feet was turning to sand. 

Finally in the spring of this 2025 we met up again and the trio snapped back into action.

Part 5 of this story will follow at a future date.

When I started writing my first version of the story of Hauenstein in Berlin 25 years ago filmmaker Thomas Struck was delighted by the way I was fascinated by the character he had created many years previously. And for a moment it seemed that we might successfully cooperate on the realization of a Hauenstein movie.  

After a long brainstorming session at the dining table of my Berlin home on the 30th December 2000 Thomas wrote a note that told Hauenstein’s life story. It was full of humour and playful eccentricity. Hauenstein was an artist and it was drawing that magically kept him alive beyond three score years and ten. Of course, that made Hauenstein a wonderful fairytale figure. I saw it very differently, feeling that the story had to have some hard edges, so I rather quickly realized that cooperating with Thomas wasn’t going to work.

During the spring and summer of 2001 I plowed ahead alone, writing a number of texts, including quite a lengthy fragment of a movie scrip . However, I had no experience of scriptwriting, and the story woefully lacked real tension. More fundamentally, I didn’t sense the deep connection was between Hauenstein and the tight knot of emotions that Peter Breugel’s The Triumph of Death (1562) had unleashed when I first saw it in 1984-5. My involvement with Hauenstein was, and is, a reverberation of that moment. This is how I saw him in 2001 as documented by a painting I did that year.

Not only do audiences live vicariously through the characters in movies, but filmmakers and scriptwriters do too. Hauenstein was the focal point where my rational awareness of the inevitability of my own death and the irrational desire to overcome it collided like sub-atomic particles in an accelerator, releasing enormous energy. I should have sought strength and inspiration there, but I only vaguely sensed its presence inside me. At the same time many weak ideas led me astray and confused me. 

In September 2001 I started writing a regular column in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s (Germany’s equivalent of New York Times) new Sunday edition, and not long after a wine book project was accepted by an important German publisher. I jumped at these things and let Hauenstein drift off. 

For many years from after that writing about wine felt right. This distracted me from my psychological problems and my failing marriage. Although I wrote a string of German language books and some of them sold quite well, none of them was published in my mother tongue. I was heading deep into an artistic dead end.

Co-writing and presenting three series of TV documentaries about wine for Bavarian TV (BR) from 2010 to 2012 reconnected me with filmmaking. I learned a lot from everyone in the team, most of all from the director Alexander Saran. This project also kept me psychologically on a halfway even keel through those troubled years. By the time I admitted to myself that I was lost and sought the help of a therapist I was suffering seriously from depression. 

When I left Berlin for New York City at the end of November 2012 my plan was to finally write an English language wine book and to shoot my own movie, an autobiographical mockumentary called Watch your Back. The book appeared under the title Best White Wine on Earth in June 2014 (published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang), and around the same time there were several screenings of my low budget 65 minute movie. 

However, that was the superficial action of this period. Of far greater long-term, importance for me was reading Story by Robert McKee, the man who can fairly be called the guru of screenwriting. That process stretched over the four years of my sojourn in NYC lasted (with numerous trips back to Berlin, where I always had a room). I am still rereading that book today, just like Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (see episode 1). 

When I started reading Story it brought me to a humbling realization: the great majority of what I had written so far was deeply flawed. What to do? Obviously I wanted to write better stories and I realized  film might be a more interesting medium than books. However, the next steps turned out to be much more difficult than I hoped and expected. The general crisis in journalism caused by the expansion of the social media suddenly caught up with me big time after the publication of Best White Wine on Earth.

Another job like working as a wine taster and editor for JamesSuckling.com wasn’t going to come along, so in August 2016 I grasped both it and financial security. I’m still doing that job, but I lost my foothold in NYC at the beginning of November 2016. Marrying again in Germany helped me over the sense of loss for my NYC. 

As I approached my 60th birthday the Covid crisis hit and the death toll in NY was 25 times that of the German average! Perhaps it was the new landscape of death in intensive care units and refrigerated containers used as morgues that prompted me to pick up Hauenstein again? A journalist friend in NYC called Jürgen Fränznick had sent me some of those horrific images.

Another  journalistic colleague Paula Redes Sidore in Germany read my first hesitant sketches for a new version of Hauenstein in September 2020 and encouraged me to pursue the project. My old Berlin friend Caroline Stummel helped me dig out many of the old Hauenstein papers, which lay in various dark corners in the city. Then, TV and film scriptwriter Thomas Wendrich provided useful criticism of the first draft of my script in June 2021, but would anyone in the film industry be interested in a self-taught scriptwriter with a story that didn’t fit neatly into any established genre?

In April 2022 I had dinner with a couple of friends in Berlin and told them about the script I was working on. Nadine Rosinski, who also works in wine, told me she had a good contact to the film and TV producer Alexander van Dülmen who also was a wine merchant. She kept her promise to speak to him and contact with him was established.

It’s only a short bicycle ride from my Berlin pied á Terre to the home of Alexander van Dülmen. We first met there in June 2022 and two months later I did an extensive interview with the film producer-wine merchant extraordinaire for the German-language Effilee Magazine. After the interview we went into the garden of his townhouse, he told me he had read my script and was interested.  

Part One of this series about the roots of my Berlin thriller Hauenstein I described how, aged 24 in the winter of 1984-85 I first encountered Peter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death (1562) in the library of the Royal College of Art, where I was studying. To see the painting scroll down to Part One of this series, but be prepared for a terrifying experience like that which was a turning point in my life.

During my late teens and twenties I didn’t get on well with my father. However, when I received my MA in cultural history in July 1986, the fact that it was from the Royal College of Art enabled him to show pride in my achievement. However, not long afterwards, he insisted  I get „a real job“, as if my studies had been no more than a distraction, so I broke off contact with him. It was a struggle, but the freelance wine journalism I’d begun doing during my time at art school just about kept me above water.

All of this would be irrelevant if, at the beginning of 1987, my father had not been rushed into hospital after falling into a coma. He was wheeled straight from the MRT scan into the operating theatre where a tumor was removed from his brain. That brought him relief, but afterwards no amount of radiation therapy could really help him. In fact, he suffered greatly during those months. 

Back in hospital at the end of July 1987 he told me that he took back everything he’d said to me during the preceding years, and we bonded in a way I never thought would be possible. The last time I saw him, during the first days of August 1987, he was in a coma again and his body as cold a block of ice. Each of his shuddering breaths was as painful to hear as the long eerie silence that followed it. Knowing I almost certainly couldn’t be with him at the end, I wrote my name on a scrap of paper and put it under his pillow. The next morning death suddenly became very personal. It was no longer just something that happened to very old people.

I struggled with depression through the remainder of 1987, but during 1988 discovering America helped me pull myself out of the dark labyrinth into which I’d fallen. The last of those trips, to New York City in December 1988, was a totally inspiring experience. I stayed with a friend of a friend who was the wine business called Louis Broman and we instantly became friends. Louis introduced me to New York City and to a bunch of very interesting people who happened to be involved in wine. We also visited a string of exciting bars and restaurants, and one night we went to the movies. 

The IFC Center movie theatre on 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village was showing a new movie called Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. I’d heard the name, but knew almost nothing about it. Louis hated the movie, and in the taxi from the IFC back up 6th Avenue to his place on West 97th Street he railed against it. „A movie isn’t just a series of images, however brilliant!“ he insisted. I vehemently disagreed with him, because the movie, its characters, story and visions of Berlin had captivated me.

I couldn’t have formulated it so clearly then, but Wings of Desire showed me how it’s possible to make a movie about the ancient themes of love and death, fear and longing that’s compellingly original, beautiful and inspiring. For me, doing that involves weaving a thread of impossibility into the complex fabric of reality. That thin line of silver or gold changes everything, though the world otherwise remains our own and completely familiar.

On December 21st, 1988, just a couple of days after I returned to London, the same flight I’d taken to New York – Pan Am 103 – exploded in the air over Lockerbie in Scotland killing all 259 people on board, plus 11 people in Lockerbie itself. I was one of many who  narrowly escaped this act of terrorism. The news images of the jagged fragments of the Boeing 747 strewn across the Scottish landscape are well-known. Less widely appreciated is the fact that the bodies of the victims were equally widely strewn, creating a landscape filled with death. Of course, Bruegel’s painting is dominated by red and ochre colors, and Scotland in winter is green, but, undeniably, there’s a certain similarity.

At the beginning of January 1989 I moved to the Mosel Valley in Germany to work as a wine journalist, and to make a new start.  Wim Wenders’ film had infected me with a fascination for Berlin. Health problems held me up, but finally in July 1990 I travelled to Berlin with my winemaker friend Ernst Loosen of Weingut Dr. Loosen in Bernkastel. He showed me Berlin in the same way that Louis Broman had introduced me to the substance and soul of NYC. I was instantly in love.

I couldn’t get enough Berlin, not just the contemporary city, but also Berlin’s past. I mean both the official history, and less easily definable things that I absorbed by what I call psychic osmosis. For me, many places in the city have multiple realities of which those things that are clearly visible is only one. I never felt like that about a city before, so it was inevitable I would move to Berlin. Once again, it took some time, but I finally got there in late 1993.

By April 1995 I felt very much at home in Berlin. Then, I opened the new issue of Wine Spectator Magazine (my most important employer) and in the news section found a brief obituary for Louis Broman. It felt as if the world had cleaved in two: before and after. Louis had broken off contact with me and many other people after becoming sick. One of my other NYC contacts thought it was cancer, but it turned out to be AIDS, which was still a big killer.

I was a successful wine journalist, but looking back nearly everything I wrote during the 1990s lacked emotional depth. Let’s face it, that’s something difficult to achieve when your subject is a bottle of wine! Then, in 1999 the filmmaker Thomas Struck asked me to be part of a very unusual documentary he was shooting in the Mosel Valley called Ein Weinjahr, or a wine year. It definitely has emotional depth!

In the theatre group at my high school, I’d worked my way up from the smallest speaking part to the male lead, and more recently I’d had no trouble being interviewed in German in front of TV cameras. However, when we started work on the Mosel I struggled badly in front of Thomas’s camera. Sensing his frustration, I redoubled my efforts, and as work on the film progressed my performance improved considerably.

Perhaps because I was distracted with my struggle to give a convincing performance there’s a massive gap in my memory at this point. Therefore, I can only say that during one of our shooting trips in the Mosel that Thomas told me about a character he’d created some years previously.  Although Hauenstein is extremely old he only looks a fraction of his actual age. Somehow death didn’t touch him, although its army of shadows must have repeatedly been around him. More on this later.

I remember being totally fascinated with Hauenstein, turning him over and over in my mind. In June 2000 in Vienna I became convinced that he had to simultaneously be a totally  contemporary person and the embodiment of an ancient city’s history. When I got back to Berlin it was immediately clear to me that my new home city was the perfect fit. 

At the end of 2000 I started making notes for a Hauenstein story of some complexity as the basis for a movie. At the time I wasn’t aware how significant this step was, but now it is clear to me that all the basic elements of my thriller series had already come together:  Berlin (location), Hauenstein (protagonist) and the conviction that it must possible to tell a compelling contemporary story about love and death, fear and longing (the ethos of the story). It was a serious beginning, but how serious was I about it really?

WARNING:  Below is the terrifying 16th century painting that drove me to write the Berlin thriller Hauenstein. Do NOT scroll down is you wish to avoid seeing it!

Every story has a backstory. Therefore, where a story begins might be considered to be arbitrary, and that’s certainly a debatable point. However, every great story starts with (an) incident(s) so decisive there’s no doubt about it / their importance. It / they thrust(s) the central character(s) into the story, in this instance myself into the events that compelled me to write the scripts for the Berlin thriller Hauenstein.

There was a decisive moment that resonated with other moments in my past and continues to resonate to this day. Between September 1984 to July 1986 I was a student of cultural history at the Royal College of Art in London. One grey day, 40 years ago, I was in the college library researching something for my master’s degree thesis. For a couple of hours I’d worked systematically, but then, feeling that I wasn’t getting anywhere, I changed tack.

Some weeks earlier my professor, Christopher Frayling, had introduced me to the idea of researching by serendipity, or “random” discovery. According to his method I went to the nearest shelf unit and randomly pulled out a book, then opened it equally randomly. In front of me was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. If you don’t already know it, then please ask yourself if you are prepared for the shock of seeing Peter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death (1562, today hanging in the Museo Prado in Madrid). The name already says a great deal, but the painting itself is a bottomless well of terror.

Although I had already seen some ugly things in horror movies and in war photography, nothing touched me like Bruegel’s painting. Suddenly, I was dizzy, trembled and thought I was going to throw up, but they were mere symptoms of my suffering: I felt as if my very existence was in doubt. Since then, every time I look at The Triumph of Death I feel that again, though much less intensely than the first time. At these moments it is as if the intervening years, decades, are dissolved and I’m transported back to that moment. That’s what I mean by resonating. HERE is the painting:

In a great story, the inciting incident that initiates the action has a deep connection to the backstory, but also points forwards like an arrow flying towards the turning point (roughly half way through the story) and onward to the conclusion. So it is my case too, though many of these connections did not became clear to me until quite recently.

Let me start with the backstory to my moment of grim revelation. My mother, now 90 years old, says that I was a happy child, though an introspective and introverted one.  All the photographs of me as a small child confirm this, but that was my waking life. Aged six I started having a recurring nightmare about the end of the world. It began in a landscape where I was extremely fragile, like a stick that could easily be snapped. Then, catastrophe came, the sky falling like the most gigantic mountain imaginable, crushing me and pulverizing the entire world. I always awoke at that point in a state of complete terror. I think it’s important to point out that I grew up in an anti-religious family and a profoundly materialistic society.

For my seventh birthday my parents gave me a lavishly illustrated book about the animal world. I vividly remember my delight when I unwrapped it and a puma with glowing eyes in a forest at night stared out at me from the cover. Accepting the invitation of his gaze, I flicked through the pages with great delight, until that feeling suddenly turned to horror. An extremely detailed image of an ant colony covered a double page spread and for a long moment it gripped me, then I snapped the book too and didn’t open it again for several years. Although my feelings about ants have changed completely it is still hard to look at those pages. Now the similarity of this panoramic landscape filled with crawling figures to Bruegel’s painting is obvious to me. 

When I was nine years old my family moved from one London suburb to another and I lost all my friends. Shortly afterwards, I also discovered the truth about nuclear weapons from a handbook on rockets and missiles. In a detached and technical manner it described how different nuclear-armed missiles would totally destroy towns and cities of varying sizes. I found all of this fascinating, although the book made it clear to me that given the location of our home we would almost certainly die immediately in any nuclear strike on London. My death, our deaths and those millions of others had been planned, and this mass execution was only delayed. Of course, I hope that this delay continues.

Everything I’ve learned about atomic weapons since then only confirmed their intrinsically genocidal purpose to me. Nuclear destruction is fundamentally indiscriminate. It enables the kind of mass murder perpetrated by various nations during the Second World War through what most people call “carpet bombing” to be undertaken more quickly, easily and cheaply. This was, and is, the reason for the development, manufacture and deployment of nuclear weapons. We all live in their long shadows. Those people directly involved with them are members of a vast cult of death that also reminds me of Bruegel’s painting.

When I started at Langley Park School for Boys in the London suburb of Beckenham in September 1971 aged 11 I was suddenly thrown into a pit of violence from which it seemed there was no escape. Worse than the actual violence – often arbitrary and nearly always perpetrated by other kids – was the pervasive threat of violence that hung in the air the whole time. One day at school in the summer of 1974 I saw how a particularly vicious boy held another boy out of a top floor window by his ankles. The psychopathic thug responsible threatened to drop his victim head first, and it was clear that doing so would have given him a big thrill. Although he then pulled his victim back in through the window (to avoid being caught?) in that moment murder became something very real for me.

Mass murder became real one day shortly after when my parents and I were watching a documentary on the television about the Second World War. The subject turned to Auschwitz and the other death camps where six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust / Shoah. Black and white archive footage showed piles of emaciated dead bodies and my father burst into tears. It was the only time I can remember him crying like that.

In November 1981 John Stezaker, my art history tutor at St. Martins School of Art in London and a great artist, recommended I read Elias Canetti’s book Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht in the original German, first published in 1962). It’s analyses human behaviour as a group phenomenon. From the first sentence I was hooked, and I continue rereading it.

It might seem unconnected to Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, but in the section titled The Survivor Canetti describes how paranoid leaders try to deflect death from themselves by killing others; each time surviving their victims increases their sense of inviolability. This has a relevance that goes far beyond Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, etc. Who never wanted more life, or hoped somehow to cheat death? The greatness of Bruegel’s painting is the visceral manner in which it confronts us with the complete impossibility of doing so. The paranoid leader’s experience of survival is at most a delay of the inevitable, and his sense of inviolability is a sham, yet he almost never considers that this might be true, even for a moment.

In the summer of 1982 I attended a lecture given by my fellow art student Paul Hedge (today a director of Hales Gallery in London and New York) on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on the 8th August, 1945. Paul read at length from several accounts of survivors, including from John Hersey’s book Hiroshima, originally published in The New Yorker Magazine on the 31st August, 1946 when it filled the entire issue. Some of the scenes it describes are highly reminiscent of Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death. As the lecture proceeded my dread turned to nausea, then to overwhelming sorrow. I feel all that again now writing these lines.

The events of autumn 1983, when American cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads arrived in Britain etched themselves deeply into me. I remember feeling a deep sense of foreboding watching the TV news the day that the warheads arrived in a military transport aircraft. During the NATO exercise Able Archer in November 1983 the leaders of several member countries, including Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, practiced giving the codes that would launch nuclear-armed missiles. Later, it came out that some members of the Soviet Politburo were unsure if this was an exercise or real preparations for a nuclear first strike. It was the last high point of tension during the Cold War, but it did not feel like it was one of the final chapters at the time. We were right in it. Soon after this I would discover that nuclear-armed Thor missiles had been stationed in Britain during my first years of life in the early 1960s. History was repeating itself.

All of this was in the back of my mind when I “randomly” pulled that book off the shelf, then “randomly” opened it and first saw Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death. No doubt all of these experiences shaped my reaction. The story of what followed from that moment stretches 40 years to the present moment, and beyond it into a future that once again looks deeply uncertain. 

As I stepped into the elevator and I was surprised when somebody I didn’t know asked me who Hauenstein is.

„Tony Hauenstein is very old, but he looks like he’s 45. He lives in Berlin where he’s hiding in plain sight. The city’s also home to the genetic researcher Dr. Brian Peacock, who’s 45, but is dying of accelerated aging. He will stop at nothing to get his hands on exceptional DNA like Hauenstein’s, both to save himself and create the Ultimate Product: more life.“

I just got to Berlin and the city stirred me like it has every time I came here since starting work on the scripts for the streaming series Hauenstein back in September 2020. I took the photograph above outside my Berlin front door almost four years ago at the beginning of this process. It reminds me of where this story comes from: the sidewalks of the city.

My very first trip to Berlin was in July 1990 and I couldn’t get enough of the city, as if it had been waiting to seduce me and was not going to give up until it had taken me whole. It was during those trips that I started feeling as if the sidewalks were whispering to me. Could they play back to my imagination the things that had happened on them long ago?

When buildings are destroyed, as untold thousands were in Berlin during World War II, this doesn’t automatically mean that the sidewalks are also destroyed.  Of course, much else in Berlin was destroyed during World War II, most importantly the greater part of the city’s Jewish population, who were murdered in Auschwitz, other death camps or even on the city’s streets. Very few of those who had not fled Germany by the time the war began survived it.

Many of them are now memorized by Stolpersteine, or tripping stones*, like the one pictured above. It may be a tiny and very belated victory over genocidal hatred, but through the Stolpersteine the victims commemorated have won back a small amount of ground, and with it some part of their identity. So sidewalks really can have memories.

Of course, my source inspiration goes beyond this. Hazy experiences in odd locations lead me to delve deep into the city’s history, and it was this process that nourished Hauenstein’s development even before I knew who he was. Without years of this serendipitous deep immersion in Berlin I wouldn’t have been so receptive when the filmmaker Thomas  Struck told me about Hauenstein back in 1999.

The timing couldn’t have been better, because I had been thinking about the coming turn of the 20th to 21st centuries since I was a small child. What had long seemed distant in time was suddenly right in front of me; what had been a metaphysical location for my dreams was rapidly becoming very concrete. During the intervening time I had not only moved to Berlin from London (via the Mosel Valley), but also reinvented myself as a wine journalist. My father had also died, and I had loved and lost several times. This meant that I’d already had some of experience of Hauenstein’s central themes.

The details of Hauenstein’s identity were filled in by my day-today and night-to-night nitty-gritty experience of Berlin’s streets and manifold interior spaces. And from the suggestive interplay of light and shadows while walking the city’s streets and moving about its rooms Tony’s friends and enemies emerged. So, regardless whether the result is good or bad, it is a Berlin story through and through. And this although its themes are universal. 

If back in the 1990s you had told me that one day I would write a complex story about love and death, fear and longing I would have laughed at you. My first attempt to write Hauenstein’s story was a failure not only because I was unaware of the basics of scriptwriting, but also because I was not up to handing the kind of material that is the core of Ancient Greek tragedy and much other classical drama.

So two developmental processes – acquiring a sound knowledge of scriptwriting and a deep exploration of these themes – were necessary before I could put together the three scripts that now stand more or less complete. And it is reaching this decisive point, more than my train journey from Eppstein in the Taunus mountains to Berlin, that triggered today’s reflections.

For those who can’t read German the Stolperstein above says: 

Here lived

JENNY COHN

Born 1878

Deported 1942 to

Riga

Murdered in

Auschwitz

*For more information about the Stolpersteine, or tripping stones go to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein

Some strange noises – at first barely audible and impossible to identify – came from behind the heavy curtains. For some time I was frozen to the spot, unsure not only what to do, but if I should do anything. But the noises got louder and suddenly there was no alternative, but to yank back the curtain and see what was behind it.

Just over three years ago I started writing the script of a thriller called Hauenstein. Now that the Berlin-based film producer Alexander van Dülmen and film director Ziska Riemann are my partners in this venture, and together we are working to realize Hauenstein as a 6 episode streaming series, so this project demands to be properly presented. Apart from everything else, it means that I am now „officially“ a scriptwriter / screenwriter as well as a journalist. With that this blog, that long neglected because of the pressure of work, begins to take a decisive new direction. 

No doubt, this will come as a surprise to those people who have followed my journalistic work, some of them for many years, or even decades. However, this new project has deep roots. It was the combination of my 60th birthday and the Covid-19 crisis that pushed me to start scriptwriting, but the figure of Hauenstein goes back more than a quarter of a century. More about his origins will follow. My first attempt to write his story in early 2001 was an abject failure, because back then I lacked any of the skills necessary to write a film or TV script. 

I began acquiring that knowledge after I moved from Berlin to New York City at the end of 2012, although it took all four of my NYC years to get a firm grip on the basic principals of storytelling. I was surprised to find that a great many of the books and films I loved complied with those principals, even when the authors were unfamiliar with them.

I have a lot of sympathy with those scriptwriters and authors who find the idea that there are „rules“ for what they do intimidating or constricting. But, rules are there not only to be followed, but also broken and twisted. For example, as the Nouvelle Vague film director Jean-Luc Goddard famously said, „A story should have beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.“ He made that work very well in his films, which confirms that he knew exactly what he was talking about. 

I prefer the beginning, the middle and in the end in that order, because I think „one thing leads to another“ is how most of us experience life most of the time. I found the discovery that there is a logic to storytelling empowering, rather than limiting or inhibiting. However, I must point out how this wonderful revelation was allied to the painful realization that most of what I had written before was fundamentally flawed. The best case scenario for my writing pre-2012 was that I got lucky and a good instinct enabled me to tell a journalistic story in a way that made it more or less compelling. But those were rare exceptions to the rule. Mostly, my stories relating to wine were fuzzy at the beginning and in the middle, then they fizzled at the end.

I think it’s not going too far to say that coming to a basic understanding of story structure and dynamics was a new beginning for me. This new story of Stuart Pigott the scriptwriter has now reached the middle section, and its turning point is quite possibly approaching. Getting to know Alexander van Dülmen was a decisive moment, after which I had no doubt that one way or another Hauenstein, and the other stories I am developing, would come to fruition. 

I will be writing more about all of this here during the coming weeks and months, not just reporting on the progress the Alexander van Dülmen, Ziska Riemann and I make with the Hauenstein project. I will also delve into the background  of my – love it or hate it – extraordinary story. Although it is very much part of our Zeitgeist, it has ancient roots. That might seem like a far-reaching claim to make, but let me show you why I think it is entirely realistic. I will also describe how my lifelong obsession with film caused me to give the story of Hauenstein its totally distinctive form. Watch this space!

PS I am not abandoning wine journalism, www.JamesSuckling.com, FINE magazine or the other publications and platforms where my journalistic work appears. Please don’t believe anyone who tells you that I am! It is a very German myth that each person is, and can only be, one thing.  

There were a number of requests for me to publish the text of my speech at Weingut Flick in Wicker/Rheingau on the occasion of the unveiling of the restored Königin-Victoriaberg monument by Jill Gallard, the British Ambassador to Germany. I have added a few details to make it easier for those who did not attend on Tuesday, 14^th June to follow. Firstly, the monument was erected in 1854 by the vineyard’s then owner Georg Michael  Papstmann to commemorate the visit of Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert to this spot for a pick-nick on the 15^th August 1845. The vineyard is owned by the Hupfeld family, but is on long-term lease to Reiner Flick of Weingut Flick, who’s Königin Victoriaberg Rieslings are highly recommended.

I studied cultural history at the Royal College of Art (RCA) from 1984-86 and one of the things I learnt from my Professor, Christopher Frayling, is that the best way to understand a historical event or person is to look at them from as many different angles as possible. Today I’d like to look at Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s visit to the vineyards of Hochheim in the Rheingau region back in 1845 from two perspectives and to see how they connect with one another.

First of all, who was Queen Victoria? The schoolchild’s answer is that she was queen of England for the great majority of the 19^th century (1837-1901) is correct, but superficial. In fact, she was the 6^th British monarch from the House of Hannover. George I was the first (from 1714-1727) of them and he was not popular, because he only spoke German. Queen Victoria’s great popularity is quite a contrast to that! However, her connection to Germany goes much further than this, starting with the fact that her mother was Victoria, Princess of Saxe, Coburg and Saalfeld. This is, of course, where her first name came from.

In 1840 she married Albert, Prince of Saxe, Coburg and Gotha and they had 9 children together. The eldest of these was Victoria, Princess Royal, who married Frederick, Prince of Prussia in 1858. 30 years later he became the German Kaiser Frederick III and King of Prussia, but he died only 99 days later. He was succeeded by their eldest son Wilhelm II, often referred to as Kaiser Bill, the last German Kaiser.

Wilhelm II was present at the bedside of his grandmother Queen Victoria when she died on the 22^nd January, 1901 sitting next to her eldest son and successor King Edward VII. His full name was Albert Edward of Saxe, Coburg and Gotha. This remained the family name until in 1917, when, during World War I King George V changed the family name to Windsor by Royal Proclamation. So you see, the connections between the British Royal Family and Germany go very deep.

Today we celebrate how the trade in German wine is a historic and contemporary link between the peoples of Britain and Germany. The word Hock for German Rhine wines, which clearly derives from the name Hochhiem, stands for this. It goes back much further than 1845, so let us have a quick look at the history of Hock.

The first recorded exports of wine from the German Rhine to Britain date back to the 10^th century, that means well before the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The route of transport for wine then was down the Rhine via Cologne (Köln), which was a great trading hub. From here all manner of goods were exported to Britian, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the Baltic. Already in 1162 the Rheingau Cistercian monastery of Kloster Eberbach (still the largest wine estate in Germany!) established a wine cellar there. At Winkel/Rheingau you can see one of the ancient cranes used to load wine barrels on to riverboats. In 1380 fully 12 million litres of wine were exported from Cologne, a good part of it to Britain, but at this time the English name for these wines was Rhenisch and there is no record of Hock.

Big changes were coming though and the centre of the Rhine wine export trade gradually switched from Cologne to Frankfurt after 1500. The first mention of Hock comes in Thomas D’Unfrey’s play Madame Fickle in 1675, and we can assume that his audience knew what the actors were talking about. That suggests the term may well have replaced Rhenisch during the Restoration period from 1660, much else having also changed then but I am speculating. It then referred not only to the wines of Hochheim, but to wines from the entire Rheingau. Later its use was expanded to wines from the German Rhine.

All of this happened long before the arrival on the scene of the Riesling grape, today the most widely planted grape variety in Germany and the wine most widely associated with Germany. The most significant date for German Riesling is the replanting of Schloss Johannisberg’s vineyards with 293,000 Riesling vines in 1720-21. It was probably the first ever mono-varietal vineyard in the world, regardless of grape variety! 

A number of innovations followed this, including the discovery of the advantage of late-harvesting, or Spätlese, for wine quality at Schloss Johannisberg in 1775. However, the big breakthrough for the Riesling wines of the Rheingau and Germany came with the great 1811 vintage. At this time all wines needed at least 3 years in barrel to clarify and stabilize before they could be bottled or sold. This means that the 1811s came onto the market right after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in , when travel and the movement of goods became much easier; perfect timing! These wines soon had the advantage of a celebrity endorsement in the form of Goethe’s West-östliche Divan published in 1819. Several poems in this collection sing the praises of der Eilfer, as Goethe referred to the wines of the 1811, or comet vintage.

After Prince Albert married Queen Victoria in 1840 many German things became fashionable in Britain. For example, he was not responsible for putting up the first Christmas tree in Britain, although the Royal Family certainly has that honour. However, he certainly popularized putting a brightly decorated fir tree indoors during the Christmas season, making it an essential part of the British Christmas. Also, right through the reign of Queen Victoria the status and prices of German wines continued to climb.

So, you see, there were many reasons why the couple made time to come here to see the place where the name Hock originated and to celebrate how these wines linked the peoples of Britain and Germany for many centuries. You could say that their visit placed a crown on that long relationship which continues to this day.

Thank you for your attention.

Today is my 61st birthday and anniversaries are useful moments to look back. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1921 vintage for German wines, which is celebrating its centenary. It was not only a great vintage, but was the turning point for the nation’s wine industry in the direction of modern winemaking methods.

I searched and searched for information that went beyond general observations and was free of platitudes. Finally, I found something in the book Könige des Rieslings an Mosel, Saar and Ruwer, or Kings of Riesling from the Mose, Saar and Ruwerby Peter Sauerwald & Edgar Wenzel (1978, Seewald Verlag, Stuttgart) about the 1921 vintage at the Kathäuserhof estate in the Ruwer (now part of the Mosel wine region). My guess is that the first text below was written by Hans Wilhelm Rautenstrauch, the then owner of the estate, in August 1921:

 “There was just one rainy day each month in May and June, apart from that burning heat. In July the heat and drought intensified. Occasional thunderstorms didn’t bring the hoped for cooling or the necessary moisture. Thursday, 28^th July was the hottest day of the year, bringing enormous heat: 39° C in the shade and 50° C in the sun. At 10pm in the evening the thermometer still stood at 32° C. However, the vineyards look good and we expect a very good crop…”

That sounds rather reminiscent of the 2018 vintage in Germany. However, the Average Growing Season Temperature for 1921 in Geisenheim/Rheingau (sorry, but I don’t have historic figures for the Mosel) was 16°C and for 2018 it was 17.8°C! The books authors also give a rather detailed description of the 1921 wines from Karthäuserhof. Please note that a Mosel Fuder barrel contains 1,000 liters of wine, so the crop was about 120,000 bottles:

 “The 1921 crop was 85 Fuder and the wines were bottled around 1925-27. Four of these Fuders from the 1921 vintage survived World War II in bottle. In contrast, the other 81 Fuders were more or less full-fermented out to dryness and those wines were therefore passé after 15 to 20 years of age. In contrast, the four top Fuders of Auslese had between 35 and 76 grams per liter sweetness. Only for this reason do they survive in great shape to this day…”

Today, 76 grams per liter sweetness in a Riesling Auslese would be considered low! The authors go on to give their tasting note for the 1921 Karthäuserhofberg Kronenberg feinste Auslese, the best Fuder of the vintage at the estate. Not only do modern wine critics write florid notes!:

“In spite of the great vintage this 1921 Karthäuserhofberg is a total Ruwer original. The deep colour speaks of its age and shimmers red-sapphire like a sunrise. It smells of an entire bouquet of flowers, also of pineapple and strawberry. The body is full, but not fat, the sweetness noble, the acidity mild, yet still piquant. Its temperament is harmonious, but still far removed from flatness or tiredness. A regal wine from which parting is painful, since one will probably never meet it again.”  

This is my maternal grandmother Annie Pratt who died ten years ago today on her 101^st birthday, and this is one of the last photograph I took of her just a couple of months earlier. She’s sitting in her favourite chair in the house where she lived alone until one week before her death and is surrounded by all her things. For a bit more than the last decade of her life she lived in the small country town of Lenham in Kent/England and after I took this photo we walked into the historic centre of town together. The town fitted her perfectly, because it combined many modern conveniences with the appearance of timelessness. She loved the antique stores and if tea had not needed to be made at some point, then she would have spent all day in them lovingly examining old things great and small. That might seem like a detail, but I think not. Although she often had strong opinions I find it hard to imagine a more peaceful person than her.

The truth is thought, that she lived through most of the turbulence of the 20^th century. On the 21^st of June 1919, aged 9, she witnessed the scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands/Scotland, where her father was a customs officer. In 1928, aged 18, she came 6^th in the national Civil Service examinations, and went to London alone to join the Civil Service. All this made a deep impression upon her and she often recounted these stories. In 1939, when she was 29 years old, the outbreak of the Second World War brought the worst period of chaos and destruction in her life. By then she was married to Neville Pratt and lived with him and their two children, my mother Sheila and my uncle Derek (later a famous watch maker), in the green London suburb of Petts Wood. One advertisement for houses like theirs in Petts Wood described them as “bijou baronial residences”, and this too fitted my grandmother perfectly. The family survived the war unscathed and the family business, Pratt’s Stores in the London district of Pimlico, was rebuilt. Pemberton’s Stores in the film Passport to Pimlico (1949, Ealing Studios) gives quite a good idea of what it was like, although Neville was nothing like the way Stanley Holloway portrayed Arthur Pemberton. Rationing in Britain continued until 1955 and this meant some suffering for my grandmother as she struggled to bring up her children. Throughout her adult life her health also frequently troubled her and she talked a great deal about that, often repetitively. In spite of all these things she was a contagiously happy person and I’m sure it was this that first attracted me to her as a very small child.

After Neville sold Pratt’s stores and retired in 1968, he and Annie moved to the small country town of Chulmleigh in Devon/England, the county of her birth. It might sound completely ridiculous, but for me their sprawling bungalow became an image of eternity. The kitchen was the centre of this seemingly unchanging world and the warmth from the old-fashioned Aga stove was the physical parallel of my grandmother’s love. For many years nothing gave me greater pleasure than to sit and talk with my grandmother at the kitchen table. When I was a struggling art student she and Neville supported me in many ways and when I graduated from the Royal College of Art/London in July 1986 she felt vindicated. The truth is I squeaked through, but that didn’t interest her one jot. I could put letters after my name and she was a terrible snob who attached great importance to titles. Of course, Royal was the most significant aspect of “MA Royal College of Art” for her. It took me a long time to share her enthusiasm for royalty, but the political upheavals in the UK since her death have proven how in troubled times they do offer stability, regardless of their failings. I now admit she was right not only about that, but about almost everything except the Channel Tunnel. She vehemently opposed it, clinging to her belief in a mythical England that was green and pleasant and where Jesus undoubtedly walked in ancient time. However laughable that may seem now, I was a beneficiary of her loving nature that was rooted in those beliefs. And I still feel her love for me just as I did when she was alive.

Note: Of course, England has long been many things other than a green and pleasant land. In order to avoid one-sidedness, idealization and nostalgia I end this posting with an image from one of the nation’s greatest satirists, William Hogarth. My grandmother would have greatly disapproved of everything this 18th century English image depicts!