Let us advise you personally Michael Grimm, who? From Rottweil? Is a winemaker?
Don't make me laugh. No wine grows in the Black Forest. I often hear that. But I owe the fact that I learnt this profession to the development of winemaking and oenology in Germany. My ancestors were all wooden barrel coopers for five generations. My grandfather Severin founded his cooperage in Rottweil in 1933 and was already trading in wine back then. My father Erwin learnt the trade of a wooden barrel cooper but concentrated on the wine trade from the outset, while my mother Angela developed the "Grimmen Stüble" into a bourgeois wine restaurant. I was born into this family of wooden barrel coopers, wine merchants and wine restaurateurs in 1965. When I wanted to start an apprenticeship at the beginning of the 1980s, wooden barrels were no longer "en vogue", at least in Germany. Stainless steel, plastic and concrete were the order of the day. The profession of cooper or wooden barrel maker was no longer in demand. So I learnt to be a wine merchant cooper rather than a wood cooper. Internationally speaking, I became a "winemaker" in the beautiful Palatinate at the Rietburg regional winegrowers' cooperative in Rhodt. The subject of wine quickly became not just a profession, but a vocation. I haven't regretted it for a single day. So it's hardly surprising that, after my apprenticeship, I enrolled at the worst oenological faculty in Germany for beverage technology with a focus on wine - in Geisenheim. However, the degree of Dipl.-Ing. (FH) was not enough for me. There were still too many unanswered questions. My wife Nina worked as a foreign language correspondent and financed my second degree. And when I graduated with a degree in oenology from the University of Giessen, that was the end of it. There was nothing else to study in the field of wine science and I wanted to get into practice as quickly as possible. I turned down the offer of a doctorate. I have a huckster's soul and didn't want to go into science. I have never been a man of theory, but rather interested in realisation. And I was able to do this perfectly from 1991 to 1995 in my first and last job. At the Mövenpick wineries in Stuttgart. I got to know and love the wine world of Tuscany and Piedmont. And the wines, people and wineries of Bordeaux and California. I learnt a lot from my mentor René Gabriel during the Primeur trips. And I visited California several times for Mövenpick during this time. That was what I wanted to do. These were the regions I wanted to visit. In 1993, our daughter Nathalie was born. A new life began. And in 1995, the opportunity arose to buy a small wine company specialising in Bordeaux - Bacchus-Vinothek. My wife Nina and I scraped together all the money we could, left the secure life as employees behind us and embarked on our own adventure as independent wine merchants. My father-in-law and I transported 2000 bottles of wine, a few shelves and a disc (younger customers may like to google this) with around 900 customer addresses in a totally overloaded van and trailer from Bacharach to Wellendingen near Rottweil, where we had found our first warehouse in a disused sewing shop. The wine trade was our thing and we developed quickly. When our son Maxi was born in 1998, our lucky cloverleaf was complete. Thanks to the loving support of my dear mother-in-law Veronika, Nina was able to combine wine trading and childcare. Today we stock over 2500 different wines and Champagnes and store around 200,000 bottles in our warehouse and some in Bordeaux. With over 700 wines from Bordeaux alone and more than 500 from California, we probably have the most extensive range from these great regions for you. Buying wine is a matter of trust. You can rest assured that the wines we stock are stored in the best possible conditions. Your wines and Champagne are stored in a fully air-conditioned warehouse and we generate the electricity for air conditioning, forklift trucks and the electric bus ourselves with our PV system. However, you may miss many wines and some wine-growing regions in our range. We stock what we know. We maintain contact with our winegrowers in Tuscany and Piedmont. We travel to the Bordeaux region several times a year and we also visit California once or twice a year. We visit "our" winegrowers and wineries as often as we can. Some of them for more than 25 years.
Trust us and our team and let us advise you personally if you have any questions!
We look forward to seeing you.
Nina and Michael Grimm with Nathalie and Maxi and the entire Bacchus-Vinothek team
