Goutte Vibrations: A summer road trip with friends climaxes with a visit at Wein Goutte in Franconia, Germany

I’m a sucker for puns and wordplay. When I heard about a winery called “Wein Goutte”, I got instant ASMR. Let’s unpack this: A winery in German is referred to as a Weingut (pronounced wine goot). Goutte, however, is French and means drop, whereas the French goût, of course, means taste. And then there is the English good.

I admit, you need to be trilingual to get it.

But I fell in love with Wein Goutte even before I met Emily Campeau and Christoph Müller—the Canadian-German couple behind the project—to whom a friend introduced me late last year. Both equally humble, well-traveled, and soft-spoken, Emily and Christoph are former chefs and wine professionals who met and fell in love while working on the harvest team at Franz Weninger in Burgenland, Austria, in 2018. (Perhaps another reason to go for that harvest internship!)

Soon after meeting, Emily and Christoph dreamed up their own wine project, which eventually led them to Franconia. There, they gradually took over a winery from a couple in their sixties—more on that below.

When a summer road trip was planned with dear friends visiting from the US (eventually leading us to Nürnberg), I couldn’t think of a better way to punctuate the trip than with a visit at Wein Goutte, just an hour off the route.