Focus on quality

For over 100 years, the Meininger Verlag publishing house has striven to protect the quality of wines, to champion high-quality producers and to expose foul play in the sector. Today, it is still as necessary as ever to protect wine consumers from various types of fraud and deception, thereby guaranteeing them genuine quality wine.

Back in 1903, Daniel Meininger began to apply these ideals in his new publication ‘Weinblatt’ with a view to denouncing and stamping out such abuses. Looking back, he summed up the situation with one pithy sentence: “One barrel could be used for fifty different types of wine.” This confirmed the accusations voiced by privy councillor Dr. Bassermann-Jordan: “Buying cheap wine in the Palatinate, concealing its own reputation and selling it dear under another name – that was the name of the game. And the courts offered no protection.” This meant that it was all the more necessary to revise the German Wine Act and to render it practicable, which finally came to pass in 1909 with the aid of the ‘Weinblatt’ publication. As Dr. Bassermann-Jordan declared: “Without the ‘Weinblatt’, the struggle to regulate the true origins of wines – which was largely won through the Wine Act of 1909 – would not have been concluded with the same degree of force.”

There followed a series of far tougher global battles, which the Meininger Verlag also withstood with stamina and integrity, even when the publishing house and its employees found themselves subject to severe restrictions. As a non-fascist company, the publishing house was able to resume business directly in 1945 and, with Daniel Meininger’s son Herbert at the helm, was built up into a large company again with almost sixty employees by its fiftieth anniversary in 1953. Herbert’s son Peter Meininger and his own children Andrea and Christoph Meininger have continued this success story with the same ideals and objectives as those set down by its founder. This also means, however, that personal gain has for decades taken a back seat to the general interest in ensuring genuine high-quality wine production. Because of this, the company is also the object of repeated hostility when it exposes scandals with a view to protecting all honest producers. For the Meininger family and its employees, the top priority has always been to put its weight behind upright vintners and dealers. Their work consists in using their publication to point wine consumers towards those producers who create truly good wine.

This can only be evaluated onsite by trained experts with years of experience, and then by equally experienced sensory analysts. This was the impetus for the creation of ‘Meiningers Weintest’, which works – true to the ideals of its founder – to ensure a focus on quality in the wine market.