Others are drawn to places where it's nice and warm. Izelle Swanepoel came to Germany because it can be so nice and cool here. So the question in the cheerful career advice would be: what makes the woman from South Africa think the same way? Joker tip: the English term cool climate gets you closer to the truth. And that's right: Izelle is the new cellar master at Weinhandwerk in Meissen. She started in January after the previous cellar master left the company - in other words, in the middle of the ripening period of the current vintage, which she is now overseeing until it is bottled.
Izelle Swanepoel studied at the Elsenburg Agricultural Training Institute (in collaboration with Stellenbosch University), where she obtained her bachelor's degree in agricultural sciences with a focus on cellar technology. "It's a very specialized and prestigious course with a focus on viticulture and oenology," she says - and the opportunity to make her first own wine in the large, well-equipped student cellar is not entirely unimportant. So now she is standing in the very large and also well-equipped cellar in Zadel, where up to 200,000 bottles of wine mature each year, depending on the harvest. Most of them go to food retailers (Kaufland, Edeka, Rewe, for example), while the smaller and more valuable "Gründerzeit" line is reserved for restaurants and specialist wine retailers.
