Latest news with #Mascha
Mint
07-07-2025
- Mint
Water sommeliers say the simplest drink is the future of luxury
SIX ESTEEMED sommeliers sit silently behind a judging table. A waiter tops up their glasses one by one and they appraise the stuff: sniff, hold it to the light, sometimes swirl, sip, swish between cheeks, dump the extras and give it a score. But the liquid is no Zinfandel or Syrah. Instead the bon viveurs are tasting high-end waters. The competition launched this year's Fine Water Summit in the swanky Buckhead neighbourhood of Atlanta, Georgia. With 1,100 bottles imported from 35 countries, it is the biggest event of its sort. The assembled connoisseurs—from Hong Kong to France and California—have paid $975 each for a weekend of talks and tastings co-ordinated by Michael Mascha, the group's Austrian founder, who lives in Texas. Most are middle-aged, very foodie and unusually fit. Many are among the 250 water sommeliers ordained by Mr Mascha's academy. Months of training have taught them to appreciate how minerality changes water's flavour, how silica affects its mouth-feel and the size of bubbles its acidity. The waters taste as different from each other as wines do. One, from the glaciers of the Lofoten Islands in Norway, does indeed taste like melted snow. Another, from the highest volcano in the Peruvian Andes, is bitter and salty—not your correspondent's favourite. Nico Pieterse, a sommelier who runs a tasting room on South Africa's Western Cape, likes to pair the first with sashimi and the second with fried foods or anchovy pizza. As the attendees sample still and sparkling varieties, Mr Mascha comes by with a spectacular bottle. The 'Fromin" is 15,000-year-old Ice Age water from what is now the Czech Republic. Floating in it are flakes of gold. 'I don't bring wine to parties, I bring this," he says. 'For the rest of the evening no one wants champagne any more." Mr Mascha is a food anthropologist who collected wine before his doctor told him to ditch it. For ten years afterwards he switched to fine water. He was mercilessly mocked: at a live television event in Las Vegas he was given toilet water to taste. Now nearly 40 restaurants, some with Michelin stars, offer full 'water menus", thanks to his evangelising. Youngsters less keen on booze are taking notice. Doran Binder, an effusive blonde-bearded sommelier, has gone viral on TikTok. After buying a failing pub in the English countryside he discovered that his land produced some of the world's 'creamiest" water. He now sells trendy cans of it by subscription. He reckons corporate water companies are scamming people into drinking poison-infused water; restaurants too often ruin the good stuff by serving it with 'chlorinated ice cubes and a slice of fucking lemon". The summit is sponsored by Lake, a cryptocurrency firm that wants to decentralise the water industry. The aqua enthusiasts are eager for more people to invest. Elena Berg, a sommelier who doubles as an environmental scientist at a Parisian college, sees the movement as a way to talk about how precious clean water is as climate change threatens access to it. But to many in Atlanta this weekend it is more about enjoying life's small pleasures. Mr Pieterse, the South African, wants to put scannable barcodes on the bottles so you can listen to the water trickling at its source while sipping it. Doing so would allow customers to simply revel in the fact that they are drinking something that a mammoth once drank, too. Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters.
Axios
24-04-2025
- Business
- Axios
Why sommeliers are sipping 4,000-year-old iceberg water in Atlanta
Have you ever tasted raindrops from Tasmania that never touched the Earth? Or water that's been locked inside a Norwegian iceberg for millennia? Why it matters: You probably haven't (I haven't). But you also probably haven't been to the Fine Water Summit, a globe-trotting annual gathering of water sommeliers who live, breathe and sip the most luxurious of las aguas. This year's conference — and the crowd-pleaser taste contest — runs April 25-27 in Buckhead. Expect roughly 1,000 bottles of rare, expensive and hard-to-find waters, plus plenty of thirst-quenching and storytelling. How it works: We're not talking about bottled water brands found at Circle K — most of which are just purified tap water, Michael Mascha, the owner of Fine Water Media and summit organizer, told Axios. Premium, or fine, water has terroir and natural minerals thanks to the geology and processes it undergoes, he said. Some brands, like Socosani, which is bottled snowmelt that filtered through volcanic rocks in a remote part of Peru, can be purchased in select local stores. Others, like the magnesium-rich ROI, can cost $200 for a six pack and can only be obtained after a long hero's quest (like a flight to Slovenia or making an online order). Reality check: Plastic bottled water, especially bottles transported halfway around the world for consumption, is bad for the environment. Premium water, most of which is bottled in glass to preserve its characteristics, is intended for special occasions and memorable meals, not everyday use. "I'm not having water shipped from Fiji or New Zealand to make my pasta," said Mascha. "That would be totally stupid." The summit's agenda includes seminars on sustainability, including how to communicate that message to the public. What they're saying:"I'm trying to elevate water away from pure hydration to an experience," Mascha said, adding that some restaurants are adding luxury water to their drink menus to meet increased interest in non-alcoholic options. "Hydration is important, but it's also important that we give value to water, and that we see water in a different way." Catch up quick: Mascha, who co-founded a water sommelier training program in 2018, started exploring and experimenting with water in the early 2000s after his doctor told him to stop drinking wine if he wanted to live. "When I go to a party, I bring a bottle of Svalbarði, the iceberg water, and I tell people, 'This is 4,000-year-old water. This is rain that fell 4,000 years ago.' No one talks about the 50-year-old Burgundy anymore." Zoom in: For the taste awards, a panel of five water sommeliers and experts will sample brands in categories like still, sparkling and naturally carbonated and rank them according to minerality and mouthfeel.
BBC News
27-01-2025
- BBC News
Holocaust Memorial Day: 'Nobody believed their accounts'
Eighteen-year-old Mascha Nachmansson, an outstanding student and rabbi's daughter, is dreaming of going to university. But Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany has just invaded Poland and his troops are about to descend on the city, tearing apart Mascha's life forever. It is the first days of September 1939 in the Polish city of Lodz (Łódź), the bustling heart of the country's textile industry. One of 12 children raised in a loving family, Mascha has already witnessed the antisemitism that has followed her community for hundreds of years. But the horror of what happened to her next will not be revealed for decades, her daughter Jeanette Marx said. "Some survivors used to say they did try to talk to people immediately afterwards, and say what had happened to them, but people just looked at them as if they were totally mad, delusional," Jeanette says. "'These things can't happen, you know. You grew up in in the civilized world. You grew up in Europe. These things don't happen in Europe.' "So nobody believed them, and they stopped talking." Jeanette says it was only through a recording made by a school in the 1970s, showing Mascha describing her experiences to a group of children, that she learned the full truth of what had happened. The powerful footage shows a middle-aged Mascha sharing the horror story of her family being forced to move to the overcrowded Lodz ghetto with more than 200,000 people - her parents and two siblings later perishing from the rampant disease. Another sister was murdered in the gas chambers at the Chełmno concentration camp, she the horrific conditions for five years, Mascha was then sent to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps towards the end of the war, describing them as "hell on earth".She left Auschwitz after being "bought" by an ammunitions factory near Berlin to carry out forced labour. Allied forces were now bombing Nazi Germany, with the area where the factory stood heavily targeted and the management abandoning Jewish prisoners to fend for themselves because, as Jeanette explains, "they knew once these prisoners had been killed there would be others" to replace them. After rescue finally came in early 1945 at Ravensbrück, Mascha was taken by the Swedish Red Cross to Malmö, where she was granted refugee status and later met her husband, a Swedish Jewish much of Mascha's later life, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was not recognised, her daughter says, and she was instead "diagnosed with all sorts of things".Mascha went on to educate herself in multiple languages, became a kindergarten teacher and raised two daughters. But the signs of PTSD were clear and she would "immediately stiffen up" if she heard a dog bark, her daughter remembers. "Dogs to her meant barking when she arrived in Auschwitz - the cattle wagon doors were unbolted, they were greeted by dogs barking and Nazis shouting 'get out quick'."Sometimes, my dad called us into the the kitchen, where my mother was sitting shaking, crying," Jeanette said."He didn't know what to do. We didn't know what to do. All we could do is hug her and sit with her." The long decades of silence about the Holocaust also followed Dr George Garai, a Hungarian Jewish man raised in Budapest. He too was 18 when the Nazis occupied Hungary in was forcibly sent to a labour camp and then Mauthausen Concentration Camp, before he was forced to undertake a four-day death march to Gunskirchen Concentration Camp where he was struck down with never spoke about the horrors he faced during the war but, as a journalist, he wrote what he called his "CV" - a hugely detailed autobiography - in the in this document, he could not tell the full truth of what he had experienced. He had hidden his account of the death march - a time during which, he wrote, he had been "touched by death". These were details he felt were too painful for his family to memoir of the horrors he faced was only revealed in the last few days of his life, when he urged his family to share what he had been through with the world. It is from this extraordinary account that his granddaughter, Ella Garai-Ebner, now shares the story of his life with thousands of people through the charity Generation2Generation. "He spoke about three miracles in his life," Ella said. "The first was that his dad, who was extremely unwell, was able to make it to his Bar Mitzvah when he was 13. "The second miracle was that he survived, in his words, the horrors of Mauthausen and the murderous death march."The third is the one that really gives me chills, which is, in his own words, that despite everything he went through he was able to have a wonderful life and meet an incredible woman and raise two beautiful daughters."In May 1945, having managed to survive to the final days of the war, George was liberated from Gunskirchen. "He really acknowledged the the miracle of his survival, and also the miracle of everything that came next and he had a happy life," Ella life saw him flee Hungary in the mid-1950s, eventually settling in England - where he worked at the Jewish Chronicle - after time spent in Sydney embarking on a journalism career and meeting his wife, Anna, a fellow Hungarian Jew who had herself been hidden in an orphanage during the Holocaust. But genocide in the 20th Century did not end with the defeat of Nazi Germany. Holocaust Memorial Day also remembers the victims of more recent atrocities; in particular, this year marks 30 years since 1995's Srebrenica massacre in Srabovic-Ryan never got to meet her biological father, Salčin, who was just 17 when he was murdered during the mother, Azmira, also a teenager at the time, was three months pregnant. She was transported to the city of Tuzla where, having lost most of her biological family, she gave Una up for adoption.A Bosnian-British couple raised her before moving to the UK for Una to attend school. She had no contact with her biological family until a Facebook message sent by her adoptive mother in 2012 to her birth mother finally reached her four years later in Australia, where she had settled after the conflict and started a family."It was so surreal, because I had kind of accepted at this point that I wasn't ever going to meet her," Una says. "But it was kind of the opposite, she did really want to find me."In 2017, Una was finally able to travel to Australia to meet her biological family and, after continuing her search, managed to find her paternal family still in Bosnia, who had never known she existed. "I'm the only child my father had and I'm kind of the main thing left from my father," she said. "So I think they look at me and they think 'wow, like you are the piece that's connecting us to him', and I just hope that they can see my father in me." Growing up in the UK, Una says there was little understanding - and somewhat downright disbelief - from people about her previous life in Bosnia, echoing the experiences of Mascha before is part of why, she says, its is so important for her and other survivors to share their stories. She says Holocaust Memorial Day is "not just to remember people who have died", but "the survivors as well, and the resilience of those survivors". Una, Jeanette and Ella will share their loved ones' stories at a ceremony at Bristol's City Hall says - 80 years on from the liberation of the Holocaust survivors - there is a "fear that such a horror could be repeated or forgotten, and history is doomed to repeat itself."I think through education, through sharing my grandpa's story, through knowing that survivor stories are being shared and heard, and the awareness and tolerance that I hope this teaches, that fear lessens bit by bit."Una, from Yate, says it will be "an opportunity for us to educate ourselves about the dangers of what hatred can do"."After the Holocaust, they said 'never again' but the Bosnian genocide happened 30 years ago and there have been other genocides since such as Rwanda and Cambodia." Jeanette says her "message" to others "is that the murder of six million Jews and many other minorities carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators did not happen within a week or two, or even a year."There was a slow development of exclusion, lack of respect, looking at somebody who's not like you as as somebody who's not worth the same as you. "I particularly feel that the young generation who are exposed to social media I hope they understand that certain messages that are pushed through social media need to be challenged, because if one doesn't challenge it, it won't take long before these sentiments and these ideas that people throw around will take hold, and from one small act it builds up."She hopes for a world in which her mother Mascha's philosophy can win through: "You concentrate on what's valuable in life, and that's family good values, charity, friendship, education and respect."
