Maienfeld is the home of Johann Spyri's world-famous children's book character Heidi. The 2500 inhabitants live surrounded by meadows and vineyards on the borders to Austria and Liechtenstein. But the idyll of the "Heididörflis" is beginning to show thick cracks: Even an oenologist from Geisenheim in Germany hired by the winegrower president cannot solve the riddle of the bitter Pinot. It gets even worse. A species of cicada, hitherto unknown in the region, attacks the vines and causes them to die. The existence of the farms is acutely threatened, the winegrowers are nervous, tense, almost hysterical. Suddenly, the winemaker president Elmar Obrist, one of the star winemakers of the region, is found dead in the cellar.
"Bitterer Abgang in Maienfeld" is the name of the crime novel by Swiss author Markus Matzner, who has been publishing about Swiss wine in books and on TV for several years. At the centre is the sympathetically drawn underdog Hannes Rüfener. His father, also a winemaker, had died in a motorbike accident. He left Hannes' mother nothing but large debts. He owed a lot of money to Obrist in particular, who took over the business to compensate and left the two of them only the residential house. Rüfener works as a food chemist despite his pronounced talent in winemaking and only takes care of the vines of the widowed Ursina Vetscherin in his spare time. She is the sister of Robert Vetscherin, Obrist's closest friend and the town's second star winemaker. Due to an old contract, Ursina has to deliver the high-quality young wine to the irascible, tyrannical brother at a ridiculous price, who vinifies it and sells it under his own name for good money.
A threatening letter, a dead man and drilled barriques
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| Author Markus Matzner |
After a television crew also reports on the bitter Pinot Noir, Hannes unexpectedly comes under suspicion and has to spend a night in the cell of the local police. He tries to find out the secret of the catastrophe analytically with the help of his old teacher Oskar, but the two also fail. Hannes receives a threatening letter announcing further "plagues". There is not one dead body, and expensive red wine from drilled barriques floods the wine cellars. Now events come to a head, especially as Hannes falls in love with the daughter of his enemy Robert Vetscherin.
Matzner tells this plot in his first crime novel in a restrained way, with precise knowledge of the facts and the place. Sometimes his descriptions remain on the surface, the dialogue occasionally seems a little wooden. But this is made up for by his detailed knowledge of the work of the winegrowers, so that despite these weaknesses, a coherent picture emerges from behind the façade of the showpiece wineries.
The calm, pleasantly Schwyz-German language carries the story deep into the abysses of the winemakers driven by success and ambition, telling of crooked deals, envy, vanity, blackmail, hard-core exploitation of dependency and overreaching. Markus Matzner does not (yet) achieve the psychological and linguistic precision of authors like Arnaldur Indriðason, Jan Seghers, Petra Hammesfahr or the Austrian Heinrich Steinfest. Nevertheless, Matzner succeeds in creating a suspensefully constructed story against the authentically depicted backdrop of a Schwyz winegrowing town atmosphere. Well described, exciting to read and thus recommendable above all for wine fans. But for everyone else as well
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Markus Matzner: Bitterer Abgang in Maienfeld, orte-Verlag, Oberegg AI and Zurich, 221 pages, 15 euros, ISBN-10: 3858301450