Category Archives: STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL

I’m full of sympathy if you’re wondering how these palms and this beach could possibly have a Riesling Message for the citizens of Planet Wine, but here they are directly outside my hotel window in Venice Beach/LA. Their significance is that they at once mark the end of the road of my long journey on Riesling Trail on the West Coast and the beginning of the Riesling Road Trip (RRT), which begins here Wednesday morning. On paper the RRT is a coast to coast journey to promote German Riesling organized by Wines of Germany in New York Wine City commissioned by the German Wine Institute back in Mainz/Germany. Venice Beach is our official starting point and New York Wine City (NYWC) the official finishing line around lunchtime June 27th. Yes, that is fast and I’ll be a little amazed if we make it on time, not least because one of our vehicles is a 20ft shipping container remodeled as a mobile tasting room. I’ve no idea how a whale like that supposed to keep good time over more than a thousand miles. If you see us then knock on wood for us!

The RRT will undoubtedly fulfill it’s intended role unless something very unexpected and very bad happens to us during our “adventure”.  However, for me at least the RRT is much more than this, not least a road movie which I will be filming with the help of a rucksack full of improvised movie-making equipment and a head packed full of ideas, but inadequate experience to fully realize them. That’s also part of the movie’s story, although it will no doubt be dominated by my struggle against the attempts of the American wine industry’s Bullshit Chardonnay lobby group (as I call it) to intimidate me into moderating my pro-Riesling stance. Whoever the henchmen of Bullshit Chardonnay are they seem determined to stop me in my tracks, not least because of the success of this blog/website. Clearly I worry them very much and so does your interest and enthusiasm for Riesling. Watch your backs!

“You don’t need to really worry until Paul Grieco goes down,” someone who was very drunk confided to me one night in a New York bar. Was he serious when he talked about Paul Grieco of Hearth Restaurant and the Terroir wine bars in NYWC becoming the target of a hit man? It all sounded completely ridiculous to me, then he told me a bunch of stuff about some kind of terrorist cell, but I found no evidence for any of it on the internet. Later when I challenged him about that (he was sober this time) he said to me, “how many terrorist cells advertise their next attack in advance on the internet?” I’d have dismissed all of this out of hand, but I got some very strange looking post the other day and have no idea how someone knew where I’d be on the Riesling Trail. What’s going on?

Whatever the truth behind all this is there are many strange creatures out on the streets, and I don’t just mean in Venice Beach where craziness is so normal even the tourists adjust to it fast. This being America some of those strange creatures are armed and dangerous. Ugly as even a weapon as small as the popular Glock 9mm pistol is, I think that ideas which are completely dislocated from any kind of reality are much more dangerous.  Think of how some members of the Bush Administration dismissed the majority of journalists as members of the Reality-Based Community and what that said about the state of their minds. That drunken guy in the bar also told me about a group of people who are claiming that Chardonnay is the American wine and that it isn’t of French origin, but was actually discovered by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. OMG! Sorry guys, but Chardonnay is a rather recent arrival in the US from Burgundy/France, and that’s not propaganda! It lagged behind Riesling until into the 1970s and only became big in California during the early 1980s. Prior to that German Riesling enjoyed extremely high renown in the US and American Riesling attempted to match its elegance, sometimes with considerable success. Riesling, both imported and domestic, has been making and continues to make a substantial comeback in the US, and regardless of whether people heckle me, throw rotten fruit, cans or rocks at me I won’t stop talking and writing about that.

But back to day one of the RRT in LA tomorrow. We kick off with a tasting at Spago Restaurant in Beverley Hills. Although I’ve been to LA many times this will be my first visit to the restaurant where the luxury pizza was invented by Austrian chef Wolfagng Puck. There I will also meet the restaurant’s sommelier Christopher Miller who will be my companion on the trip as far as Phoenix/Arizona for the first time. So far all we did was have a telephone conference call. I hope (and expect) we’ll get on as well in the flesh as in the ether, but who knows. Then we have an evening tasting at the Covell Wine Bar in Hollywood. At both locations we’ll be emphasizing German Riesling’s enormous diversity from feather light to granite density and from bone dry to honey sweet. That’s something Chardonnay simply cannot match wherever it comes from and whoever discovered it. If you see us knock on wood for us!

t.b.c.

In the intense sunlight out of a blue sky the yellow of the grass and the deep blue of the pines had a clarity you won’t find anywhere in Europe no matter which time of year it is or which drugs you take. And that does something which I find hard to describe in a few words, although it’s certainly also slightly erotic. We drove over the rise and turned the corner as I’d done so many times before, physically and mentally retracing my path to Navarro Vienyards outside Philo in Medocino County/California first taken a quarter century ago. Was I stuck in some kind of loop ? I can well understand the criticism that I often write about “my gals/guys”, because I frequently go back and hope that I find something new in a person and a place I’ve visited many times. But today I was in a very strange and almost completely unknown place called Great American Riesling, and the best thing about it was that it was also great american riesling.

Some stories creep up on you without you realizing and maybe those are the best stories, because there’s something inevitable about them – you should have seen it coming, like a gathering storm or a garden full of flower buds about to blossom, also because its roots already so deep into you – but for some reason (complacency s usually the villain) you don’t realize that until an entire landscape of cinemascope expansiveness – dark and threatening or multicolored and seductive – has spread itself out in your mind. Then it’s too early and too late and exactly the right moment all at once. And that’s what I encountered today when I drove over that rise and turned that corner, which I’m still trying to make some kind of sense of.

Ted Bennet of Navarro Vineyards (pictured above in his barrel cellar) is one of the most important winemaker in America, and I say that not (only) because of my Riesling obsession and his Rieslings, but because he’s found his own field (the Anderson Valley of Mendocino), ploughed it in his own direction (the “Alsace” grape varieties, which in this case mean Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Pinot Gris and Muscat), and in his own fashion (sleek and pristine dry white wines with fruit aromas so delicate that they seem atypically Californian). I’ve drunk so many delicious and wonderful wines – literally wines to wonder! – from Ted Bennet over the years, at restaurants in the (San Francisco) Bay Area, inNew Yorkand I don’t know where else…that I took them for granted in the best sense of those words. That’s why I was unprepared for what  happened today.

After tasting the super-elegant 2012 dry Pinot Noir Rosé, Muscat blanc, Pinot Gris and Gewürztraminer from Navarro I picked up a glass of the dry 2012 Riesling and smelt the honeysuckle in the hedgerows in the country lane in Southwest England where my grandparents lived during my childhood. Those are the kind of aromas you don’t forget, can’t forget, don’t and can’t ignore. However, it wasn’t just this “effect” which blew me away. No, it was the fact that this is a wine of pristine purity with a line of a straightness which nature ought not to allow (read Einstein and think about the logical consequences of what he says). Technically the wine was so perfect and although it had been bottles just two weeks ago it sung with a brilliance and energy which was seriously dangerous.

So here I am in the luxurious guest house of a Sonoma County winery down in Billionaire’s Hollow where I slept the last nights struggling to find adequate words to describe a wine that costs just $19.50 ex-cellars, but electrifies my sense far more than a bunch of California wines (that I like and admire) that cost $50, $100 and more a bottle no matter where I buy them. Of course, this wine means so much more to me, because it’s Riesling, I’m the “Riesling Guy”, and this is the best dry Riesling I ever tasted from California. But the importance of the moment is much greater than that personal revelation, because this wine shows what Riesling could be here if it was only understood for what it is; a grape from which great dry white wines have been and will be produced in this state. What I mean is that, if winemakers don’t believe that a certain kind of wine is possible, then how can it happen? Only by accident, but then it won’t be recognized for what it is. Knowing that something’s possible changes the whole ball game.

Honeysuckle, yes, but also white peach, apple blossom, just a hint of yeast, because it was bottled only two weeks ago, racy without being sharp, mineral…and so sexy in the Ingrid Bergmann (in Hitchcock’s ‘Notorious’) sense. What the fuck? Yes, the buttons are fastened tight right up to the chin, but underneath that tightly-fitting blouse there’s a volcano of passion. And that’s now set in amber in my heart…until I can drink this amazing wine again.

Of course, it wasn’t only Ted Bennet who made this wine, but the entire Navarro Vineyards team of roughly 50 people had a part in this and the long-term support of the many thousands of people on the Navarro mailing and regularly bought the wines are also collectively responsible for making this wine possible. However, top of the list is Deborah Cahn (with who he’s pictured above) who no less than he has steered Navarro Vineyards for forty years. 

PS My apologies for the long silence, but down in Billionaire’s Hollow the internet connection did not function at all. Finally I’m back in the cosy blogosphere!  

When I’m on the Riesling trail one thing always leads to the next and before I know it I’m God knows where. The picture taken late last night shows how before my very eyes Kirk Wille of Loosen Bros USA was transformed into the invincible Riesling Superhero “Super Kirk”. All Kirk had done – apart from drink the same wines as everyone else at the table – was to explain how he had recently been to Britain for the first time and how he dug the “British Gestalt”. It wasn’t really clear to me what he meant by those words, but clearly it was something of major significance going, “beyond Benny Hill and Monty Python”. I’m still trying to figure out if that or something else I don’t know anything about suddenly gave him superhuman strength. Whatever it was I need some of it!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m really pleased for Super Kirk that he had such a positive experience and that it was with my countrymen, but I see both this side of Britain and another darker one. On the dark side I think of the recent welcome news that the British government through of Foreign Secretary William Hague finally officially expressed its “sincere regrets” for the “torture and other forms of ill-treatment” inflicted upon the Kenyan people during the Mau Mau rebellion in that country during the 1950s. The problem with this is that for almost two years the British government fought tooth and nail in the courts to avoid any kind of legal, moral, or financial responsibility for what happened. Although just over 5,000 survivors are to be compensated, many thousands more survivors have not been offered anything. Worst of all, the British government denies liability, as if all this took place during a distant geological epoch rather than (mostly) under Winston Churchill’s second premiership. For more information see:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/uk-22790037

But back to the Riesling. Yesterday afternoon at the offices of Watershed Communications in Portland/Oregon I had a fascinating blind tasting of Oregon Rieslings which showed how fast these wines are improving. There were three really surprising wines in this tasting, (in order of ascending sweetness) the 2012 Estate Dry Riesling from Anne Amie in Carlton, the 2012 Ribbon Ridge Medium-Dry Riesling from Tristaetum in Newberg and the 2012 Willamette Valley Riesling from Willamette Valley Vineyards in Turner, which had all had a Mosel-like aromatic vivacity and interplay of succulent fruit and racy acidity. The extensive tasting sheet Katie Bray of Watershed had prepared (many thanks) revealed that just shy of 200,000 bottles of that wine from Willamette Valley Vineyards were produced. OK, it isn’t quite as exciting as the totally seductive and still vibrant 1999 Riesling Spätese from Helmut Dönnhoff of the Nahe (it was the auction bottling from the Brücke site) which Super Kirk opened for us last night, but the retail price is just $14; far below that of a Dönnhoff Riesling Spätlese. That combination of quality, quantity and price is remarkable achievement of which winemaker Don Crank can be proud. It and the ‘Best Case Scenario II’ special offering of Oregon Rieslings which Watershed has organized are further signs of the positive direction in which the United States of Riesling is developing.

As you can see from the picture left I just made it to San Francisco/California where I will continue my hike along the Riesling trail until June 19th. I now get a couple of days off before giving a Riesling “GG” (Grosses Gewächs) seminar at Jardinière Restaurant in the city on Monday morning for my friends at Dee Vine Wines. Unfortunately that event is already fully subscribed and there’s non way I can invite you along to it. Don’t worry though I will report in full. As mentioned many times before your interest in this blog, website or whatever you want to call it is enormously appreciated. It is the only prize that really counts for me. May the Riesling Force be with you!

It’s easy to make sense of the wines of Washington State in the glass. Mostly they taste pretty good and sometimes they taste amazing – this is possibly the most consistent and best value for money state in the Union for wine quality – but from the taste it’s impossible to deduct the twin „secrets“ of Washington State wines ranging from medium-dry Rieslings with white peach aromas to its dense, tannic and smoky Syrahs. And I promise you that those same twin “secrets” really are behind them all.

That’s why I’m glad that I got up at 4:30 am on Tuesday to make the first flight from Seattle to the Tri-Cities airport in Eastern Washington State for two days of deep immersion in winegrowing there. That experience wouldn’t have been so mind-expanding if Ed Doherty and Terry Doherty (no relations), Ryan McAdams and Mike Means of Chateau Ste. Michelle’s viticultural team hadn’t gone out of the way to help me make grasp the fundamental forces of this extraordinary winegrowing microcosmos. It’s all about the simultaneous lack and abundance of water.

Actually you can see some of one of those secrets out of the aircraft window as you cross the Cascades (also through the car window if you take Interstate 90). With a striking abruptness the dense forest covering the Cascades and their foothills peters out on the mountains eastern side and is replaced by scrub; lush green turns to dusty brown. Of course, most of California also looks brown at this time of the year, but in California it rains during the winter and spring. In Eastern Washington State it doesn’t rain much at all, and many places get no more than 6 inches of rain. Consequently it’s a treeless desert and there are very few places where any kind of winegrowing would be possible without irrigation.

That brings us to Washington State’s trump card as a wine producer, which is the huge rivers flowing through this desert, most notably the Columbia and Yakima, providing a vast supply of water for irrigation. This resource means that winegrowers and fruit growers – often they are the same people growing wine grape alongside cherries, apples and sometimes other fruits like blueberries, or even hops and spearmint – can irrigate pretty much as and when they want. In the past this lead to some excessive irrigation, which negatively influenced wine quality (e.g. very green tasting Cabernet). But they learnt from those mistakes and now use irrigation in considered and sometimes artistic manner.

Of course, the idea that almost all the water which the vines in this booming winegrowing region need comes out of pipes will strike some people as “unnatural” and purists will contend that this is incompatible with both wine quality and “terroir” (the taste of the place). However, the vines cannot know where the water which flows through them came from, and irrigation water no less than rainwater dissolves nutrients which are absorbed by the vines. Much of the best Riesling from Washington State grows on rather sandy soils little more than a foot deep over fractured basalt bedrock (see the picture of some great chunks of this unearthed during vineyard planting at the top), and it strikes me as terroir-logical that they should have the racy acidity and a mineral taste which they do.

The viticulturalists and the grape growers I spoke to – special thanks to Archie den Hoed and Derek Way for taking so much trouble to explain how they grow Riesling – have clearly spent as much time perfecting their methods as the state’s leading winemakers. The wonderful bright fruit aromas and good balance of most Washington State wines is mainly the result of the grape growers hard work. Chateau Ste Michelle’s “basic” 2011 Columbia Valley Riesling with some residual sweetness is a fine example of this (and retails for under $10!) but I could give many more.

Of course, if wine is uninteresting for you unless it is funky and/or rough at the edges (the wine equivalent of shabby chic) then you won’t like this wines. However they already give pleasure to millions of people and at STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL we believe in the pleasure wine gives and the conviviality it encourages. May the Riesling Force be with you!  But if you insist on something freaky, then Richland/Washington State has the beverages for you at the Atomic Ale Brewpub & Eatery…

PS I am now on the Riesling Trail until the afternoon of June 27th when I return to New York City. Please be patient when sending messages to me, since I will only be online one hour or so most days and zero hours on other days. To be honest, I enjoy those zero online days when I  feel like I’ve returned to the Stone Age, or at least to my childhood.

My notebook and pen used to be the most important tools of my unusual trade, closely followed by the device upon which I typed my stories. However, recently an important change took place and I began to regard the video camera as another vital tool. This had everything to do with the three years I spent shooting the TV series ‘Weinwunder Deutschland’, Wine Wonder Germany, for state-owned Bavarian Broadcasting (BR). Director Alexander Saran, cameramen Sorin Dragoi and Florian Schilling, sound man Peter Wuchterl and camera assistant Florian Bschorr (the regular team) taught me a great deal about filmmaking. Inspired by these experiences last year I shot a 14 minute trial movie (click on I am Riesling above to find the YouTube link to it) in New York, on the Rhine and in Berlin. It at least proved to me that it was possible and I learnt from my mistakes, most of which landed in the electronic garbage can.

On Saturday, June 8th the first screening of the third series of ‘Weinwunder Deutschland’ begins on BR3 (also on the BR website) – more details just beforehand – and early Monday I set off for Washington State to shoot a bunch more video material. This is partly for the International Riesling Foundation (IRF), and partly for my work-in-progress WATCH YOUR BACK (a Riesling movie). I will shoot much of the latter between June 19th thru June 27th when I cross the US by road as part of the Riesling Road Trip, a promotion for German Riesling in America. For the first half of this road movie I’ll be accompanied by Christopher Miller, the sommelier of Spago Restaurant in Los Angeles and for the second half Paul Grieco of the Terroir wine bars and Restaurant Hearth in NYWC will be my companion in this madcap (ad)venture. All of this just by way of introduction to my Thought for the Day.

In preparation for the Riesling Road trip I read and reread some books relating to strange journeys in America. Yesterday in the New York subway it was Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ (1971), or more particularly the jacket copy, which gave me a jolt. Thompson first explains his ideal of Gonzo reporting as “a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.” I’d never read those words before, but they describe exactly what I am involved in, exactly what I am determined to do with my video camera. Like Thompson I will bend the dividing line between fiction and fact in the cause of making the resulting composition more true. In ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ both the narrator figure Raoul Duke and his attorney often tell “innocent” bystanders some very tall tails, but this only helps reveal what those bystanders are really thinking, how they tick. In my movie I’m doing exactly the same thing, however, I cannot reveal exactly what that means in filmmaking terms, since it could compromise my chances of creating a work that in Thompson’s words about ‘Fear and Loathing in Las vegas’, is “complex in its failure”.

Although my subject is definitely Riesling I reserve the right to “deviate” from this subject as and when material of sufficient interest drifts into my field of vision, on the basis that it was my search for the truth in Riesling has brought me to that Close Encounter with “Other Stuff”. Of course, in an interconnected world like ours it’s debatable what could really qualify as “Other Stuff”…but back to the Riesling.

A friend just poured me the Canadian wine pictured above and I was seriously impressed by its vividness (the very opposite of the cliché of staid Canada), the subtle pink grapefruit aroma and the mineral freshness at the medium-dry finish. I think it really only has the 10.5% alcoholic content declared on the label, because I downed almost half the bottle very quickly and feel only the slightest (and most delightful) hint of intoxication. Here in New York it’s just $16.99 at garnet Wines, see: http://www.garnetwine.com/sku111198.html I shan’t make it to Ontario’s Riesling vineyards on the Niagara Peninsula until September, but in July I’ll be in Okanagan/British Columbia for a few days shooting some material for the IRF. My notebook, video camera and I are looking forward to that very much!

„Yes, but that doesn’t stop people buying them. That’s another of the things about the wine world which is completely illogical, but doesn’t change for that reason!” said Reinhard Löwenstein of Weingut Heymann-Löwenstein in Winningen/Terrassenmosel (pictured above in his new cellar extension). I’d just told him how again and again during the last couple of years I’ve been terribly disappointed by red and dry white wines from Burgundy/France in the three figure Dollar/Pound/Euro per bottle price league with the magic words “Grand Cru” on the label. That’s the highest legal designation for burgundian wines; the Holy Wines of Burgundy! For me a poor quality wine is a bad thing at any price, regardless of where it came from, the grape variety or who made it, but with a three figure price tag I’d say it qualifies as a Liquid Disaster Area in a Bottle. But, as Löwenstein observed, illogically, even that doesn’t seem to prevent those wines from selling, which shows that factors other than the taste often pay a significant role.

I didn’t bother to rattle off a list of the names of the producers who disappointed me to him, but here are the most important names on my roll call of shame: Domaine Armand Rousseau in Gevrey-Chambertin, Domaine Perrot-Minot in Morey-St.-Denis, Domaine de la Romanée Conti in Vosne-Romanée and Domaine Bonneau du Martray in Aloxe-Corton. On the plus side I’ve tasted some wonderful red and dry white wines from Burgundy for much more modest prices, most notably from Domaine Charles Audoin in Marsannay and Chateau de Fuissé in Pouilly-Fuissé. If they dominated the picture I’d certainly feel much more positively about Burgundy.

“OK, those poor but expensive burgundy wines still sell,” I answered, “but that doesn’t mean they fail to disappoint many of the consumers who encounter them. It just means there are always enough new consumers with enough money to pay the prices and who believe in the hype. Wines in this price league are often consumed for status reasons. Nouveau riche always liked to flaunt their wealth and there’s more of them in today’s world than a generation ago.” Löwenstein admitted this was the case , but still seemed reluctant to criticize any of the winegrowers of Burgundy for their pricing policy. I think I can understand why.

Seen from the point of view of a leading German producer of Riesling wines with what the French call “terroir” character (the taste of the place, of the vineyard) like Löwenstein Burgundy is the place to look up to. With their “terroir” wines, or more accurately with the help of their best wines, the “terroir” story about them and a lot of networking, the leading winegrowers of Burgundy have steadily cranked the prices for their “Premier Cru” (the second highest designation for wines from ther region) and “Grand Cru” wines higher and higher. Four figures seem to be the new goal for some of them! Production costs certainly did not rise as fast as wine prices, so (if you do the simple math) profit margins became larger and larger. Compared to burgundian wines of similar quality with a similar individuality of character the dry Heymann-Löwenstein Rieslings taste like great value for money. No wonder Löwenstein, along with many of his colleagues in Germany and beyond, would like to make something closer to the kind of profits leading burgundian winegrowers make, instead of the much smaller kind leading Riesling producers currently do!

However, his argument about the remarkable imperviousness of the global wine market to the reality in the glass also explains why he will almost certainly never make burgundian-style profits. The global wine market generally remains set on the path it’s already on, because most consumers think about wine in hierarchies of perceived value which are intimately linked to the hierarchy of wine prices. (In contrast, there’s no relationship between the hierarchy of production costs and wine prices, since the former are almost completely invisible to consumers). Even the cleverest and most dedicated wine producer can usually only influence the global perceived value of his wine to a small degree, and that requires a long period of time. Regardless of grape variety or home region his or her best chance is in markets where a large number of consumers trust their own taste and risk making their own quality judgments. For example, Piemont/Italy wouldn’t be where it is today if producers like Angelo Gaja or Elio Altare hadn’t dramatically improved the quality of their wines, and enough consumers in markets like America and Germany had acknowledged that by paying higher prices. This was a rare case of rapid change in the wine market, though it still took several decades.

During the same period Riesling, particularly dry style Riesling, often seemed stuck in the Bargain Basement of Planet Wine; a fact that used to deeply frustrate me. In some markets with a high proportion of self-confident consumers (I think particularly of Scandinavia,  Australasia and the German speaking countries) this has changed markedly, but globally the change has thus far been fairly modest. This, and the sheer number of dynamic new and young Riesling producers in Germany and around the world who cannot (yet) charge high prices, means that most Riesling wines remain modest in price and great bargains can still be found. That strikes me as something good. Riesling is, and will long remain, a democratic wine rather than a status product for the 1% of wine drinkers. And I have to say, that I feel at home amongst the 99% of wine drinkers!

Nonetheless Löwenstein has a good reason to yearn for higher profits on the psychological level. High prices give wine producers not only healthier bank balances (and much larger tax bills!), but also more self-confidence. On my recent trip to Alsace/France Jean Michel Deiss of Domaine Marcel Deiss in Bergheim said something to me about his region, which could be extended to all the others where high quality Riesling is grown,  “the winegrowers in Burgundy have too much self-confidence, and we have far too little.” I can’t explain how this functions, but I’m sure that a winegrower’s self-confidence or lack of it rubs off on her/his wines. A significant injection of self-confidence do for the producers of Riesling would surely lead to another jump in wine quality, and if that came without a major hike in prices that would be nearly perfect. In the interests of Riesling drinkers everywhere on Planet Wine I’ve also made this part of my job here. The reality in the wine glass makes my task so much easier!

I feared that the thoughts I posted after discovering that I’d been made a finalist for Best Single Subject Blog at the Wine Blog Awards might strike many readers as self-indulgent and incoherent ramblings, but the responses have all been interesting and suggest that I said something worth saying. I also worried that these thoughts could seem arrogant, since I played down the importance of any and all such prizes, and insisted that the prize I might win was inappropriate. However, I just got a comment from Sean O’Keefe of Chateau Grand Traverse in North Michigan, one of the leading new generation of Riesling winemakers in America, which makes clear that some people immediately got what I wrote yesterday about this not being a Single Subject Blog. As he wrote, “Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t only a sports writer.”  So I decided to risk accusations of even greater arrogance by posting the above photograph of myself (thank you again Bettina Keller in Berlin!) which to my mind makes it crystal clear that I am not only the Riesling Guy.

The red coat I’m wearing in the photograph was recently made for me by Neodandi of Seattle (soon in New York) about whom I will be writing and posting something during the coming week. The look on my face has a lot to do with the fact that as a teenager I wanted to train as an actor, a profession which I finally drifted into in 2010 when filming of my German-language TV-series, ‘Weinwunder Deutschland’, wine wonder Germany, began. Screening of the third season of which will begin on BR3 (click the above tab for a German-langauge text about the new series) on BR3 in Bavaria on Saturday, June 8th. During the three years of shooting a learnt a great deal about movie-making and this encouraged me to start work on shooting my own feature-length film. This is an expensive and time-consuming business and because it’s all my own time and money work will extend into next year, with the first screenings set for September 2014.

Another important comment was a question about the final line of my last posting. Someone asked whether I meant to write, “the truth will win out,” or what I actually wrote, “the truth will out.” In fact, this time the world champion in typos (myself – who else could it be?) typed what he intended to. The question, which came from an American, is important for the truth will out is an old English expression, which means that the truth will always push to the surface on its own, though its own inherent force. Of course, that could be taken as meaning that people like myself who work with truth are unnecessary and irrelevant. However, I certainly don’t see it that way, for ignored and surprised truths need champions to aid and quicken this process. The crust of lies which covers so many truths is continually forming, spreading and thickening if nothing is done to disrupt its accretion. Better still to rip it open so the truth can rapidly and decisively come into the daylight, even if this is a painful process.

The 20th century history of my own nation, Great Britain, as it continues to be told in schools, newspapers, popular magazines, books and the electronic media is a horrendous example of  how a crust of lies can long obscure important truths. The apparent, but disingenuous, commitment of my nation’s establishment to the ideals of humanity, honesty and fairness only make a series of policies which at the least verged in a genocidal direction worse. Compared to that situation – for example, the British colonial regime in Kenya during the 1950s will soon be judged to have committed war crimes which were denied by successive governments for more than half a century –  the illusions which I regularly try to debunk here are small and unimportant. However, there’s no difference in kind when it comes to truth and lies. Either you’re in favor of the former or you’re in the service of the latter. The worst situation is to be a servant of lies, but unaware of your position, and sadly that’s not a rare situation for people to be in our world. In fact I’d say that to some degree we’re all suffering from illusions, all in need of help in breaking their pernicious influence. That’s my goal.

PS May 26th is my 53rd birthday, so please excuse my absence.

Sorry, but this is not a Single Subject Blog, even if it has been listed as a finalist in that category of this year’s Wine Blog Awards. The whole point of STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL is using Riesling as as key to unlock many doors leading in all kinds of directions. That is particularly easy here in New York Wine City (NYWC), where everything is crashing into everything else, and as a result it’s hard to keep things of any kind separate from things of any other kind. That’s why I chose this great photo of NYWC by Birgitta Böckeler who I used to share the Hotel of Hope – the place I’m currently staying in Manhattan’s East Village – with.

Let me give one simple example of the interconnectedness which is so vital to this Blog’s functioning. Because he was one of the great Riesling experts during the period 1935 – 75, and wrote some books which document this period of Riesling History brilliantly I got interested in the American wine author, importer and consultant Frank Schoonmaker. In his ‘Wine Encyclopedia’ of 1964 I discovered a table listing the vineyard areas for each of the major grape varieties in California half a century ago. Comparing those statistics with the current ones showed that grape varieties which are now of such major importance that they’re taken for granted, like Chardonnay and  Merlot, were virtually unknown back then. Back then there was more Riesling planted than those two fashion-grapes put together! This proved how California’s wine industry was every bit as dynamic as its IT industry during the same period, even if that was (until a recent turnaround) to Riesling’s detriment. It’s an observation I’ve not found in any other wine publication, although it is vital to understanding what makes California radically different to a European winegrowing nation like France. Again and again wine journalists and authors compare France and California in a thoughtlessly simplistic manner as if climatic and other conditions (compare the latitudes!) were directly comparable and their wine industries functioned in the same way (compare the cultural differences!) Usually these comparisons are made in order to find one wanting, so that the other can be glorified.

As much as I love Riesling that’s not my goal. If Riesling is a wonderful thing, then all I need to do is find and present the wines and connected facts for that to become obvious (it is already apparent to many people). And if you decide that there’s no glory in Riesling, then so be it. As we say in England where I come from, the truth will out!

I’ve just been nominated for a blogging award – more details of that below – which has made me to do some serious thinking about what I’m up to here at STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL. First of all, right from the beginning I’ve been well aware that this is what the world calls a blog, but I always saw myself as a journalist, and this as another (special, as much because editor-less and very rapid as because electronic) medium for publishing my work. Regardless of the medium, journalism is a two stage process, the first part of which is research like the tasting of Finger Lakes Rieslings at the Hotel of Hope in New York Wine City’s (NYWC) East Village earlier this year pictured above. However, as regular readers are well aware, much of my research is conducted on the road with winegrowers in their home regions, some of which I feel familiar with, while others are completely new to me.

Even when it all seems familiar to me, for example when I visited the Dönnhoff estate in Oberhausen/Nahe about a year ago (see the photo below), there are always surprises for which I must try to be open. In this case it was the first vintage of dry Riesling from the Höllenpfad vineyard site of Roxheim, a wine which tasted very different from anything else I’d ever tasted there since my first visit back in May 1986. Back then Helmut Dönnhoff was a virtually unknown, but obviously talented and (quietly) ambitious winemaker. He was what Germans now call a Jungwinzer, or a talented young winegrower. Whether the winegrowers and wines I encounter are famous or completely unknown is part of their identity, but that doesn’t alter the fundamental challenge of telling their story at all.

This side of my work is all about selecting and arranging the impressions I gathered and the ideas which I (and others) had about them in a form and sequence which enables them to function as well as possible in the particular medium. This is what most people consider “creative” work, but I’m guessing that my last sentence strikes many of you as making that process sound banal and very “uncreative”. However, I promise you that, as New York-based novelist Tom Wolfe said in a bunch of recent interviews, writing is mostly hard work and the pleasure is nearly all in completing a story that seems to work well. By “work well” I mean a text which strikes me as conveying my impressions and ideas in a way that’s comprehensible and compelling for readers unfamiliar with the particular material. Of course, it always takes some time for me to find out if my gut feeling was right and it’s actually comprehensible and/or compelling. If it’s not and my gut feeling was wrong, then I have to do some rethinking before the next try.

And that brings me to the most important thing I’ve got to say today, which is that writing this stuff is not about winning a prize like the Wine Blog Award for the Best Single Subject Blog, for which I am a finalist this year. Of course, it would be flattering to win this award and it might also be very good publicity for STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL, however, the whole point of my work is communicating something of the exciting winegrowers and wines to readers, that is connecting with them. The sole measure of my success is your interest and excitement. So if I win this prize I’ll continue, listening to and read your comments as avidly as I do now. Let’s be frank, I don’t want or need a medal, a prize or even a Wine Blog Award!

Experience has taught me is that it’s strong and surprising things which touch you most. Often it’s funny things which get the best response, but only if they also have something important to say. You, the readers, certainly want to be entertained, but you want to discover stuff (and I’m talking that old-fashioned thing called truth) you can’t get elsewhere and that’s exactly what I’m trying to give you. Thank you for your interest and for your excitement!