Berlin Riesling Diary: Day 1 – Under the Swan, the Lion and the Unicorn (Part 2) – In memory of Philip Eyres

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Stuart

This is the second installment of the talk I gave at the Riesling Fellowship evening in the Vintners Hall in London on January 29th. To fully grasp the context of the below it would help to read my previous posting (Part 1) before this one. Philip Eyres (1926 – 2012) was not only a great wine merchant, he was also a man with a strong sense of justice and great compassion. I spoke about these things the last time I saw him, and I promised him that I wouldn’t let the subject of this talk drop. Whether the Vintners Hall was the right place to say these things is debatable  It seemed to be so to me, because it is the home of the Establishment of the British wine trade.

Then something Philip Eyres did 10 years ago changed everything. Harry Eyres describes this so well in his Slow Lane column in the (London) Financial Times of March 12th/13th 2005 (pictured above) that I will read the first half of his column (I pick up newspaper clipping and begin to read).

HUMANITY’S VEIL OF DARKNESS

On the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden last month my father quietly brought out a black and white photograph. It showed a long street reduced to rubble, with no building standing higher than the first story, and most completely flattened. As he made no comment, my sister remarked that it looked like Hiroshima. No, it wasn’t Hiroshima, my father informed us, it was Hamburg in 1946. He had taken the photograph while serving in the Allied army of occupation. The RAF bombing raids on Hamburg in July 1943 practically demolished Germany’s second-largest city. More than 40,000 people died (probably more than were killed in Dresden) during the three nights in July 1943 when the firestorms reached 1,000 degrees centigrade. Three years later the city was still a wasteland.

Seeing the almost unimaginable destruction wrought on Hamburg as a young man of 20 had a profound effect upon my father. He is no supporter (unlike many British people of his generation I have spoken to) of Air Marshall Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. He does not agree with the sentiment expressed by the present British ambassador to Germany that in the context of the war the raids on German cities were justified. Nothing, for him and for Slaughterhouse Five author Kurt Vonnegut, can “justify” dropping incendiary bombs on people and turning them to sticks of carbon, a view I share.

One good thing that came out of my father’s posting in Germany at the end of the war was an enduring love of German wines. Later, as a wine merchant, my father made a specialty of the beautiful, delicate Riesling wines of the Mosel, Saar, Ruwer, and Nahe rivers. For a number of years I used to go out with him, in the cool Rhineland-Palatinate spring, to taste the young wines at estates such as Maximin Grünhaus on the Ruwer, the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Trier (Karl Marx’s old school, which has a priceless dowry of vineyards) and the State Wine Domain at Niedershausen on the Nahe. I share his affection for these green-glinting wines, for the valleys with their gravity-defying vineyards and for the German wine growers and makes who approach their craft with the unselfish devotion of orchestral musicians. But I also realized that for my father were not simply about wine. They were a kind of reparation, a way of restoring Anglo-German amity through a cultural exchange based on the shared pleasure of wine.   

Suddenly, I realized that for 20 years I had unknowingly been involved in Philip Eyres personal campaign of reconciliation, and his work of reparation. I was immediately reminded of a conversation with a German wine journalist colleague, Pit Falkenstein, back in the summer of 1998. I had already known Pit for some years, but knew little about his life. On a walk through the vineyards of Assmannshausen in the Rheingau he told me his life story. (I put down newspaper clipping and pick up an email). Pit was born in Berlin in 1935. After the family home bas bombed out during the war they moved to a safe place, the Salzkammergut area of the Austrian Alps. Pit was sent to Stift Admont, a monastic boarding school. At Easter 1945 the food ran out and the monks sent the younger children home. Here is the story in his words:

There were many groups of four or five boys. A 13 year old lead our group…The trains were not running any more. I therefore marched the 60 kilometers to the Salzkammergut with my group in two and a half days. The two sandwiches each we were given at Admont were quickly eaten, because we were hungry. We slept in barns on hay and friendly farmers gave us plenty to eat. On the second day as we had almost made it to Tauplitz we were surprised in open fields by Spitfires. We were making our way up a hillside meadow between large rocks. We tried to reach the nearest piece of woodland, but didn’t make it. The British pilots shot mercilessly at us with their machineguns. We lay flat on the ground and were very lucky. Almost nothing happened to us. One friend of mine was grazed by a bullet on his right shoulder. The heel of my right shoe was blown off. Only some minutes later did I realize that my left hand was bleeding. A tiny piece of shrapnel from a bullet that had hit one of the rocks next to me and flown into my middle finger. To this day I carry this “trophy” around with me.

Stuart, why did those pilots do that?

I was very shocked by that story when Pit Falkenstein told it to me, but I also felt terribly confused. What did it have to do with me? I was born in 1960 and my parents were children during the Second World War. Only much later did I realize that my maternal grandfather had been an electrician in the RAF and worked on fighter planes. Quite possibly, he had serviced the planes that shot at Pit Falkenstein and his school chums.

TO BE CONTINUED VERY SOON!

Posted in Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right | 1 Comment

Berlin Riesling Diary: Day 0 – Under the Swan, the Lion and the Unicorn (Part 1) – In memory of Philip Eyres

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Stuart

Here is the first installment of the talk I gave at the Riesling Fellowship yesterday (Thursday, January 29th) evening at Vintners Hall in the City of London. Along with Hew Blair and Sebastian Thomas I was made a Riesling Fellow by Wines of Germany, which is kind of them, but not necessary as I don’t do this thing in order to wine prizes. I was also invited to give a 15 minute talk about my life and Riesling while a wine I’d selected was served. I followed Jancis Robinson, David Motion and Hugh Johnson, and what I said caused quite a stink, but that didn’t surprise me. What I said was all true, and I believe it’s far more important to speak an uncomfortable truth that has been swept under the carpet, than to be polite in return for polite applause. These are my opening remarks and they might seem uncontroversial, but were the foundation for all that followed. I think it’s worth noting that three symbols were to be seen all over Vintners Hall. The swan, which an anthropologist would call the totem of the vintners tribe, was almost as ubiquitous as the lion and the unicorn. The latter are of course part of the coat of arms of the House of Windsor (the British royal family), and are essential symbols of the British Establishment. To this episode, like those that follow, I’ve added a few extra words to those I actually said, because I forgot one or two important details.

This evening each of us is telling reminiscences, but mine will be very different from the others. I have to show you my new book (I held up my book),  even though I’m not going to read anything from it, because in it the labels of the first wines – including the first Riesling – I ever drank with pleasure are reproduced.

Call from the audience: “is it in English?”

Yes, it is in English, and I think you should all be able to read the cover. The title, BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story, and it’s in English, American English.

In the book I also tell how I came to drink those wines. (I put down my book). It was April 1975, I was 15 years old and on a language exchange to Germany. I didn’t get on with my exchange partner at all, but that didn’t matter because I got on so well with his family. They lived in a bungalow in a suburb of Ludwigshafen and when I arrived they showed me around. Last stop was the kitchen where the father of the family swung open the refrigerator revealing rows of beer and wine bottles. Then, he said a magical word, “Selbstbedienung”, or self-service. I did so frequently during my stay, enjoyed what I drank and was rarely more than slightly hung-over.

The wine that’s just being poured for you is the 2012 Kupfergrube dry Riesling GG from Gut Hermannsberg, to which I’ll come in a moment. It might seem a banal thing to say, but wine connects us. Most obviously, this wine now connects us all, because we are tasting and drinking it together. Of course, this is the same kind of connection as between a group of people at a dinner table or in a bar who share a bottle. However, beyond that banal level the wine in the glass connects us in a more subtle way with the place where it grew and the people who made it.

In this case, it connects us with Dr. Christine Dinse and Jens Reidel who purchased the ex-Nahe State Domaine in 2009, and with Karsten Peter, the young winemaker from the Pfalz they hired. Of course, he has a team under him and it also links us to them, to the Nahe wine region and to Germany as a whole (both can be found on the label). Beyond that it connects us with the convict laborers who in 1902 started clearing the scrub  around a disused copper mine to build the terraces of this now famous vineyard site and plant it as part of the Prussian Wine Domaine of Niederhausen-Schlossböckelheim, and with those responsible for the first ever vintage of dry Kupfergrube Riesling in 1912. When we choose to drink a wine, we also choose to make those connections, although few people take the trouble to follow them in the kind of detail I just have. Of course, you can also choose not to drink a wine, and that means not to make those connection, for example with Germany.

My direct personal connection with this wine goes back to a sunny day in May 1984 when I first visited the Nahe State Domaine for the first time with British wine merchant Philip Eyres (pictured above, right). He had invited me to join him, his wife Jennifer and his son Harry (pictured above, left) for a week on one of his regular wine buying trips to the Mosel, Nahe and Pfalz. During that trip this tasting which made the greatest impression upon me, and it was the dry and sweet Rieslings from the Kupfergrube vineyard site that etched themselves into my memory.

If there was a single moment that I started on my present course, then that was it. Over the last days I was in the Mosel, Nahe and Rheinhessen visiting wine producers and tasting their wines, much as I did during that week. For more than 20 years I kept on that course in a rather thoughtless way. By this I certainly don’t mean that I didn’t think while I was tasting German wines and talking to the winemakers responsible for them, rather that I didn’t think about why I was doing it. During this time I think it’s fair to say that the success of my articles and books – I mean of each individual work – ranged from negligible to modest. However, there was a cumulative success, without which I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you today. Surely, it masks sense to look back with a critical frame of mind, rather than to idealize the past and in that way to misrepresent it?

TO BE CONTINUED VERY SOON!

 

 

Posted in Home, Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right | 2 Comments

Lustiger Wein von Frank Ebbinghaus

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Stuart

Jede Weinkarte ist unterteilt in verschiedene Sektionen: Weiß- und Rotwein, Rebsorten, Herkunft, trocken, rest- oder edelsüß. Ein System wie ein Möbelhaus oder das Zentralkomitee der SED, positivistisch, funktional, nicht in Frage zu stellen. Und genau deshalb wieder auch höchst zweifelhaft.

Befrage ich mich nämlich selbst, auf welche Flasche ich Lust hätte, und reiche diese Frage an meinen Weinkeller oder Kühlschrank weiter, so wäre die Weinkartensystematik kaum hilfreich. Ich denke nicht in Regalsystemen oder Sektionen, sondern rufe Sinneseindrücke hervor, betrachte diese wie Seifenblasen, lasse ihre Anmutung auf mich wirken bis eine Entscheidung gereift ist.

Dieser Prozess lässt sich zwar versachlichen, etwa, wenn es um einen Wein geht, der zu einem bestimmten Essen passen soll. Wer sich ihm jedoch sklavisch unterwirft, findet nur selten zum großen Wein-Glück. Denn das Weingenussbedürfnis führt ein starkes Eigenleben. Es ist oft stärker als der Anlass, ein Essen zu begleiten. Ich will in diesem Moment genau diesen Wein. Da ist mir gerade recht, dass er auch zum Essen passen könnte.

Ich befinde mich also in einer erinnerten Aromenwelt, die ich mit meinen Stimmungen und Bedürfnissen abgleiche. Ein Zwiegespräch, das ich natürlich auch mit einer herkömmlichen Weinkarte im Restaurant führen kann, sofern ich die angebotenen Tropfen aus eigenem Erleben kenne. Oder mit einem Sommelier, was überaus reizvoll ist, wenn sein Werben für diesen oder jenen Wein auf mich eine Verführungskraft ausstrahlt. Eine solche Beziehung setzt ein intuitives Verständnis voraus, das mehr im Zwischenmenschlichen als in der Weinkompetenz allein gründet. Um mich anzufixen muss mir keiner eine Terroir-Arie singen oder die Weinbereitungsphilosophie vorbeten. Auch ist mir völlig gleichgültig, ob der Winzer auf Punk steht oder sich als Frau fühlt. Es geht vielmehr um die Wirkung von Poesie (was freilich nicht heißt, dass der Sommelier oder die Sommeliere Sprachkünstlerinnen oder –künstler sein müssten, nein, es geht nur um die Wirkung: den Moment der Verzauberung).

Ich bin deshalb schon froh, wenn die Weinberatung zu dem Ergebnis führt, dass der Wein zum Essen passt und auch noch gut schmeckt. Verzauberung erwarte ich nicht unbedingt im Restaurant.

Und das ist eigentlich schade. Gerade dort, wo der Wein im Mittelpunkt steht, in Weinbars oder Restaurants, die sich zu einer Weinpassion bekennen, wäre doch genau der richtige Ort, um den Moment der Verzückung nicht nur zu suchen, sondern auch zu finden. Wobei – um ein weiteres Missverständnis auszuschließen – das in einem bestimmten Moment größtmögliche Weinglück nicht unbedingt im größtmöglichen Wein liegt. Ja, der Weinkenner oder die Weinkennerin, die eine Karte zu lesen vermögen, sind hier im Vorteil. Aber der große Rest vergnügungssüchtiger und verführbarer Gäste?

Eben daran musste ich denken, als ich mich kürzlich mit Stuart und Freunden in der Berliner Weinschenke „Weinstein“ traf. Naturgemäß oblag dem Großkritiker und Welt-Rieslingversteher, die erste Flasche auszuwählen. Und Stuart sagte zu meiner Überraschung: „Nehmen wir einen lustigen Wein“. Oh Gott, diese Pigottsche Exzentrik! Ein „lustiger Wein“, was soll das bitte schön sein?

Ich erinnerte mich in diesem Moment an meinen Großvater, der mit großem Eifer auszurufen pflegte: „Wein muss nach Wein schmecken, und nach sonst nichts!“ Und phantasierte Loriotsche Restaurantszenen herbei, á la: „Ober, einen Wein, bitte. Aber einen schönen Wein.“

Und doch liegt in diesen satirischen Zuspitzungen eine tiefe Wahrheit und Aufrichtigkeit, die nur deshalb seltsam wirkt, weil sich solche Ansagen und Wünsche nicht aus dem Reich des völlig Subjektiven heraus begeben. Ebenso wie im Pigottschen Bestellwunsch. Ein „lustiger Wein“! Wären wir Fremde unter Fremden gewesen, eine slapstickhafte Kommunikation hätte sich angeschlossen. Aber wir erkannten schnell (und ahnten es bereits früher), was Stuart wollte: Einen Wein, der die Sinne weckt, der freudige Gefühle und gute Stimmung animiert, der auf der Zunge tanzt, ohne das Gespräch durch einnehmendes oder forderndes Verhalten zu behindern. Ein sichere Plattform, auf der sich der Abend und was er an zu leerenden Flaschen mit sich brachte, sinne- und geschmackspapillenweitend aufbauen konnte. Also das, was in vielen Restaurants das Glas Champagner zu Beginn leisten soll, aber selten schafft. (Foto von Vuk Karadzic)

Es wäre also an der Zeit, die hergebrachte Weinkartensystematik zu hinterfragen. Warum gibt es auf Weinkarten keine „lustigen Weine“? Warum keine „Meditationsweine“, die doch immerhin den Hinweis liefern, dass sie alle Aufmerksamkeit auf sich ziehen wollen und jedes Gespräch absterben lassen? Weshalb fehlen Hinweise auf eine unmittelbare, durchaus sexualisierbare Sinnlichkeit, die dem Genießer eine Schnappatmung und Schweißperlen auf der Stirn bescheren können? Warum werden nicht explizit Weine empfohlen, die Dialog oder Disput hervorrufen. Ja, sogar der „schwierigen Wein“, der erobert werden will und dem Genießer oder der Genießerin alles abverlangt, sei erlaubt. Denn all dies sind soziale Kontexte, die beim Weingenuss denkbar oder sogar wünschenswert sind.

Wer in einem Restaurant oder einer Bar sitzt, will sich unterhalten und zwar auf eine andere Art als zu Hause – selbst wenn ein Gast allein ist. Wein ist Katalysator von Kommunikation, wird aber in diesem Zusammenhang oft völlig unterschätzt. Mit Wein entsteht ein Gespräch, das seine besondere Stimmung erst durch den Zusammenklang von Personen, ihren Emotionen und den passenden Flaschen erzielt. So wie es der „lustige Wein“ vermochte. Es war übrigens ein 2012 Ayler Kupp Riesling Fass 2 des Weinguts Peter Lauer (Ayl/ Saar) – verdammt lustiges Zeug für einen lustigen Abend.

Posted in @deutsch | Comments Off on Lustiger Wein von Frank Ebbinghaus

Mosel & Rhine Diary: Day 2 – Let #Riesling & Music do for You What They do for Me

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Stuart

New York somm Peter Weltman was still under age – shock, horror! – when he drank his first Riesling back in 2004. It was a Spätlese from J. J. Prüm in Wehlen/Mosel, probably from the Wehlener Sonnenuhr site that owes it’s global fame to the Prüm family. The photo above shows him in front of that site early this morning. Yesterday J. J. Prüm was our first appointment and we tasted the 2012s and 2013s with Dr. Manfred and Amei Prüm, which are exciting, but very contrasting wines (the 2012s are elegant and graceful, the 2013s much more racy and mineral with quite a challenging acidity). I first visited J.J. Prüm back in May 1984, so this was some kind of double anniversary, for Peter a 10 year one and for me a 30 year one. However, as I recently observed, sheer age doesn’t make wine or anything else more important.

From this and the photo you can tell that there’s a generational gap between us, but this is one of those friendships where I only really feel as a distance when we talk about something that was new for the young me and therefore before Peter’s time. For differing personal reasons, but in the same basic way, the Rieslings of J.J. Prüm and the jazz piano playing of Bill Evans are things which bridge this generational gap. Wine, like music, bridges distances between people both in space (for example Mosel wines being drunk in New York or Berlin) and in time (the age difference between Peter and I or any other two people). This is because wine and music are “abstract”, that is they don’t have an obvious content – song lyrics are content, but often not consumed as such, particularly by people with other mother tongues. They touch us emotionally, that is they connect directly with the traces intense experiences in the past left in us. This is something fundamental to being human that has nothing to do with the intellectual side of us, but of course connects with that too. I think that’s enough philosophy for one grey, winter morning!

If you look closely at the photo it shows something that a lot of wine books talk about, but you can seldom actually see. The snow melts first in the best vineyards, because they have the best exposure to the sun and are warmer for other reasons too (lower altitude, less exposed to cold wind, etc). You can clearly see that the lowest third of the Wehlener Sonnenuhr is the best part of the site, and that’s where most of the best Rieslings we tasted at J.J. Prüm came from. Some aspects of wine, like the way it connects with our memories and emotions are very difficult to analyze, while others such as this are rather easy to explain and grasp. This combination is what makes my job so endlessly fascinating. Every day that gives me a Riesling to live.

Posted in Home, STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL | 1 Comment

Mosel & Rhine Riesling Diary: Day 0 – “Schaefer” is a Magical Word in the Riesling Vocabulary

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Stuart

NYC somm Peter Weltman (left) was lucky that Christoph Schaefer of the Willi Schaefer estate in Graach/Mosel (right) was the first winemaker he ever visited in Germany. What better place could there be to start deep immersion in the world of this nation’s Rieslings than here at Willi Schaefer with some of the most delicate and intense, archetypal and lovable (A&L) wines from my favorite grape. That last pair of descriptors says everything about what makes these wines so different from the great majority of the world’s best wines. How many of them are really A&L? Mostly they’re either A or L and don’t have much of the other to offer, at least no to the high degree that is possible with German Rieslings when they are of the calibre of the Willi Schaefer wines. Personally the wines I tend to enjoy least are those which are over-loaded with the archetypal thing to the point of being enormously self-important. The phrase “icon wines” describes this kind of untouchable vinous monuments to themselves perfectly. Icons are there to be venerated and are so holy you could never feel something as simple as love for them. There is none of this pomposity to the Schaefer Rieslings, rather they speak directly to you, welcome love and calmly accept statements like, “sorry, not my thing.”

I don’t think the fact that a wine has reached a great age is really a criterium for judging its quality, because I’ve had some really sensational tasting wines that were extremely young (for example the 2013 de Fleveaux Sauvignon Blanc from South Africa – and I promise you that normally I hate Sauvignon Blanc). However, when joyful and subtle young Rieslings of the kind the Schaefer’s have been making for generations get the opportunity to age for the equivalent of a generation, like the bottles in the Schaefers Schatzkammer pictured above, then they can taste simultaneously mysterious and sexy. That’s the way the 1976 Graacher Himmelreich Riesling Auslese was this evening, as well as tasting mellow and creamy, yet very alive and enticing. Tasting this wine persuaded me that I must work much harder to live a healthy life so that I will still be around to experience the literally brilliant 2013s from Willi Schaefer reach the same kind of age. Please don’t lead me astray from the true path of Riesling!

Posted in Home, STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL | Comments Off on Mosel & Rhine Riesling Diary: Day 0 – “Schaefer” is a Magical Word in the Riesling Vocabulary

Berlin Riesling Diary: Day 9 – My Romantic / Obsessive-Compulsive Wine Cellar

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Stuart

I’m often asked about my wine cellar, and sometimes I can see from the way the eyes of my questioner glaze over that they’re expecting something which looks like the crypt of a cathedral or at the least the cellar of a Medieval castle in Scotland. They want cobwebs and the dust of centuries, also at least a few rare and exceptional bottles of the kind even serious wine collectors can only dream about. In short, it should be a dark and damp Wine Heaven on Earth illuminated only by a few flickering candles! The few people I actually took down there were therefore seriously disappointed when they found what you can see above: rows of plastic crates and cases between concrete walls with no hint of stone, wood, much less any serious cobwebs. The only dust is from the plaster on the walls and ceiling crumbling, the only light is from fluorescent tubes of the standard kind.

But for me it is still a romantic place, because of the wine in the bottles. In his poem ‘L’ame du vin’ Charles Baudelaire wrote about the soul of wine being imprisoned behind the glass of the bottle, waiting to be released by the drinker, and that’s exactly how I see it today. Of course, some of this is also in my mind in the form of memories of the people who made those wines, the places the grapes grew, and situations in which I previously experienced them. What you see is just packaging (at the front of the picture literally so, those being the labels of Keller in Flörsheim-Dalsheim/Rheinhessen and of Sinß in Windesheim/Nahe). Frankly, that is all ballast weighing the wines down. I dread to think what the carbon footprint of all the glass bottles in my cellar is (of course, I recycle), and hope one day a better technical solution will be found. Some are ridiculously and unnecessarily heavy, particularly those for the GGs (Großes Gewächs). VDP please take note and address this problem, because currently you’re in denial!

The other thing which immediately strikes me when I go into my cellar is that there is a ton of wine in there, maybe 2,000 bottles (my list isn’t complete so I can’t calculate exactly). Is this too much? The library function of my cellar is undeniable and it really does help me build up a picture of how the important wines of earlier vintages taste now, which also tells me something useful about the producers responsible for them. Of course, that’s all good for my work as a wine journalist. However, in retrospect, there was a time when I took it all too far. By that I mean there was an obsessive-compulsive aspect to my wine purchases. If you suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD is the correct name not the widely-used OCD), or have a close friend/relative who suffers, then you know what I’m talking about. If not I promise you that suffering impacts many parts of your life. I’m trying to overcome, or at least, to seriously dampen down this side of my personality, so I’ve put much less wine in the cellar the last couple of years.

And, yes, I did buy almost all the wine that went into this cellar. Winegrowers who sent wine presents that went beyond one bottle at Christmas received bottles from me in return and/or dinner invitations which included wine from my cellar. A couple of wine merchants sent me single expensive bottles, generally of French wine. These were always put to good use in blind tastings. The only wines I ever asked producers for were samples for specific tastings, and that is a strict policy. A lot of wine from this cellar was poured without charge at charity events in Germany and New York. I am not perfect, nor can I be, but I try to be straight, fair and, most importantly, to share.

 

 

Posted in Home, STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL | Comments Off on Berlin Riesling Diary: Day 9 – My Romantic / Obsessive-Compulsive Wine Cellar

London Riesling Diary: Day 2 – England’s Violent Dreaming

Posted on January 10, 2015 by Stuart

I would be hard to find a more boring scene to present to you than the above corner of Bromley, the London suburb where I – also David Bowie – come from. The point is that I could have used another photo taken in another part of the Great London Area that would have been virtually indistinguishable from this one. It was a bland place when I grew up there, but it has become much more bland since then. Every time I come here to visit my mother this simple fact shocks me again. However, that’s not all I experience when I’m suddenly immersed in the world I turned my back on a quarter of a century ago. There’s a very different, parallel shock I experience through the British media and on the streets. This results from the fact of, acceptance and glorification of violence. The only place I was ever violently attacked was on a street corner in London almost indistinguishable from the above. Thankfully a friend pulled my drunken attacker from me after he’d landed only one blow to my head and a young woman who saw what happened stopped her car and rescued us before the youth’s friends could join him.

Bad as this kind of violence is, the way, for example, the British media make bombing Iraq seem the most natural and moral thing to do is worse still. That British troops first entered the territory that is now Iraq (then a province of the Ottoman Empire) just over a century ago on November 6th, 1914 and was it occupied by the British again (although it was then a neutral country) during WWII is forgotten. The standard formula British politicians use for this kind of forgetting is, “it’s time to move on,” and their catch-all motto for our participation in military adventures far from these shores is that we must, “punch above our weight,” in world affairs. George Orwell had some pertinent words to describe this kind of talk: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

Of course, in the leafy suburbia where I grew up all was and is not evil. And it was here that I developed my own way of looking at the world. A good part of British creativity – also, for example, David Bowie’s music – grows out of this leafy suburbia, that is a reaction against it that would be impossible without it. If you doubt the relevance of my words to David Bowie’s music I suggest you listen to ‘Life from Mars’ on the ‘Hunky Dory’ album, which rather precisely describes the world he and I grew up in.

On rainy, grey winter days like today on which England looks all brown, grey and (absurdly for the season) very green I wish myself back to Berlin or New York where I feel free from the weight of British history’s ballast of violence. Of course, the histories of both Germany and America are also laden with ballast of the same kind, but there I feel a sense of detachment from it when I think about it, because those are not my national identities. Oddly, both those cities were also important for David Bowie. His album ‘Heroes’ was the soundtrack for my first immersion in Germany that same year, 1976. When ‘The Next Day’ suddenly came out in 2013 I immediately recognized the New York I was then exploring. Listening to it now it sounds doubly appealing due to the distance.

I will have more to say about England and Germany on January 29th. So watch this space on that day!

Posted in Home, STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL | 2 Comments

New York Riesling Diary: Day 36 – Arizona Dreaming – “There are no Facts, only interpretations”

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Stuart

A brief philosophical intro: There’s no way around the fact that the context (the natural and human aspects are so interwoven it’s almost impossible to separate them) in which a wine is produced shape it. However, there’s also no way around the fact that the context in which a wine is experienced no less radically shapes the experience of its smell and taste. A wine tasting in one location with one group of tasters is NOT going to lead to the result as the “same” tasting in another place with another group of tasters, not least because they will taste the location and the contents of their heads every bit as much as the wine in their glass. These too are so interwoven that you can hardly separate them. I write this listening to ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ from Nirvana, and I promise you that colors these words too, and it would do so differently if I was hearing it for the first time, rather than for the (still electrifying) thousandth time.

But now, let’s get down to business: Sunday afternoon I forgot all the above for a long moment, because I was focusing on the brass tacks of staging a blind tasting of wines from Arizona plus a couple of pirates from California and France at Hotel Delmano in Williamsburg/Brooklyn for a group of New York somms (thanks again Alex Allan for the great support, both moral and practical). And that’s how I blindly sailed straight into the dark heart of a storm.

I didn’t begin realize what was happening until one of the somms politely asked me if the winegrowers of Arizona focussed on terroir, French for the taste of the place and NYC-Sommspeak for a taste that is indefinable – je ne sais quoi – in a simultaneously sexy and holy way. I politely pointed out to him how young the contemporary AZ wine industry, but I don’t think he has any idea how hard it is establishing vineyards in locations where there’s no previous generation who’s experiences you can draw upon. Terroir is a luxury for established winegrowers, or, at least, for winegrowers in regions that are well established. It’s also a method for selling wines more expensively (see the example of  Burgundy where the T-word enables some mediocre wines to be sold for fancy prices).

Only after that exchange did I sense how behind that question lurked the expectation – of course! was anything else even conceivable? – that the winegrowers of AZ would be focusing on terroir. You see, in France terroir is holy  and from there this religion has been spread around the world by French winegrowers, their importers and SOPEXA. With it has travelled a mythical France that is a timeless land of wine on the western edge of the wine continent of Europe which the Great God of Wine favored above all others. That this marketing strategy was successful is proven by the prices charged the famous wines of France, which bear no relation to the production costs of them. Of course, I deliberately exaggerate for effect, but also because this way you’ll pay more attention than if I was cautious and understated everything.

The tasting started quite well with a flight of three dry whites. However, when the the first reds – young wines made from the grapes of the Cabernet family – were poured something odd suddenly happened. NYC somms can have a knee-jerk reaction against the combination of the sweet fruity aromas of fully-ripe grapes plus clean, modern winemaking. These wines certainly smelt that way and provoked that knee-jerk reaction. To be fair, I would say that there was a touch of over-ripeness in all of them, that they would have been better without. But did this justify the force of those reactions? Some people seemed to feel they’d been insulted by the wines. In fact, they’d only tasted some wines of a style they personally don’t prefer.

I have to admit here that most of the AZ wines had tasted better to me when I was there in a more relaxed context that was undeniably friendly to them. Many also tasted quite a better and very different after 24 hours further aeration. For example, on the day of the tasting the 2012 “Gallia” from Saeculum Cellars (55% Merlot, 45% Cabernet Franc) had quite an intense sweet redcurrant character, but the next day it was dominated by firm, dry tannins. I’m not arguing with the tasters characterizations, rather pointing out their  vehemence and how that inclined some present to pay less attention to the taste experience. Those somms may also have projected a high alcoholic content and lots of new oak onto the wines, because often in the big wide world of wine those sweet aromas are married to high alcohol and lots of new (in what used to be called “Parker Wines”, after the wine critic Robert M. Parker Jr who liked that combination). The AZ wines actually had below 14% and were not full of new oak.

This situation repeated itself with the GSM (named after the combination of the Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre grapes in a blend) flight, at which point the attention oif some somms was seriously wandering – we want funky terroir wines, and we want them now! – their comments becoming rudimentary, vague and dismissive. My experience is that at many blind tastings a mood is established early on and casts a show or an aura over all the wines that follow. I’ve been swept along by such moods myself, and am certainly not immune to that effect. In this case it was a deep shadow, as the grudging nature of the praise for impressive wines like the 2012 “Kitsune” (Sangiovese) and 2012 “Judith” (60% Tempranillo, 40% Cabernet Sauvignon) from Caduceus Cellars made clear. With that latter wine the tasting ended with an at-least-its-finally-over-and-we’re-all-still-alive mood.

I don’t mind what any individual taster or drinker makes of a particular wine, because everyone is entitled to their own opinion and opinions contrary to mine are welcome. My doubts about the tasting have to do with the influence of local culture (the NYC wine scene is no less an island than Manhattan is) and the role group dynamics. As Nietzsche wrote, “there are no facts, only interpretations.”

An important conclusion for me: It was interesting to ride this ship through the storm and listen to all the screams (including my silent ones at a couple of moments). When I chewed it all over after I was back home, it became clear to me that my decision to make AZ as a major research project in 2015 is a daring one, and some people here will think me mad for pursuing it. My experience with Riesling has ably prepared me for being out on a limb (particularly when it was totally “out” 20 and more years ago). There’s iron in my soul! I shall proceed regardless of any and all reactions!

Full sail ahead!

 

 

Posted in Gonzo, Home, STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL | Comments Off on New York Riesling Diary: Day 36 – Arizona Dreaming – “There are no Facts, only interpretations”

OFF von Frank Ebbinghaus

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Stuart

Ich tue es keineswegs aus hehren ethischen oder gar religiösen Motiven. Nicht mal der gesundheitliche Aspekt, der ja wohl nicht von der Hand zu weisen ist, juckt mich. Meine Haltung zum Fasten ist ausschließlich dem Genussprinzip unterworfen. Kurz: Ich faste, um meine Genussfähigkeit zu steigern. Mit Fasten meine ich den Verzicht auf Alkohol. Da ich nur Wein trinke, verzichte ich darauf wie auch auf die Zuführung alternativer alkoholischer Getränke. Null, nichts, nada, dreieinhalb Wochen lang, zwei Mal im Jahr. Sogar unterhalb der Woche – auch da bin ich humorlos prinzipiell – trinke ich zwischen Sonntag und Mittwoch nicht. Nicht immer, aber meistens.

Es ist zum einen ein lustvolles Spiel mit der Abhängigkeit. Denn natürlich – machen wir uns nichts vor – ist die Lust am Weingenuss auch eine Lust am Alkohol. Die überaus sinnliche Erfahrung der komplexen Aromatik des Weins ist von seiner Wirkung nicht zu trennen. Zum Luxus der Weingenießerin oder des Weingenießers gehört, mehrere unterschiedliche Flaschen gleichzeitig zu öffnen und nach gusto und Kondition auszutrinken. Erfahrene Trinkerinnen und Trinker wissen den Zustand einer gepflegten Trunkenheit zu schätzen und zu kultivieren. Die wunderbare Jancis Robinson erzählte mir mal, dass sie privat nur wenig trinke, ein Glas am Abend oder so – genau weiß ich es nicht mehr. Aber ich erinnere mich noch, enttäuscht gewesen zu sein. Von ihr hätte ich mehr Genusssucht erwartet. Aber vielleicht geht das nicht anders, wenn man täglich mehrere Dutzend Weine probieren (und spucken) muss, beginnend vor dem ersten Zähneputzen, wenn der Geschmackssinn noch gänzlich unbelastet ist. Wird der Genuss zum Beruf, ist die Hölle meist nicht weit.

Ich selbst probiere auch gerne, aber nicht zu oft. Ausufernde Proben verleiden mir alles. Ich trinke lieber. Und manchmal saufe ich auch gerne. Beides tue ich ohne jede Reue, weil ich mir Grenzen auferlege. Ein richtiges Gelage oder vielleicht auch an zwei oder drei Abenden  hintereinander genieße ich in vollen Zügen, weil ich mich auf die Abstinenz danach freue. Vier Tage ohne am Stück, die ich mir jede Woche nehme, sind dazu da, meine Akkus wieder aufzuladen und Lust auf das nächste Glas zu wecken.

Trinke ich eine Woche durch (ja, ja, ist auch schon vorgekommen), verliere ich zunehmend die Lust. Am vierten Abend schmeckt es mir nicht mehr so wie am ersten oder zweiten. Und der Rausch wird lästig.

Wenn ich zweimal im Jahr jeweils knapp drei Wochen keinen Wein oder sonstigen Alkohol anrühre, dann ist das eine Zeit der Besinnung. Ich werte die Weingenüsse und –erfahrungen der letzten Zeit aus und überlege, was mir wirklich wichtig ist. Denn es ist doch so: Trinke ich regelmäßig, brauche ich ständig einen neuen Kitzel. Über den Wachauer Winzer F. X. Pichler habe ich mal die Anekdote gehört, er trinke in seinem Urlaub jeden Abend eine Flasche seines Spitzenweins „Unendlich“. Auch so stelle ich mir die Hölle vor. Ich dagegen lasse es nach dem komplexen, introvertierten Moselriesling gerne mal richtig krachen und greife zum Killer-Juice aus dem Barossa Valley. Oder suche in meinem Keller nach einem Wein, den ich ewig nicht getrunken habe. Vielfalt und Gegensätze ziehen mich an. Ich bin verwöhnt und mein Keller oder der meiner Freunde lässt mich selten im Stich. Aber manchmal doch. Dann sitze ich über irgendwelchen Listen, überlege, worauf ich Lust haben könnte und finde nichts. Meine Genussfähigkeit befindet sich dann im Zustand der Abnutzung – höchste Zeit für eine Pause.

Vielleicht ist das der Moment, der manchen Connaisseur dazu treibt, sich an einem oxidativen Naturwein zu erfreuen. Neue Welten tun sich auf, Gedankengebäude werden schmeckbar. Ich faste da lieber.

Kurz vor Ende einer Fastenzeit überlege ich, was ich am ersten Abend trinken will. Eine sehr lustvolle Beschäftigung. Meistens ist es der introvertierte, komplexe Moselriesling. Oft gehe ich dann in Berlin ins Weinstein und beginne mit einem Glas Riesling „Molaris L“ vom Weingut Karlsmühle (Mertesdorf/Ruwer). Ein Riesling, der mir eine Geschichte erzählt. Einfach, aber saugut.

Posted in @deutsch | Comments Off on OFF von Frank Ebbinghaus

New York Riesling Diary: Day 31 – My American Wine Year Already Began

Posted on January 1, 2015 by Stuart

This is the first blog posting I’ve written straight into this slot without any plan for some time, and it sure feels good to be shooting from the hip again. Normally, I’m very cautious of using military or firearm metaphors, but this one fits my subject today (this first day of the so-called New Year of 2105) perfectly, because it’s so fundamentally American, and this really is My American Wine Year.

In fact, My American Wine Year began several months ago after I finished work on BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story (Stewart, Tabori & Chang) / PLANET RIESLING (the German language edition from Tre Torri ). At that point it occurred to me that many of my best stories had either never been written down at all, or at least had never been told in English. Furthermore, nearly all of them took place in America, or had obvious American subjects. They span the entire period from my first eye-popping encounter with the US of A back in 1985, through many years of serious research and some serious craziness along the way, right up to the present. That’s the period during which wine entered mainstream American culture, the US became the world’s biggest wine consuming nation, and its entrepreneurial creativity eclipsed that of almost every competing wine producing nation.

That strikes me as a dynamite combo, and – what good luck! – the ideal basis for an outrageously true book about wine in America. Some new research will be necessary, but not so much that this new year I’ll have to be on the road for months at a go. However, I will be getting as close as possible, not only to the vines and cellars, but most importantly to my human subjects. This method is often called Gonzo Journalism, although you can just as well describe it as off-road deep-immersion, but whatever name you give it, this is the kind of searching for the truth and writing about it that I naturally gravitate to. To my mind, the best book anyone can possibly write is the one that converts their life directly into pages of text, and my goal with this project I’m calling #CBL is to do exactly that with myself immersed in Wine America big time.

It’s a little more than two years since I began spending a lot of time in the US both to intensively research the dramatic recent Riesling developments here (and in Canada) and to write BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH from an American perspective. Along the way I encountered a slew of exciting new wines made from other grape varieties, and many of the winemakers and vineyard locations responsible for them located were way outside the American Wine Box. None of these discoveries was more surprising and exciting than Arizona, which I visited in 2013 and ’14.

The usual reaction from Americans when  I mention of vineyards in Arizona is, “it’s way too hot for vines! That’s the desert!” Of course, Phoenix is one of the hottest places in the US and much of Arizona is desert, but this is nowhere near the whole story as the photograph taken by Maynard James Keenan of Caduceus Cellars and Merkin Vineyards in Jerome/AZ today shows. The press trip to Arizona’s vineyards which he, a group of colleagues and Dada PR man David Furer organized in Mid-November was a turning point for my project. Not only did I write some of my best stories for this blog (scroll down and click on “older posts”), it also give me another great subject, and with that the basic plan for the book took much clearer shape. The serious work had begun, and that was seriously exciting: exactly the combination I look for.

Official Warning! : I just completed the first chapter of #CBL and it isn’t only outrageous, but dangerous too. Don’t worry though, this year you won’t be in acute danger, because I won’t complete the manuscript before the last days of August. That means it will be  a bit more than a year until it gets out into the big wide world in the form of print on paper an e-book where it can finally cause some real trouble. Then it will carry a parental advisory sticker to prevent harm being done to impressionable young people. The book will be a white-knuckle ride for adult readers and I feel responsible for young people, who are also the wine drinkers of the future. They may have to wait a bit longer to enjoy to the full.

Happy New Year!

 

Posted in Home, STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL | Comments Off on New York Riesling Diary: Day 31 – My American Wine Year Already Began