Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

There’s nothing I enjoy more than mixing old friends with new friends and Berlin is one of the best places on Planet Riesling for that, because here it can lead absolutely anywhere as the picture above shows. Pictured left is on old friend who wishes to remain anonymous because he turned into a Riesling Monster in front of our eyes, and right is my new friend Peter Barry from Jim Barry Wines in Clare Valley/South Australia. Peter Barry has a reputation for “bad” behavior including speaking truths that other winemakers won’t publicly acknowledge. I’d finally got to know Peter Barry properly during the International Riesling Symposium in the Rheingau where he’d pointed out that Riesling’s strong niche status and limited mainstream success means that big Australian wine companies did not and are not developing wines from my favorite grape on the basis of the Nielsen sales figures (as they clearly are and have with other grape varieties like Shiraz and Chardonnay). Then I bumped into him on the ICE train from Frankfurt to Berlin the next day and invited him, his wife and a friend to join us in Weinstein, the best wine bar of East Berlin.

The new friends I’d reckoned with were two Finger Lakes/NY winemakers, Kelby Russell (left) of Red Newt in Hector and Bob Madill (right) one of the founders of Sheldrake Point and now consults for several wineries in the region. It was Bob’s cellphone that captured the Berlin Riesling Monster’s appearance. In this picture of mine he and Kelby are seated in a corner table of the Kurpfalz Weinstuben, the best wine bar in West Berlin. We talked a lot about history and the way it gets a stranglehold on the present if you don’t face it squarely, something our home countries (the UK in my case, the US in Kelby’s case and Canada in Bob’s) haven’t been good at in recent years. We also faced some recent dry Riesling history, the enormously vibrant 2009 ‘Turm’ from Riffel in Bingen-Büdesheim/Rheinhessen, the mellow yet refreshing 2008 Saumagen ‘KT’ (Kabinett trocken) from Koehler-Rupprecht in Kallstadt/Pfalz and the distinguished and mysterious 2005 Berg Rottland from Georg Breuer in Rüdesheim/Rheingau. Of course, by “faced” I mean that we drank them. That Riesling History has become part of us and will through us it will alter the Riesling Future.

Sadly, those winemakers are now all birds that have flown, but I know I’ll see them all again quite soon, because they are members of the unofficial Global Riesling Network. You too can join by purchasing my new book BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story (Stewart, Tabori & Chang from June 17th) or by using the hashtag #BWWOE on the so-called social media.

Rumors are always a bit ugly, because nobody can control them, and this time is no exception. Suddenly there’s such a swarm of them flying around New York Wine City (NYWC) that I feel like I could swat them until the walls were running with bug juice, but it wouldn’t make a darned bit of difference. Somebody just said that somebody had told them (that’s the way you know it’s a rumor) that I’ve written something in my new book – ‘BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story’ – that will get me into very serious trouble, that is the kind of trouble nobody can slither out of. This person, who shall remain nameless in order to spare me yet more trouble, was utterly convinced of that and nothing I could say – wine is a just a beverage and with 1% of global wine production Riesling is hardly the most important beverage on Planet Wine – could sway them one iota. Although they couldn’t tell me what this terrible thing I’d written was, they were nonetheless convinced that doom and destruction were on the march and headed in my direction.

What can I to do? The book’s been printed and is in the warehouse of my publisher Abrams Books of New York (it appears under their imprint Stewart, Tabori & Chang on June 17^th) and there is no way they’re going to reprint it  – the expense would be considerable – on the basis of what they will rightly deem gossip and hearsay. I feel sure I’ve done nothing wrong, but for some reason I still feel like I’m hanging on the edge of a precipice. Maybe that’s because I’ve been here before, by that I don’t mean in NYWC, rather this situation. Back in 1994-5 my first German language book whipped up a storm of controversy. There was a civil suit seeking enormous damages and the winegrower behind it (no names mentioned) also got a criminal investigation into my work started, although this was dropped almost immediately. That was an ugly moment though.

As I was I’ve been reading and rereading my advance copy of the book trying to figure out which page, paragraph or sentence it is that’s supposed to be dump me in the crapper, another rumor came to my attention. Some people in NYWC are spreading the story that the reason I wrote a book about Riesling is that it’s the only subject I can write about, because I can’t taste other wines in a professional manner. Any regular visitors to this site know that I’m actually interested in everything happening Planet Wine, and taste the greatest possible variety of wines, red white, rose, sweet, dry, oaky, orange and whatever. My belief in the importance of this diversity goes much deeper than my love of Riesling.

There is yet another rumor about BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH going around, and that is that it’s already available at Kitchen Arts & Letters on Lexington Avenue between 93^rd and 94^th street here on Manhattan. However, I didn’t have the time to check that out because I’m currently packing my bags to jump on a plane to Germany this afternoon. As usual, I’m not making any promises I can’t keep. That also means that the next posting won’t be online before late Tuesday, or possible even Wednesday. My apologies for that unavoidable gap, but on Monday and Tuesday I’m attending the International Riesling Symposium at Schloss Reinhartshausen in the Rheingau. That will, of course be my next subject.

Here with one small correction – the time for the tasting on June 22nd.

Here, finally, is the program for the series of events immediately following the publication of BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story by Stewart, Tabori & Chang (an imprint of Abrams Books) on June 17th. I will also be circulating and mailing a printed version of this during the coming days. Where it says “by invitation only” there’s always an email address which you can write to and if you have a good enough reason why we should admit you, then you will get a seat at the table. Please understand that for the two events at Hotel Delmano there is very limited seating and we must give somms first shout for them. There is still some planning to do for all the above, but all the basics have been covered. The Riesling Show is coming to New York Wine City!

PS Many thanks to all those who are making this possible!

Did you see us or this bizarre vehicle somewhere, somehow between Monday, May 5th in Key West/FL and May 16th in New York Wine City (NYWC)??? Above is my first glimpse of our Riesling Whale – my nickname for our bizarre vehicle – when I arrived in Key West on the first of those dates to meet up with the RRT2 team. It really is very hard to miss us if we pass you on the road or if the Riesling Whale is sitting in the same parking lot as your car. Wines of Germany USA are the only people around who have something like this, as some of you know, because you’ve been in the belly of the Riesling Whale with us.

This second Riesling Road Trip was rather easier than the first one back in June 2014, when we drove from Venice Beach/LA to NYWC in just 9 days, which required one thru the night drive of 25 hours from Phoenix/AR to Austin/TX. Sure, this years trip was also a serious piece of work, and that’s how we all treated it, but we wouldn’t have signed up for roles in this Road Movie if we didn’t all love Riesling & Co.

We reached out to many hundreds of enthusiastic Riesling fans and converted a many of you who were long attracted to German Riesling (also Spätburgunder, Silvaner, Weissburgunder and Scheurebe), but were hesitant. We couldn’t cure everyone out there who’s suffering from Riesling Deprivation Syndrome (RDS), because we are regular guys and gals, not wine superheroes. On the plus side, along the way many beautiful things that we didn’t seek out suddenly wandered into our field of vision, like these birds at gas station we were refueling in Florida. We won’t forget either them or the German Riesling & Co. fans in a hurry.

For the child in me, seeing the Saturn V moon rocket at the Kennedy Space Center was one of the highlights of the trip. No less than the Disney cartoons I loved as a child, Nixon’s visit to China and the Watergate scandal on TV, it helped shape my image of America. It strikes me that with the appearance of the cool Jungwinzer or young winegrowers and their innovative wines, German Riesling fits into America’s success culture better than it did back then. Importers: we need more of these wines in the US!

OK, I didn’t to meet Mickey at Disney World/FL, but that didn’t alter or diminish an important aspect of the message we were bearing. Yes, German wine can be subtle and sophisticated, but it is often just great fun to drink. Riesling Road Trip 2 confirmed my conviction that Riesling has no problem fitting in with the exuberant, in-your-face, fun-loving aspect of America, as expressed at Myrtle Beach/SC in the picture below. There’s still plenty of work to be done to inform the many Americans who still think it is just a sweet, foreign beverage that it is so much more than that!

My apologies that I find it impossible to pick a single image which adequately conveys either the historic beauty of Savannah/GA and Charleston/SC, or the rapidly developing food and wine culture of the Southeast. For that reason I picked an image of a German wine I discovered while I was there. I already knew some of the top wines produced by Jungwinzer Stefan Meyer of Rhodt/Pfalz, but was completely amazed by his basic dry Silvaner bottled in Liters (roughly a quart). It is a joyful, but modestly priced wine!

Maybe I’ve been a little bit unlucky with Washington DC. I always enjoy my visits, but these brief glimpses were never enough for me to connect with the city emotionally. However, I have realized – like the city’s inhabitants – that you can eat and drink well there, also without throwing a ton of money out of the window. The Riesling Spirit seems to have bonded with DC, even if I haven’t yet. I will try again until I succeed.

As you can see from the above photo towards the end of Riesling Road Trip 2 heavy clouds rolled up and just a few hours after this picture was taken it began to rain heavily. Thankfully this didn’t hold us up to much, but it literally dampened the spirits of those we had invited to be our guests. Riesling rightly has the image of being a spring and summer wine, but choose well and there are wines which also work in driving rain like that in which I photographed our two drivers, Mike (left) and Danny (right). Without them we wouldn’t have rolled so effortlessly northwards, but they also entertained us and sometimes challenged us with unexpected thoughts. When you’re on the road as much as we were it’s important to laugh and you’ve got the time to do some serious thinking. Thank you guys!

During Riesling Road Trip 2 I finally gained something approaching an overview of the Southeast of the US and I realized that it is a natural match with Riesling’s profoundly refreshing personality. It ought to be one of the best markets in the world for German Riesling and this will not be the last time I visit these states with that message. Thank you everyone who took us seriously enough to come along and enjoyed!

It’s hardly original to suggest that lobster loves Riesling, but back in Europe lobster is generally a luxury food and saying that could be interpreted as an elitist statement. Here in the land of the lobster roll that isn’t necessarily the case. Pictured above is the lobser roll (with red beats and goat cheese) that was my lunch yesterday at the Thames Oyster House in Baltimore/MD. It was the most delicious lobster roll I ever had, not only because the lobster meat was perfectly cooked, but also because that roll had a delicately sweet taste and a wonderful texture that made the whole damn near perfect. What was missing? Only a glass of medium-dry Riesling feinherb  from the Mosel, Nahe or Mittelrhein regions. That would have been an electrifying combination and if carefully chosen the wine would not have turned the whole into a luxury food experience. Feeling slightly disappointed by not being able to enjoy that combo we headed off to DC.

Just a few blocks from the Capitol we had a totally different lobster experience at the James Beard Award winning Rasika Restaurant which has the finest Indian food I’ve eaten in the US. The lobster dish is the one in the late white bowl in the middle of the table. Thanks to somm Simon Stilwell there’s a great Riesling list here, most of it German. The 2012 Graacher Himmelreich Riesling Kabinett form J.J. Prüm in the Mosel was just perfect with that lobster in its creamy sauce with a gentle spicy warmth thanks to its great balance and enormous vitality. That’s a combination it would (sadly) be extremely difficult to experience in the many fine restaurants in India as that nation’s burgeoning hi-end gastronomic culture has yet to discover what German Riesling can do for their food.

Our tasting yesterday evening was outside Plume Restaurant in the Jefferson Hotel and for the first time on this Riesling Road Trip it rained and our whale got wet. The group of somms and distributors inside were OK though because of the angle the rain struck the container, but water was running down the outside of the metal grill that covers most of the “open” side. In the steamy heat of DC, which the rain didn’t make any better, the 2012 Leiwener Klostergarten Riesling Kabinett from Carl Loewen, also Mosel, really shone. I’m beginning to understand how well this category of German wine fits this climate. Medium-sweet they are, which is one of the least sexy wine descriptors going, but the taste under these conditions is seriously sexy!

PS Riesling Road Trip 2 is fast approaching it’s end in New York Wine City. It may take me a day or two, but after I return to NYWC I will write one more story that about our adventures that tries to draw conclusions about what we experienced. Be patient and watch this Riesling Space!

I’d been to the Southeast of the US several times before, but to be frank I didn’t really get it until Riesling Road Trip 2 forced me to spend a long week in this part of the country that I realized what makes it special and fell in love with it. I found that there was much truth in the clichés of Southern charm and hospitality, for example at our Riesling & Co. dinner at Petit Pois Restaurant in Charlottesville/VA pictured above. We were not nonly made very welcome, there was also great openness for our message, and almost everyone who attended our events enjoyed the wines to the full without any trace of hesitation. For all these reasons, I will be returning, probably in early December.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not idealizing this world. Savannah/GA is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve seen anywhere, but I can well understand how the city got the nickname Slowvannah. It clearly has a lot of catching up to do if it wants to match the blossoming gastronomic culture of Charleston/SC. There the downside was the way the tourists dominate parts of Downtown such as the Market Steets (North and South). I have to admit that apart from enjoying dinner at Poole’s Restaurant and our two trade tastings in Raleigh/NC I didn’t see much of the city, but the spirit (a combination of hedonism and professional curiosity) at those tastings delighted me. That is really the Riesling Spirit, and when you consider that the range of German Rieslings obtainable in the cities we visited is rather limited the wines have clearly connected with a good number of people already; another reason to return. How many more places are there like the Social Wine Bar in Charleston? I don’t know. I could only stop there for an hour, but managed to consume a big glass of 2011 Riesling Kabinett from J.J. Prüm in the Mosel with crispy shrimp spring rolls; a delicious combo that perfectly expressed the contemporary gastronomic spirit of that city. The cost? Just shy of $20 plus tax. The atmosphere? Relax, don’t do it!

Of course, being a good distance north of the Mason-Dixon line our stop last night, Baltimore/MD, doesn’t qualify as part of the South, even if at the beginning of the Civil War there were a lot sympathizers for the South there. To this day, at least on the gastronomic level, Baltimore has as much to do with the South as the North as our trade tasting yesterday evening confirmed. There is something unashamedly sweet and/or fatty about so much Southern Food, and the many variations on this theme combine beautifully with medium-dry and medium-sweet German Rieslings. That’s a no-brainer, also was at Baltimore’s Fleet Street Kitchen where we had dinner before our tasting.

PS We’re now en route back south to Washington DC, although part of the team is slightly delayed by an appointment with the Baltimore Police. Honestly, we didn’t do anything more last night than enjoy a glass or two of good German wine (as at the picture above proves). However, some idiot drove into the vehicle that pulls our Riesling Whale while it was on a Downtown parking lot last night, denting it slightly. If this is the worst that happens during 12 long action-packed days on the Riesling Road, then I’d say we were lucky, and maybe the cops didn’t always have their eyes open!

Everyone knows this image, because this view of Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello/VA is on back of every Nickel (the US 5 cent coin). However, if you’ve never been there then neither that nor anything else can prepare you for the experience of visiting this astonishingly well preserved home of one of the great movers and shakers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In spite of all the differences between them, it reminded me of visiting Goethe’s house in Weimar (they were contemporaries, and although Goethe was less of a politician and more of a writer than Jefferson both were polymaths and room-filling personalities).  Jefferson plays a much more important role for the contemporary sense of American national identity than Goethe does for Germans. Of course, the reason for this is that Jefferson drafted the American Declaration of Independence, which is one of the world’s most important political documents.

I’m a Brit, but certain lines of that document were etched into my memory during high school history lessons back in the early 1970s, the approaching American Bicentennial having temporarily changed the history curriculum at my school. “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they reendowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”  (If I got it right, these are the exact words of his daft, rather than the final text unanimously passed by Congress on July 4th 1776). Much later, I became aware of the fact that for Jefferson the pursuit of happiness also meant wine, and that during the late 1780s when he was the American ambassador to France he travelled to the Rhine and was greatly impressed by the Riesling wines he tasted there. That was the official reason for Riesling Road Trip’s visit to Monticello.

After he became the third President of the United States in 1800 Jefferson became a kind of unofficial ambassador for wine and culinary culture in the new republic, something he continued after his retirement to Monticello in 1809. His typical daily wine consumption was three or four glasses with dinner. In his dining room there was equipped with a wine dumb waiter which hoisted fresh wine bottles from the cellar and the empties back down. Unfortunately, photography isn’t allowed in the dining room, but pictured above left is the (recently restored) wine cellar.  There was also a cellar where wine bought in cask was bottled, and a separate beer cellar. The kitchen, pictured right was very modern for its time. The food prepared here was described by Daniel Webster in 1824 as, “half Virginian, half French in style, in good taste and abundance.” There is no trace of puritanism in any of this, much less of the American temperance movement that only developed after Jefferson’s death on July 4th 1826. Jefferson was against drunkenness though, in fact he saw promoting wine consumption as the answer to this problem.

Something which impressed me very much about Monticello is that while this is some kind of national shrine (how could it not be that given the man’s achievements?) Jefferson’s personality is presented without conscious idealization, and the contradictory aspects of his thinking and behavior haven’t been air-brushed out. The most important of these was his long-term sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, one of the roughly 130 slaves he owned (over his entire lifetime he owned about 600 slaves). Genetic analysis of her descendants makes it look certain that he fathered her four children. In some respects, this inter-racial relationship looks very modern and was clearly a fore-runner of a vital aspect of contemporary America. However, Sally Hemings was not one of the seven slaves that Jefferson freed during his lifetime. That isn’t so easy to square with, “all men are created equal,” and also might be considered to contradict Jefferson’s modernism in so many other areas of life. It reminds us that nothing in this world is entirely black or white (no pun intended), and this simple observation that is as old as the hills is also part of the Riesling Spirit. The BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH peacefully co-exists with all the other wines on the planet, and is an example to us all.

For more information go to: http://www.monticello.org

PS My condolences to the Faller family of Kaysersberg/Alsace. Domaine Weinbach’s winemaker Laurence Faller  just died of what appears to be a heart attack. She was just 47. When I return to New York Wine City I will drink a bottle of Domaine Weinbach’s Riesling Grand Cru Schlossberg “Cuvée Ste. Catherine” in her memory. RIP

I am not a restaurant critic, because after once trying testing for one of the big restaurant guides I realized it was one of those 95% total boredom, 5% excitement jobs. However, here I am (temporarily) back on that job, because yesterday evening in Charleston/SC I had one of the most remarkable meals of my entire life. The last experience which altered the way I think about food was at Noma in Copenhagen in early 2010, just before it was voted the best restaurant in the world by a global jury for the first time. That’s why I’m making this abrupt change of plan.

Yesterday the Riesling Road Trip 2 event in Charleston didn’t require my presence before 9:30pm and after writing a newspaper column in the morning I decided to spend some time exploring the incredibly beautiful old town (more on that subject in a later posting). Suddenly, just after 5pm I found myself standing in the late 18th century Unity Alley in front of McCrady’s Restaurant and all kinds of bells went off in my head. How could I have failed to register that Sean Brock’s restaurant was here? How could I have failed to realize that I might have the time to visit it? So I stepped into the glazed in courtyard that is the reception area and bar and gingerly asked the receptionist if I could sit at the bar and have a snack (they offer a plate of snacks for $20), and when she said that would be no problem I asked if I could have a full meal (four courses for $65). “Sure,” she replied. It was my lucky day.

I ordered quickly and while I was reading the marvelous wine list (including German wines beginning with ‘Eins, Zwei, Dry’ Riesling from Leitz in the Rheingau for $10 and ascending to the 2011 Hermannshöhle Riesling ‘GG’ from Dönnhoff in the Nahe for $122) I realized just how little I knew about Sean Brock. However, this turned out to be a serious advantage, because it meant that my dinner was wave after wave of flavors and textures which the gastronomic me surfed on a longboard of euphoria.

In essence, the first dish was green salad, that is a cucumber and green strawberry salad. Yes, strawberry as a vegetable next to rather normal bitter greens and my old friends the sliced radish and cucumber, here both marinated (familiar) and dehydrated and ground to an astonishingly aromatic green powder (unfamiliar). The freshness of the dish was ratcheted up by the lemon balm and sorrel vinaigrette, and one of the lightest ricottas I ever tasted adding the only sense of weight. Pansies never looked more beautiful than on this ravishing plate. A vision of spring that awakens memories of springs past!

Not only the fava beans in the second dish reminded me of my maternal grandfather, also the trout. He was as talented a fisherman as he was a gardener, and the fruits of both were combined on this plate. Here the astonishing thing was the “sauce” based on juiced fava bean leaves, which came close in taste to my first experience of macha, the green tea served in the Japanese tea ceremony. That was the only other thing I ever experienced which tasted this spectacularly green. It was a great contrast to the sweetness of the beans , the trout (particularly the parts which had browned slightly during cooking), and the parsnip cream under them. The wild bay foam added a delicacy the dish would otherwise have lacked, but I feel this description despite my attempt at precision communicates this micro-cosmos of flavor rather inadequately.

Often the third course of a meal like this – what many people would call the entree – fails to excite as much as the dishes which preceded it, because the chef feels obliged to, “give the customer what he wants”, or is obsessed with making some kind of statement about how gastro-macho he is. But Sean Brock obviously doesn’t feel that he has anything to prove and applied the same creative combination of ingredients and preparations to this duo of lamb (pan-fried, i.e. cooked fast plus pot-roated, i.e. cooked slow). The “layer cake” of wilted Dandelion leaves and shiitake mushrooms topped with flowers and sprouted grains was literally breathtaking in itself (the textural contrasts were something else!), but more importantly it provided a stunning foil for the lamb.

By this point I was reeling with delight, and looking back from this distance it strikes me that I never enjoyed dining alone as much as I did yesterday. To be fair, this was also because the barman (thanks Morton) and the woman from Michigan dining alone to my right (thanks Christie) provided as much company as I needed. I then paused to devour the bread, but I will report on that another time in my series ‘The Story of Peter Klann’.

All the sweet stuff at the end of fancy dinners (I think that description is often fair) usually leaves me completely cold and hinders digestion, but the parfait of grits hidden under this crisp and delicate chip swimming in a rose-scented liquor made form juiced geraniums was a creamy-dreamy end to the meal. That is until I tasted that blob of dewberry on that chip, which was outrageously aromatic and intense; another taste experience that was completely new for me. All of this for just $65; totally amazing!

For all of those who are wondering, this was an extremely Riesling-friendly series of dishes, although for the lamb would demand something mature and muscular like the 1991 Hochheimer Hölle Spätlese from Schloss Schönborn we poured at our evening tasting in the belly of Riesling Whale parked in front of Husk restaurant, another Sean Brock establishment. The small, but extremely interested group of somms, included Cappie Peete, the outrageously young (for what she does) wine director responsible for that great list at McCrady’s. For further information see:

http://mccradysrestaurant.com

PS we are now en route to Raleigh/NC, named after the failed British colonizer of North America Sir Walter Raleigh, one of my childhood heroes.