#RieslingRoadTrip Diary: Day 4 – Cinderella, Apollo and the American Dream of Riesling

I’m putting a brave face on it in this photo, but yesterday I suffered massive sensory overload and my nervous system came close to complete meltdown when Riesling Road Trip 2 visited the Kennedy Space Centre (KSC) then The Magic Kingdom in Disney World. “Everything here is a kind of optical illusion,” our driver Mike perceptively commented at KSC, which could obviously also be applied to Disney World. What does all this have to do with German Riesling? Well, KSC and Disney World are aspects of the contemporary American Dream and if America is to fully embrace Riesling (it doesn’t yet realize how close it is to doing that), then Americans will have to integrate Riesling dreaming into their existing dreaming.

The most striking thing about KSC was how much the visitor centre is a history museum. Not only Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, but also the Space Shuttle are all now clearly history. Since that program ended America has had no means of putting a man in space and is currently reliant on Russian technology to do that. “Failure is not an Option,” was one of NASA’s  slogans. Ouch! KSC tries to put a positive spin on this embarrassing sign of weakness. “The Space Shuttle program personifies what a great people can do, and provides a glimpse of the greatness that lies ahead,” stood in large letters on the wall right in front of me as I entered the exhibit centered around the Atlantis Space Shuttle. Sure, KSC is currently retooling for the next generation of space craft and the return to manned space flight by America. However, I don’t see anything that is currently in the planning that might generate a similar excitement to that I experienced as a child during the Apollo program. To this day the Saturn 5 moon rocket remains the most complex piece of technology ever constructed! And it was that excitement I re-experienced at the KSC. It reminded me of how Sean O’Keefe of Chateau Grand Traverse in Northern Michigan compared his Riesling exploration on the Old Mission Peninsula with the American space program of our childhood (we’re the same generation). That might seem an inappropriate comparison for German Riesling, because Riesling’s recorded history in Germany goes back to 1435, but if you look at how regions like Rheinhessen totally reinvented themselves during the last decade I think it is also an appropriate metaphor. Riesling winemakers in Germany are also reaching out for new worlds of aroma and flavor.

Our original plan was that we should have dinner in Cinderella’s Palace in The Magic Kingdom, but since they don’t serve alcoholic beverages and it is thus a Riesling-free zone (they do serve tea and coffee so it is not a stimulant-free zone!) we decided to shift our focus. That was fine by me, because coming from a country with real princesses I don’t feel the need to meet pseudo-princesses. Perhaps, that’s also why I found it bizarre that the street which leads to Cinderella’s Castle was called Main Street U.S.A. I never saw a main street in America which looked even vaguely like that collection of knock-offs of late 19th century European-style buildings. Why fantasize that Main Street U.S.A. could look like this piece of so very un-American history? Does that very American feeling of inadequacy about the nation’s history – Europe’s history typically being perceived as both older and better – lie behind this, or have I utterly failed to understand America?

Either way, I was knocked out  by the two rides I went on, ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean’ and ‘It’s a Small World’ which were like being in 3D realizations of Disney movies. ‘It’s a Small World’ swept me away, because it reminded me vividly of seeing ‘Fantasia’ as a small child in a huge movie theatre in London’s West End and being completely seduced by that fantasy world; the movie’s title says it all. German Riesling fits into that dimension of American Dreaming unexpectedly neatly. Let’s face it, Walt Disney’s Cinderella’s Castle is a knock off of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria that takes all the elements of that 19th century fantasy castle and pushes them to the limit. What other wine could Cinderella drink in that castle – assuming alcoholic beverages were allowed – but sweet Riesling Spotless from a real wine castle on the Rhine? I think the abbey of Kloster Eberbach in the Rheingau comes closest to an architectural match, in which case the wine would have to be from their monopoly Steinberg vineyard. Alternatively, Maximin Grünhaus in the Ruwer sub-region of the Mosel may look a bit different, but always struck me as being like a fairytale castle. On top of this, Riesling is the Cinderella of wine grapes and, as I wrote in BEST WHITE WINE ONE EARTH (#BWWOE), Cinderella is now going to the ball!
We were still talking about the downside of the experience this morning over breakfast, most notably how we all had to give Disney a fingerprint (right forefinger) before entering. Don’t get me wrong. I was happy to give the US government all my fingerprints in the cause of national security, but Disney? A corporation who’s raison d’être is profit maximization? I have nothing to hide, my credit-rating could hardly be better, I was never arrested much less charged with anything criminal in any country, but it still left a nasty aftertaste in my mouth. However, we’re now en route to Savannah/Georgia, a city I never visited before, but already heard so much about and I can’t wait to experience this piece of the Deep Riesling South.