Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

Yes, for those of you who are familiar with German TV, that is Thomas Gottschalk sitting next to me. I should have posted this photo of our meeting in the great Berlin wine bar ‘Weinstein’ right after it happened, but I misplaced the photo in a fit of forgetfulness. Last night I walked into the great Berlin Chinese restaurant ‘Hot Spot’ and there was Joschka Fischer (sorry no photo this time), the ex-foreign minister of Germany. Not only did he do a great job then, he’s also a real expert on German and many other wines. He had something important to say to me too. He must be one of very few people who read my recent Riesling book BEST WHITE WINE ONE EARTH (English language edition by Stewart, Tabori & Chang) and PLANET RIESLING (German language edition by Tre Torri Verlag) in both languages. “Mr. Pigott, I much prefer the English language edition,” he said, “the design is much better.” This reminded me to hunt for the lost Thomas Gottschalk picture and, miraculously, I almost immediately found it. It doesn’t look so bad either. By the way, Gottschalk was impressed by the house dry Riesling at ‘Weinstein’, called ‘Schlank im Shrank”, Lean in the Closet, which is produced by the Karlsmühle estate on the Ruwer.

Finding the above photo reminded me that Gottschalk is good friends with Germany’s current number one TV anchor, Günther Jauch, the owner of the von Othegraven estate on the Saar, and one of the region’s top Riesling producers (for dry and sweet wines). A couple of years back the WEINWUNDER DEUTSCHLAND, Wine Wonder Germany, TV team and I shot an interview with Günther Jauch at von Othegraven during which the photo above was taken. From left to right are Jauch’s wife Thea Sihler, Günther Jauch, von Othegraven’s winemaker Andreas Barth (also of the Lubenitushof estate in the Terrassenmosel) and myself. Now this might all seem like showing off, but what these photos say to me is that on a good night I’m an passable foil for these real stars; at best I’m almost famous.

I still don’t know what I was waiting for / And my time was running wild…

I had to do a lot of work to this image to make it look like what it actually is, an old photo of Rod Stewart and David Bowie with a bottle that looks suspiciously like Blue Nun Liebfraumilch. It’s only recently that at least some rockstars have once again allowed themselves to be photographed with wine. This comes after a long period when it was considered very uncool for them to be seen with the drug made from grapes compared with the drugs made from leaves (cocaine) and flowers (cannabis), which they often waived around like big flags. That is, unless the rockstar in question had a record contrast that specified (s)he would never be seen using intoxicants of any kind in a public place. And if real rockstars did admit to liking wine, then it was always something very expensive and either French, Italian, or more recently Californian. The truth about their wine consumption was often (surprise, surprise!) very different from the image they projected. For example, I know that Madonna was a big fan of the powerful, medium-dry Riesling ‘Three Stars’ from Gunderloch in Rheinhessen/Germany, but Ms Erotica never acknowledged this publicly for fear of looking uncool and damaging her image of being dangerously sexy. In contrast, the movie actor and director Kevin Costner came out about loving Gunderloch’s ‘Three Stars’. He danced with wolves and with Riesling!

So, for a long time there was a huge gulf between what Rockstar Wine Guys (and Gals) were recommending and drinking themselves – they were nearly all seriously into Riesling! – and what Real Rockstars appeared to be drinking. This photo dates from before that period, that is from another era of cool. Thankfully, we seem to be moving back in the direction of the 1960s early 1970s when rockstars often had a wonderfully relaxed relationship with wine, and Riesling was something many of them did. And what Rieslings do today’s rockstars drink? Well, quite a few of them are fans of the wines from Martin Tesch of Langenlonsheim/Nahe in Germany, because Tesch is a big rock music fan, has many friends in the rock music world and took the trouble to introduce them and their friends to his bone dry Rieslings. I have to say, that every time I drink a glass of Tesch Riesling ‘Unplugged’ I get a jolt of energy like that which good rock music gives me. And when I taste one of his masterpieces, like the 2012 St. Remigiusberg, then the hairs on my arms stand up like they do when I hear the first chords of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.

Here we are now; entertain us / I feel stupid and contagious…

I just got off the plane from New York and I’m feeling a bit disorientated, which is my excuse for presenting this enigmatic image as proof that my Riesling Diary continues its twisting and turning path, now from Berlin for quite a while. Let me put you out of your misery though, the object pictured above is a hunk of glass I found in the garden of the house in suburban London where I grew up. I always loved gardening, and one day whilst digging in the garden 46 years ago I literally dug it up. I presume that it dates from the years when the house was under construction (1939-40), but that’s only a guess, because I really can’t explain how it came to be there. However, from the moment I held it under an outdoor tap and the cold water freed it from the dirt clinging to it to reveal these sharp and irregular contours I was fascinated by it, also attracted and repelled by it.

And that’s very much how I feel in Berlin this evening. I’m sitting at the desk in the shared apartment where I have a room and wonder what the hell I’m doing here, even though I can explain rather well how I got here. Of course, it is all part of my way of life oscillating between the twin poles of Berlin (my North / +) and New York (my South / – ), but also with my use of entirely legal (where purchased) medications to cope with the stress of intercontinental flights. While we passed over Ireland around 5am the turbulence was pretty extreme and some people in the plane were yelling and screaming in panic. But, I feel sure that this is far from being the whole truth. This kind of dislocation enables me, at least on days like this, to acutely see and feel some of the things nearly everybody else on the street takes for granted and are therefore blind to.

I know that it sounds too obvious to say, but here in Berlin it really is totally different to in New York City, and in ways that no New York Times correspondent will every be able to get into that newspaper (fear not, for I certainly don’t want to suggest that they don’t feel the same kinds of things as I do), because every publication has its explicit and implicit agendas that filter out exactly this kind of stuff. Who wants to pick up a newspaper and find an enigma with jagged edges like those of the hunk of  glass staring back at them? Not many people, but I’m damned if I’m going to let that fact alter the way I report anything I experience to you. Here it is, jagged edges ‘n’ all.

Pictured above is the junction of 2nd Avenue and East 7th Street in Manhattan where on Thursday afternoon a gas huge explosion lead to a fire that consumed three entire buildings, the ruins of which can be seen in the photo behind all the cops, Fire Dept vehicles and the red stop lights. Just 10 minutes before the explosion I’d driven by in a friend’s car, but this wasn’t the reason I had to visit the scene of this terrible accident that appears to have cost at least two people’s lives. I had to pay my respects to all that was lost that day. You see, this place really means something to me.

When I began coming to New York City for longer periods at the end of 2012 I stayed in a shared apartment on East 7th street just yards from this junction that the tenant Jürgen Fränznick nicknamed the ‘Hotel of Hope’. It was there that I wrote the first posting entitled ‘New York Riesling Diary’ late on November 26th, 2012. For almost a year my room at the Hotel of Hope felt like home, because it was the new somewhere that my hopes blossomed after that long period of depression I’d been unable to shake off at my old home in Berlin. When I woke on Tuesday, December 4th in my room at the Hotel of Hope I felt that an enormous weight that I’d been carrying for many months had dropped from my shoulders, and I began to become the person that I am today. Special thanks to Birgitta Böckeler (an even longer term member of the Hotel of Hope team) for the photograph below of my cooking buffalo steaks from Wild Idea in South Dakota.

I could write a lot about this part of Manhattan, but another writer has already said nearly all of it better than I could, so here’s the link to Sarah Larson’s excellent story in The New Yorker. There are just two things I would add to what she writes. The first is that the entire thing struck me as being like a miniature 9/11, except that this was an accident rather than terrorism. 2nd Avenue is still completely blocked off to traffic south of East 14th Street and this photo was taken as close as I could get to the scene of the disaster. The second thing is that just a few blocks from this intersection on East 12th Street between 1st Avenue and Avenue A was the original Terroir wine bar and this has now gone too, although not with a bang, but a whimper. It recently reopened as Fifty Paces and it looks good, but that loss cannot be replaced either. It was where my book BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story was conceived. Of course, New York is famously the eternal city of construction as well as of destruction, so what has gone will be replaced by something very different, but possibly no less positive. We will see.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/sarah-larson/the-east-village-fire-love-saves-the-day?intcid=mod-latest

Some stories absolutely demand the right photos before they are told, and those photos only arrive much later, then it can be difficult to use them for a blog posting, because blogging is theoretically all about the moment. OK, it’s now almost two months since I was in Singapore and the above photograph was taken of me (left) with “Iggy” or Ignatius Chen (middle) and Tan Ying Hsien (right). I was at Iggy’s Restaurant at The Hilton in Singapore on Tuesday, February 3rd for a Riesling dinner in honor of my book Best White Wine on Earth, but, to be frank, I forgot all about my book when the first dish was served. I expected that it would be a really good meal, because friends had told me about Iggy’s Restaurant, but the dinner that evening exceeded my expectations by leaps and bounds. One dish,  quail with mushrooms, lily bulbs and black truffles, was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever eaten, but the experience was remarkable even before I put the first forkful of food into my mouth. That’s why it still demands a blog posting.

This is what that dish looked like when it was brought to the table: a sealed transparent plastic bag in which broth was boiling because of the heat from the cast iron sizzle plate it was lying upon. That was already a mystery, because if the broth was so hot that it was boiling, then why didn’t that plastic bag melt? However, the overwhelming aroma of black truffle that escaped from the bags brushed this and all other questions aside. I never experienced a truffle smell that intense before, and it would have been worth the evening at Iggy’s just for that experience! Then the bags were opened and we began to eat a dish which had the most captivating contrasts of flavor and texture, yet was direct and uncomplicated too; a miraculous combination. Even the quantity of truffles used was modest, compared with how some fancy restaurants throw the stuff around in order to look important, and to pump up the bill.

With this unforgettable dish was served the 2012 Morstein Riesling GG from Weingut Wittmann, one of the most exciting dry Rieslings of that excellent vintage in Germany. I’ve tasted this wine many times, but never did it reveal its dark earthy secrets as it did on that evening. At the end of the evening I felt that I’d not only fully experienced black truffles for the first time, but also the Rieslings from the Morstein vineyard, although I’ve been tasting and drinking them for more than twenty years! That’s what happens when I hit the Riesling Trail and I get really lucky.

As I write this snow is billowing past the window although spring officially begins in just a few minutes. It makes me nostalgic for that evening in Singapore with Iggy, Ying, that amazing dish and beautiful wine! Many thanks to both of you for making that moment of revelation possible. Also thanks to Michael & Tina Thurner in Vienna and Unique Food and Wine in Singapore for organizing that dinner. Thanks Tina for the photos.

After KISTLER MY ASS (scroll down to see my previous blog posting)

is this now the ROCKY HORROR RIESLING SHOW ???

No way! These are just some of the nobly-rotten grapes from which Red Tail Ridge winery in the Finger Lakes (FLX) in Upstate New York made their sensational 2013 Riesling ‘907’, one of the best sweet white wines produced anywhere in America. And a 500ml bottle of this nectar costs only $29.99 from the winery!

The combination of FLX, Riesling and sweet on the label used to be a recipe for disaster. The problem was that only the least good grapes were used for these wines, and due to poor vineyard management that often meant the dregs. Any Riesling grapes that were reasonably ripe and clean were used for dry and medium-dry wines. Back in the Bad Old Days sweetness was used by many FLX winemakers as a kind of all-purpose Band Aid that would, to some limited degree, mask green acid, the murky flavor of non-noble rot and a multitude of other minor sins. However, there’s no way to hide the lack of attractive ripe aromas in Riesling; that leaves a hole no amount of sweetness can ever fill. So those wines were at best boring, at worst crude and cloying. No thanks!

My recent trip to the FLX hammered home how much has changed for the better and raised an important question: Why did the upswing in the quality of FLX dry and medium-dry Rieslings during the last couple of years receive such wide media coverage, but the transformation of the sweet FLX Rieslings got only a tiny fraction of those column inches and web pages? Because “sweet” is still a major turn-off for the older generation of male consumers many of whom cling to the dry wine gospel as if it were a life-saver and they were drowning men.

Few people in the wine industry, except for Tyler Balliet, the creator the Wine Riot phenomenon (see www.secondglass.com for more info), have succeeded in actively reaching out to the Millenials; a generation with none of the old-fashioned hang-ups about sweetness in wine. The reason you didn’t already hear about the stunning new sweet Rieslings is that most wine and food journalists belong to that older generation and are fixated on Germany for that wine style. Sure, Germany makes some amazing sweet Rieslings, but this is far from being the whole story.

Logically, the FLX ought to be an ideal location for sweet Riesling, because most years the grapes can hang long into the fall without losing the acidity needed to give sweet wines the laser-like brightness that makes them shine like diamonds. The wine growing challenge is to prevent rot of the non-noble kinds from destroying them before those great aromas develop. Recent research in the FLX by Imelda Ryona & Gavin L. Sacks of Cornell University has shown that most of the exciting Riesling aromas develop late to very late in the growing season. The lakes supply the necessary moisture for noble rot to develop, but noble rot is only really noble when it strikes grapes that are already ripe or slightly over-ripe. For Riesling “long hang time,” isn’t just a buzzword!

Given dry conditions after noble rot (the fungus Botrytis cinerea) infects ripe or over-ripe grapes, the fungus punctures the skin of every berry hundreds of times and water evaporates through those holes resulting in the berry shriveling, thus concentrating the aromas and flavors. Simultaneously enzymes released by the growing fungus transform hundreds of substances in the grape. In total, a “magical” transformation occurs and it worlds wonders with the Riesling grape. Even a little bit of this process makes elegant and moderately sweet “Spätlese-type” possible, and once the majority of the berries in each bunch have shriveled significantly the lusher and more honeyed “Auslese-type” are on the cards if the winemaker understands how to properly handle stuff looking like the first picture. (I use the German terminology for lack of anything better).

On my recent trip to the FLX I tasted some great Spätlese-type sweet Rieslings at Boundary Breaks (’11 and ‘14), Kemmeter (‘12) Red Newt (‘13 and ’14), and in the Auslese-type category Bellangelo (’14) Bloomer Creek (‘13), Kemmeter (’13) and Red Tail Ridge (’13), and this is not a complete list! Johannes Reinhardt of Kemmeter, pictured above, is the rising star in this field, although the first vintage for his new winery was 2012. Look for his spectacular 2013 ‘SanSan’, when it is released.

The one name missing from this list is Hermann J. Wiemer, but Fred Merwarth and Oskar Bynke are the masters of this style. Their Spätlese-type and Auslese-type Late Harvest Rieslings have been stunning since I first visited the winery back in fall 2004. Their 2013 and ’14 wines of these styles (from $24.50 per bottle at the winery) are spectacular and remain the benchmark for all other FLX winemakers. Clearly, Fred and Oskar, pictured below in their new combo tasting room and press-house, have now become a source of inspiration for many of their colleagues. Thankfully, none of those named above are trying to carbon-copy the Wiemer style, rather each is reaching out in their own direction. That, no less than the special climatic conditions, is what gives the new wines their originality.

Last, but not least, there remains some confusion about the role for these wines on the dining table. My experience is that even the lusher Auslese-type wines are rarely sweet enough to accompany dessert. However, with blue cheeses both the Spätlese-type and Auslese-type wines are spectacular, and if you put some blue cheese in your hamburger that would be a great combo too. The Spätlese-type Rieslings are also great with shrimp and vegetable tempura, or even fish and chips. And those are just the no-brainers!

For much more about sweet Riesling consult my BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story (pub. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, NYC, 2014).

I got some flak for writing the words Bullshit Chardonnay in my recent book ‘Best White Wine on Earth – The Riesling Story’ (Stewart, Tabori & Chang). Some people, including those of high intelligence with a well-developed sense of irony, didn’t appreciate the fact that I was not dismissing all dry white wines and sparkling wines made from the Charodnnay  grape, but was talking about Chardonnays that are too oaky, and/or too alcoholic, and/or too sweet and/or have no real Chardonnay character. Sadly, there’s an ocean of that kind of bullshit wine out there on liquor store shelves and on wine lists.

On the other hand, I love elegant and subtle Chardonnay. One of my favorite dry white wines in the entire world is the Mount Eden Estate Chardonnay from the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, and the Terroirs Blanc de Blanc Champagne from Agrapart is one of my favorite sparkling wines in the entire world. Today in New York Wine City (NYWC) was a day of dramatic Chardonnay contrasts, and I feel compared to share with you the most important of them. I know that there are a bunch of other people out there in NYWC and beyond who feel the same way as me, but mostly they’re whispering these things amongst themselves, because this is an opinion widely considered to be politically incorrect. One of them who knew he couldn’t be overheard put it bluntly, “Kistler sucks!” What I’m talking about is High-End Bullshit Chardonnay, that is expensive wines made from this grape with famous brand names on the label that suck. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of producers of this category and Kistler in Sonoma County/California is one.

Kistler describe themselves as “a small, family-established and privately owned and operated winery dedicated to the vinification of world class Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.” To underline this, on the front page of the website the only text is a quote from Robert Parker of The Wine Advocate, “If the Kistler Winery could be magically transported to the middle of Burgundy’s Côte d’Or, it would quickly gain a reputation as glorious as any producer of Brugundy grand crus.” Unfortunately, every time I tasted the Kistler Chardonnays during the last years including today in NYWC, I found them gruesomely oaky, lacking in charm and balance. The best way I can communicate to you how I feel about these wines is to ask you how you would feel if someone took one of Matisse’s richly colored  paintings and nailed some boards across it as is done with the windows of abandoned homes?

The problem with the Kistler Chardonnays is not only that claim to be world class, but the prices that go with it. www.wine-searcher.com gives the average retail price of the ‘Les Noisetiers’ Chardonnay from Kistler as $69. The 2013 vintage of this wine was the cheapest of the Kistler Chardonnays I tasted today, and the 2013 Vine Hill Chardonnay was the most expensive at $104 according to wine-searcher. Clearly, there are a bunch of people out there who feel different about these wines to me, or they wouldn’t sell so well, but to my mind they are caricatures of what the Kistler Chardonnays used to be back in the 1980s and early 1990s. No thank you!

Finally, we come to the wine pictured above, the 2013 Sonoma County Chardonnay from Lioco. This is a rather new California winery, just a shade under ten years old. I first encountered their wines about a year ago, and since then I’ve tasted and drunk them many times. However, today was the first time I experienced this, their cheapest Chardonnay. It is a vividly fresh wine with just a touch of creaminess and bright lemon and pear aromas that leap right out at you; a joyful Chardonnay that is screaming to be poured with dinner tonight! Wine-searcher gives the average price as $21, but it was no problem for me to find a source for this wine at $17.99. There is an alternative and it isn’t expensive!

“They call us New California,” Matt Licklider of Lioco said to me today, “but the irony is that we’re Old California. We’re making wines that are like those from before the Wine Spectator and Robert Park explosion hit the state.” There’s something to mull over, maybe also for the folks at Kistler.

You could say that writing how certain wine winemaking teams have done something for an entire region like the Finger Lakes (FLX) in Upstate New York is just stating the obvious: producing wine in any quantity in any wine region is always the work of more than one person. However, this argument ignores the fact that there are positive and negative teams. In the latter case energy is wasted, the initiative is lost and either practices that are detrimental to wine quality (and even profitability) are stupidly perpetuated, or a lot of random dumb shit happens. In contrast, the members of a positive team reinforce each others’ determination, hard work and creativity, lifting the quality of the wines and the appreciation of them out there in the Big Wide Wine World.

Shannon and Paul Brock, pictured above took over Silver Thread Vineyard back in the summer of 2011 and since then they have successfully reinvented the small and slightly eccentric (in the positive sense) winery that Richard Figiel founded. Just like his wines, theirs are daringly original and always need some time to show their best, however, they’re considerably more consistent in style and quality than Figiel’s wines were. Their quartet of single vineyard dry Rieslings from 2013 (current vintage) are just beginning to come into their best form; racy and mineral terroir wines of considerable subtlety.

The winemaking team of Kim Engle and Katy Koken at Bloomer Creek, pictured above, also work on the Eastern Shore of Seneca Lake and share the Brocks’ disdain for the way some wine producers throw chemicals around in the vineyard with too little concern for the consequences. However, here Katy is the “assistant vigneron” and Kim is the founder, or perhaps I should say the “inventor” of a daring wine style that emphasizes spice and texture, rather than bright fruit aromas and crisp acidity (the style that’s still the norm in FLX). Here, the wines get all the time they need to unfold before bottling, and the number of different lots of Riesling in the cellar is staggeringly large for a producer. More about these FLX Outer Limits wines will follow in the near future!

Bellangelo on the west bank of Seneca Lake has been around for a while, but under Chris Missick (centre) it has acquired a new dynamic that has just been shifted up a couple of gears by the appointment of Nathan Kendall (left) as winemaker from the 2014 vintage. From the cask samples of Riesling and Chardonnay I tasted (yes, I believe this variety also has a future in the FLX) he and assistant winemaker Daniel Bissel seem to make a great team in the cellar and form a creative triumvirate with Chris. Certainly their new Rieslings will be more aromatically and texturally complex than the wines of the previous vintages from this producer. Watch this FLX space!