Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

Last night at Freeman’s restaurant in Freeman Alley on the Lower East Side (see www.freemansrestaurant.com) it suddenly struck me that so far I’ve avoided telling the story of how STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL came into existence. That’s a serious mistake, because it is as much the reason that I’m here in New York until the end of January as wanting to have fun. So here is the story of my moment of Global Riesling Revelation:

On the afternoon of Sunday, February 12^th in Queenstown/Central Otago in New Zealand I was struck by lightning. It was half way through a 49 day long round-the-world trip which a conference in Sydney had justified (thank you Frankland Estate of Western Australia for organizing it!) Cornelius Dönnhoff of the famous Dönnhoff wine estate in Germany’s Nahe region had also attended that conference and four days later we met up again at Queenstown airport to spend several days together tasting NZ wines. Like me he’d been to the Land of the White Cloud several times before – “the first time I was here I tried all the extreme sports,” he told me – and we both felt sure that we knew what NZ wine was all about.  How wrong we were!

We checked into our hotel and set off straight away for the tasting rooms of the local wineries, deciding on route to play at being normal tourists. I would justify my note-taking by saying that I was a wine geek; a role I’m rather good at playing. We also decided to stop at the very first winery we came to, which shall remain nameless since the wines there were all as correct as they were mediocre. In the tasting room we were first surprised to find a handful of Rieslings on offer – we both had a figure of about 400 hectares for the area planted with Riesling in NZ in our heads – then it hit us. Everywhere were posters and shelf-talkers promoting the Summer of Riesling. During our short stay we found them all over the place, also in Queenstown as the above picture shows. In Central Otago, one of the most remote regions on Planet Wine!

By this I don’t mean that the Summer of Riesling which Paul Grieco’s Terroir wine bars have been celebrating in New York since 2008 and which went Coast to Coast in 2011 or the Summer of Riesling in Sydney/Australia which is currently happening for the third time had reached NZ. The NZ Summer of Riesling not only had a very different approach (more educational) than either of them, but the promotional material Cornelius Dönnhoff and I saw also had a very different look. For example, the T-shirts were black with white logos; the colors of the national rugby team, the All Blacks. In the US and in Sydney/Australia the Summer of Riesling is mainly for restaurants and bars, whereas in NZ it is primarily for wine producers and wine merchants.

We quickly learnt the reason for this was the rapid growth of the area planted with Riesling in NZ to around 1,000 hectares. So the Summer of Riesling had not only gone viral, but also mutated to adapt to local conditions. I was in a state of delighted shock so the significance of all this didn’t hit me until I reached New York two weeks later (via San Francisco, Monterey and LA in California, Washington DC, then Middleburg and Richmond in Virginia). On the afternoon of Monday, February 27^th at a tasting of Rieslings from the Finger Lakes in New York State at Hearth Restaurant on 12^th Street at 1^st Avenue, it suddenly hit me: Riesling is now a global phenomenon and New York is the place I can best get a grip on it. 

As soon as I got home I commissioned the masthead at the top of this site, and began planning its complete overhaul. I was in a hurry, because I felt that I had been too slow to pick up on this. I am now in the process of turning this into both a book and a movie. Any help, advice or information you can give me is much appreciated. WATCH THIS SPACE!

Darn it! I wanted to put off the theme of corks versus screw cap closure for Riesling and other wines, because so much has already been written about it, but my hand was forced by the events of yesterday evening. No, the wine in my glass was not tainted by the sea of corks pictured which cover the ceiling of a great bar on Bleeker Street close to my temporary East Village home called ‘Von’. In fact, I think this is one of the best use of cork. It’s a decorative material which is good on ceilings, floors or as the soles of sandals standing on those floors, but I would prefer it not to come into contact with my wine. Not that I have nothing against a cork closure which functions and leaves my wine intact, but I have had too many bad experiences with cork (TCA is the name of the substance) taint to feel anything but intense skepticism of wines with cork closures regardless of their price. Although the quality of wine corks has got better than during the high point of the taint problem around a decade ago when about 3.5% of all bottles with cork closures were heavily TCA-tainted wine and maybe another 5% were lightly TCA-tainted (dull and fruitless). However, we are still not down to a 1% failure rate, which strikes me as the absolute maximum that could be deemed acceptable, as last night proved.

I went out to a new modern Italian-American place on East 1st Street called L’Apicio with Volker Donabaum of AI Selections and Amy Troiano and we had a very tasty and interesting meal. The service was pretty good although the place was packed and there were many interesting, moderately-priced wines like the just off-dry, piercingly-fresh 2011 Riesling from the Teutonic Wine Company in Oregon; one of the best Rieslings I’ve had from that State. It was fine in spite of being under cork, but the Late Harvest Riesling from Hermann J. Weimar in the Finger Lakes being served by the glass was not. The first bottle may well have just been open too long, but either way it was definitely not in prime condition. So they kindly opened another bottle, but it was savagely corked, raped by TCA! In top form this wine in has a diamond-like brilliance of flavor that is literally breathtaking. Our disappointment was great, because that was the last bottle of this wine which L’Apicio had. So we decamped to ‘Von’ and danced with friends of Volker and Amy’s until I forget the bitter aftertaste of the corked Riesling and pretty much everything else too. This morning I chanced upon the object pictured below and realized there was no way around telling this story in full.

A lot of people who reject the screw cap closure do so because they say that wine under screw cap doesn’t age. The last time I visited him Martin Tesch of the Tesch estate in Langenlonsheim/ Nahe in Germany pulled out a bottle of 1966 ‘Goldener Oktober’, a cheap blended German white, under the screw cap pictured. The wine was fully mature, but still alive thanks to what was a fairly new technology 45 years ago. Note the arrow on the screw cap indicating the direction to turn it, something you’ll also find on the screw caps of Tesch’s pristine dry Rieslings. So there’s really nothing fundamentally new about this technology and there’s no doubt that wines under screw cap, even simple wines, age longer than those under almost all corks. By the way, there is a minimal failure rate for wines under screw cap due to accidental mechanical damage to the closure. Tesch reckons that this is around 0.1%, which is at least one order of magnitude better than the very best corks available. Of course, the juicy and refreshing Château Benoit Müller-Thugrau from Oregon which fueled our dancing at ‘Von’ was also under screw caps and each bottle was perfect. Which is why I’d rather get elegantly screwed than have corked wine!

Of course not! As the above photo proves. It’s not even wine that’s being poured into my glass, but apple juice. I took the photo June 22nd, 2007 and in Oslo/Norway during a trip searching for the most northerly wines in the world. Then, suddenly there was an old friend, the James Grieve apple which my maternal grandfather had grown in his garden, but in the form of a mind-blowing apple juice. I had no idea that this kind of flavor experience was possible with unfermented fruit juice. My favorite fruit is the grape and I definitely prefer it fermented form, because you need alcoholic fermentation to unlock about 99% of the aromas, but regular readers already know that.

Riesling is one of the most wonderful things on Planet Wine, not least because of its enormous diversity of flavor. It spans the entire range from bone dry to honey sweet, every weight class from featherweight to super-heavyweight and almost the entire wine aroma spectrum. For that reason there’s a Riesling for every conceivable situation (expect those where alcohol is forbidden or the wine must have a reddish color for reasons of protocol, ritual or symbolism). But this is also the reason that the Riesling Spirit is inclusive and open, because the argument that a particular combination of dryness/sweetness, weight and aroma type is good for Riesling can equally be applied to wines from other grapes that fit the same bill.

Last night I very slowly pot-roasted the cheeks of several Berkshire pigs I bought a few blocks from here in Essex Market (see www.heritagefoods.com) with carrots and shallots in white wine. While waiting for this to cook and for the guests to arrive my landlord here at the Hotel of Hope, Jürgen Fränznick and I drank the rest of the bottle of 2010 Pinot Gris from Ponzi in Oregon that went in the pot. If every Oregon Pinot Gris had this kind of freshness, clean dry taste and attractive melon and gooseberry aromas then I’d drink more of the stuff. (Thanks Luisa Ponzi!) Then came the 2012 Sauvignon Blanc from Framingham in Marlborough/New Zealand. Sauvignon is definitely not my favorite white grape, but in this case the green paprika aroma – regular readers know that this comes from pyridines – was not too strong and a passion fruit note complemented it very well. Better still, the acidity was not sharp, much less biting as is so often the case. (Thanks Andrew Hedley of Framingham!) Then the guests were there and the food was ready, so we drank several lighter Pinot Noirs which were all good.

The point is that these things were right for the situation, and there was absolutely no reason to demand Riesling, much less to adopt a take no prisoners approach, but there never is in the Here & Now. I know it might seem too obvious to need mentioning, but that’s always where drinking pleasure takes place. But if you’re thinking to yourself, “wow! Chateau Lafite, that’s a famous wine which costs more than a thousand bucks a bottle!” or “oh no! If I drink what’s just been poured in my glass I’ll be in terrible shape for that important meeting tomorrow”, then you’re not going to get much of the smell and taste of the wine in the Here & Now, because in your mind you’re trying to will yourself back to yesterday or on to tomorrow. I promise you that I speak from experience, suffering from a nasty tendency of this kind.

Riesling is not about this kind of nonsense. That is nonsense because you can’t will yourself backwards or forwards in time however much you want to. You can only fall back into the past (for example, the enveloping memories stimulated by smells) or into the future (for example, in lucid dream).  In the Here & Now Riesling works its magic if you give it the chance to do so. There’s joy and freedom, truth and light in Riesling, as well as those acids and aromas. Let them touch you and enjoy all the good wines you encounter while they’re doing that!

Above is the first photo (thank you Carla Rzeszewski of The Breslin!) of my right forearm since Nuco of North Star Tattoo (www.northstartattoo.com) on East 7^th Street decorated it with s piece of my florid handwriting back on November 28th. I’d been planning this for a long time, but told nobody and waited until it had healed before showing anyone. It documents how a feel about Riesling and what kind of grip Riesling has got on me.

Fascination, that is the illogical fixation upon and obsession with something or someone that goes way deeper and continues far longer than a simple crush, has a low visibility in our part of the world, although it’s absolutely fundamental to western culture. Think of pop music, fashion, eroticism and perfume. Due to the way our sense of smell interacts with our memories aromas easily result in fascination. Although they are almost insubstantial their hold on us can be tenacious. For example, I can remember exactly how the bathroom in my maternal grandparents home smelt, and if I close my eyes and concentrate upon that smell then I feel almost as if I am transported back there although that bathroom ceased to exist years ago.

Wine, and particularly the subtly aromatic wines like Riesling and Pinot Noir, has an almost magical power to kindle und rekindle the fire of fascination. That’s why wine – though it needed religion to push its way into the center of our culture, and in spite of the fact some of the stuff tacked onto it reduces it to a status symbol – has such an importance in our hi-tech world. Just think about the situation where a couple sit face to face each with a glass of wine in front of them and what the wine does in that situation. It is no less important a part of it than what they say and do, their clothes or the ambience of the room, but because it functions subliminally as well as consciously its effect is far greater than we normally acknowledge.

I was thinking about all of this as I had dinner with Carla Rzeszewski and Rosemary Gray – two of the most talented young women in the New York wine scene – at the Spotted Pig restaurant in the West Village last night. The assault of wonderful aromas from the kitchen, from the plates of food on our table of us and more varied stuff coming from the rest of the room was almost overwhelming. However, the indescribably delicate 2011 Schonfels Riesling from Florian Lauer in the Saar/Germany (you can find this and other wines from Weingut Peter Lauer  at Chambers Street  Wines in New York) had no trouble at all holding its own.  How is that possible?

Wine aromas are a very mixed crowd. At one end of the scale you have the brutality of the methoxypyrazines (pyrazines for short), the signature aroma of Savignon Blanc, but also present in the red Caberent grapes and Merlot. You need incredibly little of them to create an intensely green vegetal stink. Professor Hans R. Schultz of the Geisenheim wine school on the Rhine once explained the minimum concentration of pyridines in wine necessary for them to be perceptible by telling the following story: “Think of James Bond’s cocktail, a Martini with only a drop or two of Vermouth in it. Keeping the Vermouth in your mind, tip the cocktail into an Olympic size swimming pool. Now the Vermouth has been greatly diluted, but not nearly enough. So take the swimming pool and pour it into the Indian Ocean. Then you’ve got the right concentration!”

My first whiff of pure pyrazine was in the laboratory of a “nose”, a perfume blender on the Rive Gauche in Paris. He showed me the recipe for one of his latest creations, a long list of substances for each of which a percentage was given. For the last item on the list the percentage was many orders of magnitude below 1%, in fact there was a long list of zeros before a number came. “How can you possibly smell that?” I naively asked. He stepped over to the other side of the lab, took one of the glass lab jars off the shelf, dipped the tip of a thin cardboard wedge into the clear liquid it contained and pointed the tip in my direction. The green paprika smell almost made me a casualty of the global perfume wars!

Although a good Riesling has hundreds of aromas the most important seem to be norisprenoids – sorry for the technical name, but sometimes it’s important to be correct – which seem to be responsible for most of the fruity aroma. They have nowhere near the screaming intensity of the pyrazines and have a completely different life story too. Pyrazines are formed in the lowest leaves on the vine’s shoots shortly after flowering, that is very early, and only end up in the grapes much later. The norisporenoids seem to form in the outermost cells of the grape skin and only right at the end of the ripening process. This is the reason Riesling has to be late-picked in order to have a ravishing aroma and flavor. That is something the almost dry 2011 Schonfels Riesling from Florian Lauer certainly has, but what makes the wine so amazing is the interplay of those fruity aromas with all the other aspects of the wine, beginning with the yeasty elements.

To me it’s logical that young wines should also smell of yeast, for  without the activity of the yeast they’d still be grape juice. And grape juice tastes about 1% as aromatic as the wine you get when you ferment it, because the fermentation process literally unlocks the vast majority of the aromas. But first the winemaker has to get them out of the skin of the grape where they (and all the minerals) are stored; the juice only contains sugars and acids. In order to extract as many of them as possible cool climate Riesling winemakers like Florian Lauer do skin-contact, that is they macerate the destemmed and gently crushed grapes for some hours before pressing them. However, the skins also contain phenolic substances (the correct name for tannins) and the more intense the sun and the drier the ripening conditions the more tannins form in the skins as a protective shield for the pips. This is great for red wines, but negative for Riesling, so in warm climates Riesling winemakers avoid skin contact. This is a crucial reason for their wines having a completely different flavor profile to cool climate Rieslings.

The next element in Florian Lauer’s wine is all the textural stuff, or mouthfeel, which demands a certain alcoholic content (12,5% in this case) plus the glycerine and similar fermentation byproducts. The more alcohol and glycerine in a wine the richer it tastes, but this is a double-edged sword, for alcohol also inhibits our perception of the wine’s aromas. That’s an important reason why those very low-alcohol (7% – 8.5%) sweet Riesling from the Mosel, Saar, Mittelrhein and Nahe are so extremely aromatic. With dry Rieslings (and all other dry wines) the need for a certain alcoholic level to give body must be set against the conflicting need to keep the alcoholic content down to help maximize aroma; no easy task for winemakers!

The discrete tannins of Florian Lauer’s Riesling masterpiece are like a whale below the waterline of which you can see only the hump. They give the wine power and underline its richness, then the bright acidity lifts the ample body making it seem way lighter than it actually is and seems to illuminating all the flavors like a spotlight focused on a diamond. If sniffing the aromas was like a gentle and beautiful kiss, then the interplay of all the wine’s flavors as it flowed down my throat was more like an orgasm…

And that I think is enough for today!

PS This would have been the entry for Day 14, but I got home too late last night to explain all this as well as I just did. Thank you for your patience!

Riesling is rightly regarded as an aromatic white wine, and  the most important aspect of its aroma is no less rightly described described as being fruity. That’s nothing new. A century ago the leading experts described Riesling as being the most noble of the aromatic white wine grapes, and top quality wines from the grape were even occasionally criticized for being too extravagantly aromatic. That’s something I’ve also heard a few times during the last years, and if that sounds to you like saying they’re “too sexy”, then you’ve spotted exactly what the issue some “sophisticated” wine people have with Riesling really is.

The chance to taste century old Riesling masterpieces next to the best wines being made from the grape today may be very rare, but from my experience (I was very lucky a couple of times during the last years) it confirms that jaw-dropping aromas is an integral part of the personality of great Riesling past and present. The bouquet of a great Riesling can dissolve time and make decades seem like a detail (see yesterday’s story for an explanation of how the sense of smell works with human memory to make this possible)

Of course, that’s something extraordinary, but when you try to define what the typical Riesling aroma is, then you quickly run off the road and into the wilderness. For example, in Europe it is frequently described as peachy , but in Australia it is generally regarded as limey.  Even within one continent – let’s stick with Europe for a moment – there’s no simple answer, since in very cool winegrowing regions the typical Riesling aroma is appley instead of peachy. And that’s just the beginning, because there are certain niches like the Ruwer sub-region of the Mosel where the typical Riesling aroma is more blackcurranty. Almost all the books tell you that’s the signature aroma of Cabernet Sauvignon, one of the most important red wine grapes on Planet Wine!

Then when you try to make it easier to get to the bottom of the matter by concentrating upon the aromas of just one “classic” example of a high quality region from a long-established Riesling winegrowing region, you run into the next problem. Sure you can rather quickly identify one or two of the prime aromas and, for example, say that the wine smells like white peach, a very typical aroma for the best Rieslings from Washington State. However, the longer you study it the more obvious it becomes that the wine in your glass doesn’t only smell of white peach. Bite into a ripe white peach and this becomes even more glaringly obvious.

The bouquet of a good Riesling is like the Mona Lisa’s smile. It’s unforgettable, but also impossible to describe in a few words, or even lines. When I was at the famous Geisenheim wine school on the German Rhine for two semesters back in 2008/9 I learnt that a good wine has hundreds of different aromas, maybe even in excess of a thousand. There are grape varieties like Sauvignon Blanc or Cabernet Sauvignon which have one very dominant aroma component (in both cases it’s methoxypyrazines which give them their bell pepper and/or blackcurrant notes), which makes them intense but sometimes screamingly obvious. Then there are grapes like Pinot Noir and Riesling where you have an incredibly wide aroma spectrum. This makes their wines that are highly suggestive both for our memory and imagination, particularly if they have some bottle age.

As well as having a fruity aspect, a good Riesling will also have a combination of floral and/or herbal and/or spicy aromas. If the wine is young, then there will also be notes which a professional taster will immediately identify as coming from the yeast with which the wine fermented. These range from “flinty” to rubbery and are all very unfruity, which is just one of the paradoxical aspects of Riesling aromas. And although you can put a Riesling wine through a gas spectrometer that breaks down its bouquet into the individual components and you can identify many of these, the fact is that even two experienced professional tasters will describe it differently. Give the same two tasters  the same wines blind the next day and their descriptions will be different again. Riesling is at once charming and sexy, yet hard to pin down and for this very reason fascinating.

That’s enough for one rainy New York night. The next installment begins with another paradox: Riesling is one of the most aromatically fruity wines (even when it’s bone dry), yet when you taste ripe Riesling grapes they don’t taste very fruity at all (although they do taste very sweet).

I make no apologies for returning to the subject of the dry Rieslings of the Rhienhessen region where you can see Klaus-Peter Keller of the Keller estate in Flörsheim-Dalsheim selectively harvesting Riesling grapes in the vineyards of Nierstein. Honestly, it’s not because I’m obsessed with the Germany’s largest wine growing region, just that so many exciting things happened there during the last years and so many great wines were made there, but have so far received such scant attention in the international media, including in the theoretically totally open-minded and utterly cosmopolitan New York-based media. To compensate for this I attach a link to a short film about the New Rheinhessen blind tasting I staged together with the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) at Trestle on Tenth restaurant on 10th Avenue at West 24th Street on the evening of November 28th (see my full report under Day 5). It was made by a talented young French filmmaker based in Brooklyn called Marcarthur Baralla (www.defendshh.com) who I met for the first time that evening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GC0JSn-w_8&feature=plcp

By the way, Marcarthur Baralla’s favorite wine at the tasting was the 2012 “Rabenturm” Riesling from Christine Huff of the Fritz Ekkehard Huff estate of Nierstein-Schwabsburg, which was not well understood by every tasted although it comes from a stony “red slate” (geological name Rotliegendes, actually a type of finely-layered sandstone) and in the New York wine scene Rieslings from stony soils are definitely cool. Some tasters were irritated by the special aromas (for me a headily sweet floral note) which Rieslings from this kind of soils often develop. But as you can see from the video in spite of this the general mood at the tasting was extremely positive.

By the way, Katharina Wechsler of the eponymous estate in Westhofen/Rhienhessen about whom I reported two days ago, was one of untold dozens of young winemakers in the region who were once trainees at the Keller estate. She’s a perfect example of this group, for she never attempted to copy the Keller style, instead striking out in her own direction and thus enriching the region which is now the Dream Factory of dry white German wines.

Don’t worry about continuation of the story of the Riesling aromas getting put back a day or two. One of the secrets to aromatic and elegant Riesling is picking late when the grapes are fully ripe, and my story needs to ripen too!

OK, it smells good, but it’s only wine…only Riesling. With these and similar words those lacking in awareness or imagination seek to dismiss not only the global Riesling phenomenon as insignificant, but try to reduce wine of all kinds to just another beverage, or even a mere commodity. Of course, wine is a beverage and a commodity just like beer, coffee or range juice. However, if you give it a chance to work upon your mind, then it can be so much more, and what I’m talking about has nothing to do with the alcohol in wine.

Wine is very suggestive, because it contains hundreds of aromatic substances and through their interaction with the sense of smell it hooks our into memories making connections we’d never have dreamt of before they pop into our minds. Every wine can do this, but those with very intense and dominant aromas like Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon (that bell pepper smell) tend to be much less suggestive those wines in which no single aroma has the upper hand, but many nuances “flicker”. For me Pinot Noir does this most best amongst reds and Riesling amongst whites, which maybe explains why they are the grapes around whose wines global cults revolve. They are the most suggestive wines you can smell or put in your mouth, period. I know that I’m saying the wrong thing for a bunch of Riesling and Pinot Noir fanatics, but that seems to me more fundamental than their supposed terroir (taste of the place) quality.

Let me explain in one paragraph how this functions. Much of what we call taste experiences are actually impressions which come from our sense of smell and some come from our sense of touch. In the brain the five things we can actually taste with our tongue (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami or savory) are wedded to the tactile impression we have in our mouth (mouth-feel) and what we smell as we exhale, propelling  volatile substances from our mouths into our nasal cavities where our aroma receptors are situated. This is one reason that a taste experience can be so complex and compelling. The other is that our memory for smells works through association and those associations are shaped by our bodily and emotional response to the all the things in the world around us we ever smelt and the taste of everything we’ve ever put it in our mouth. All the really positive things and the really negative things we smelt and tasted are etched into our memories

You really don’t have to be a wine freak or a wine geek for this to really do something for you. You just have to relax and savor the wine, opening the doors of perception. I propose that (assuming you don’t have a fundamental problem with acidity and if orange juice isn’t too tart for you, then you have no problem) you find a good chilled Riesling, pour it into a large wine glass and let it start working on you. This is much less financially damaging than the same kind of experiment with Pinot Noir is and no less exciting to see what memories the wine’s aroma arouse, which associations they stimulate. Open your nose and open your mind! This might be intoxicating, but we’re talking sensual intoxication, since all you have to do is inhale, though I suggest you also put the wine in your mouth and swallow, since this greatly enhances the entire experience.

This is what went through my mind on this rainy day in the East Village of New York.

To be continued. WATCH THIS SPACE !

Once again I have to put back the story of Riesling and the mystery of aroma for another day, because as they say in America “stuff happens”. At short notice I reorganized my schedule for yesterday evening so that I could meet up with rising star winemaker Katharina Wechsler of the eponymous estate in Westhofen/Rheinhessen. I make no apologies for dragging you back to the subject of Germany’s largest wine growing region and the Dream Factory of dry white wines that it has recently become. I first tasted Katharina’s wines only a couple of months ago and we met for the first time at the Wine Vibes party in Berlin on Friday, September 14th. So it was a great surprise when my friends Volker Donabaum and Amy Troiano told me that Katharina would be in town and that I could join them for a late night tasting at Terroir E.Vil. (as locals call the East Village).

Before I’d even finished saying hi Katharina and asking how she was doing Volker had unpacked samples of her whites of the 2011 vintage and the first wine was being poured. I made quite detailed notes, which might seem a bit obsessive late at night in a place like Terroir, but that’s the sort of person I am and the wines deserved being taken that seriously. The dry Wechsler Rieslings managed to combine the power that’s typical of contemporary dry Rieslings from the New Rheinhessen with a rare vitality for ambitious dry wines from this region. They’re joyful rather than imposing wines, though there’s so much in the best of them (most importantly the Westhofen Riesling and the Benn Riesling with their high-tensile strength and subtle spice) that you can’t take it all in immediately. That’s what makes me really like them.

However, that’s not all that the talented young lady who gave up a career in TV journalism for wine and claims she’s “still a rookie” winemaker has up her sleeve. Katharina’s 2011 Silvaner ‘Alter Reben’, old vines, taste of quince, butter and smoke, is richly texture, but not the least heavy (sometimes a problem with high-end wines of this grape). No Wechsler wine is more joyful than the dry Scheurebe, or as the staff at Terroir E-Vil. called it last night “Sure-rebe”; one of those dangerously refreshing wines that taste of blackcurrants and fresh herbs, and are so often my undoing.

All great news? Yes, yes, yes and just a little bit of no. Sadly the 2011 Wechsler wines didn’t make it to America so like the res of the country President Obama will have to wait for the 2012s to be bottled and shipped (they should make it for the 2013 Summer of Riesling). Also Katharina’s regular dry Riesling doesn’t quite measure up to the competition down the street in Westhofen (Wittmann, Groebe and Florian Fauth), but hell it was only her second vintage!

Thank you Volker and Amy again! I hope you enjoyed the dry Riesling wines (Dr. Loosen from the Mosel/Germany, Frankland Estate from Western Australia and Keunhof – Peter Pliger from Alto Adige/Italy) which followed Katharina’s. By the end of the evening I felt that my spirit had become one with that of Riesling and it was moving in me. Not bad for a Wednesday night.

And don’t worry I haven’t forgotten those Riesling aromas. They are already wafting their way through cyberspace in your direction…

Today was a very busy day, also thanks to Bruce Jack chief winemaker of the Accolade Wines South Africa group, which includes the Flagstone winery he founded. We first met a decade ago when Flagstone had not yet become part of a corporate structure and Bruce was making a very exciting Riesling called ‘Frostline’ from a high altitude vineyard where there was a real danger of frost…during the summer! It was just one of a string of daring red and white wines he was making back then. Sadly after Constellation bought up Flagstone Bruce had to drop the Riesling project along with several others that were very close to his heart. I took this picture of him during our lunch in Le Bernardin.

The first wine we ordered was a 2010 Dry Riesling from Wiemer in the Finger Lakes/New York, but I forgot to write down the name of the vineyard designate, because the conversation was too interesting and the combination with Bruce’s ‘Surf and Turf’ was so breathtaking. Instead of the predictable and often dire combination of a steak with lobster the dish was a roasted marrow bone topped with sea urchins. Bruce said it was the most remarkable dish he’d eaten all year, and he loves his fine food. The wine was intense, yet so elegant and pure with a delicate hint of lemony sweetness balancing the almost minty-cool acid freshness.

After that we moved on to fish (my salmon with lotus root and tiny mushrooms was spot on) and a Sauvignon Blanc from Craggy Range in New Zealand which had some quite a subtle “flinty” and herbal notes that made it the most interesting NZ SB I’ve had in a long time. It almost made me forgive the global obsession with Sauvignon…but not quite.

The day’s appointments are not over yet, since after dinner I’m meeting Katharina Wechsler from the eponymous estate in Westhofen/Rheinhessen at the East Village branch of the Terroir wine bar chain. That makes it a two Terroir day, since French documentary filmmaker Marcarthur Baralla just interviewed me in the new Terroir branch in Park Slope/Brooklyn. This means that my thoughts on Riesling aromas must wait for Day 10, but I promise that they’re worth the wait!

I also can’t wait to taste Bruce’s new wines or the Riesling which Howard Boysen is making from the Frostline Vineyard!