Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

The United States of Riesling: Sean O’Keefe for President!

STOP PRESS – I just received the following comment to the below from Sean O’Keefe:

“Thank you for your presidential nomination! I was working on a 5-year plan/Great Leap Forward speech but became sidetracked by bottling the 2011 Vintage…I took my hands completely off the handlebars on te 2011 Lot 49 Riesling, and the wine steered itself in an interesting direction. I might have cruised over the edge on this one (though I remember thinking that about the 2010 Lot 49 as well when it was a newborn!)”

I think we can take that as acceptance of the nomination I poposed below. Watch out Mitt Romney!

It’s a little-known fact that there’s not only a United States of America, but also a United States of Riesling occupying exactly the same territory. Nobody knows just how many citizens this other United States has, but figures for the total sales of domestically produced and imported wines made from the Riesling grape indicate that it must be many millions, and that this number has grown substantially during recent years. The fact that coast to coast more than 500 restaurants and 100 retailers will participate in this year’s Summer of Riesling festival compared with 222 last year (back in 2008 it was just Paul Grieco’s wine bar Terroir in New York!) suggests that further significant growth may be just around the corner.

The United States of Riesling is a grass roots democracy based on the fundamental principals that all Riesling men and women are created equal, and of government of the Riesling People, by the Riesling People, for the Riesling People. Strangely the position of President is currently vacant, and should an election take place this fall parallel to that for the President of the United States of America, then I propose Sean O’Keefe as candidate for the next President of the United States of Riesling.

O’Keefe is winemaker at Chateau Grand Traverse on the Old Mission Peninsula in North Michigan, the biggest Riesling producer East of the Mississippi. Like Barack Obama he’s not a silver-haired member of the East Coast WASP establishment, but has already gathered enough experience to be fully up to speed on developments within the United States of Riesling. In addition, he has considerable foreign affairs experience in the grape’s European homelands and right around Planet Wine. I’d say that these qualities alone make him well-suited for the top Riesling job in the other US.

Of course, one crucial test has to be how his wines stand up under the most demanding of conditions. The blind tasting of the world’s finest dry Rieslings at the Frankland Estate International Riesling Tasting in Sydney/Australia this February was just such a stress test. When it was announced that wine number 5 was the 2010 ‘Lott 49’ from Chateau Grand Traverse the crowd of professional tasters burst into spontaneous applause, so stunned were they that it was a Riesling from America! It was the only such reaction at this tasting. On the strength of this Jancis Robinson, also present in Sydney, made O’Keefe’s Michigan Riesling masterpiece wine of the week on her website! (see www.jancisrobinson.com)

However, for me the tasting which O’Keefe gave me one evening at Trattoria Stella in Traverse City/Michigan when I visited the Old Mission Peninsula in late July 2010 was just as impressive. Instead of showcasing his own wines, or even those of his home state, he poured a coast to coast range of his favorite American Rieslings. Would Mitt Romney have done that? I think he’d have been too terrified of damaging his conservative credentials to even think about it. Which would, of course, mean that Romney would have ignored the significant role the hospitality industry (ever more members of which serve American Rieslings with pride) plays in the US economy. But what’s that to the man who’d have let General Motors go belly up?

Though he has an eccentric sense of humor that makes some people jump out of their skins O’Keefe is a hard-working family man with a strong sense of morality. His barbed jokes are invariably directed against that section of American society (0,1% rather than 1%, I think si the correct figure) whose goal is to enrich itself regardless of the cost to other Americans or the world. On the other hand, one of his most deeply held beliefs is that Riesling is a force for good in the United States and beyond, thoug I’m sure he’d agree with me that nobody should ever forget, alcohol is a drug and Riesling contains alcohol.

Let me be straight with you. Read my lips. I’ve known O’Keefe for 12 years and during that time I’ve learned to appreciate his intelligence and his inspiration, his humanity and his humility. Now I admire his feeling for Riesling culture every bit as much as his down-to-earth approach to wine. Nobody in the wine industry today more vehemently rejects the smoke and mirrors so frequently employed in wine marketing than he does. His combination of soaring idealism and old-fashioned common sense is remarkable in an age both marked and marred by short-term opportunism and blindness to its long-term effects. These things are all good for America no less than for the United States of Riesling.

So I recommend that you vote for Sean O’Keefe as President of the United States of Riesling, that is if an election for the position take place this fall.

The guy on the right of this poster in the New York subway is Paul Grieco, the dynamo of the Global Riesling Somm-Sation. He just won the James Beard Award for the Outstanding Wine & Spirits Professional of 2012. CONGRATULATIONS PAUL They finally realized that they need you! To celebrate German wine and this great success on Thursday, May 10th Paul Grieco, Roy Metzdorf of the Weinstein wine bar in Berlin, nearly a hundred Riesling fans and I celebrated the Long Night of German Wine NYC at Grieco’s Hearth Restaurant (403 East 12^th Street, at First Avenue). We not only had a dangerously good time together, we also raised around $6,300 for “Wein hilft”, or wine helps. 100% of those donations will go to the HIV / AIDS foundation HOPE in Cape Town / South Africa. The high point of a very long night was the auctioning of a bottle of 1983 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Eiswein from Joh. Jos. Prüm in the Mosel from my private cellar for $1,350. Thank you to the Hearth team for making this possible!

„What is Riesling?“ The question seems too simple to need posing, the answer too obvious to need giving. But this is actually like one of those kid’s questions such as „why is the sky blue?“ which are incredibly hard to answer.

You see, the reply that Riesling is the 20^th most widely-planted of the 10,000 grape varieties on Planet Wine and that the white wines made from it have a vibrant  personality is only the beginning of a proper answer. During the last years a big change happened and Riesling also became a global network linking wine drinkers with winemakers and the people selling the wines in all kinds of situations. Most importantly Riesling is a rapidly growing Global Somm-Sation, that is a wine which sommeliers in restaurants right around Planet Wine love, rave and obsess about. The only other grape that’s the object of a similar cult is (the red) Pinot Noir.

Sadly, some wine drinkers still make the mistake of thinking all Rieslings are sweet, and the fear of sweetness keeps many imprisoned within their comfort-zone of „dry“ wines (which often turn out to actually be slightly sweet). Many people still associate sweetness with inferior, outdated wines ill-suited to the dining table and fail to realize that the sweetness in some Riesling wines is natural, coming directly from the grape. Then they put spoonfuls of sugar in their coffee or drink a cola! Other wine drinkers who like sweet wines frequently feel embarrassed, fearing they will be taken for schmucks if they admit what their taste in wine is. America is far from being the only place where people are schizophrenic about sweetness!

Thinking and drinking only inside that box has convinced some that Riesling is a pussycat amongst wines. The somms laugh about this and think of the words of California winemaker and free-thinker Randall Grahm, „I am Riesling, a lioness, the queen of the jungle. Hear me roar!“ They also know that most people find sweet Rieslings work really well with spicy food, be it Tex-Mex or Thai, when they try it.

More recently some wine drinkers have been jumping in the opposite direction by claiming that „real“ Riesling must always be dry. Usually this spiel is just a way to stand out from the crowd and look sophisticated. In fact, Riesling can be dry or sweet  and comes in every gradation from bone-dry to honey-sweet; the first dimension in this  cosmos of flavor. It means that unless you only drink heavy reds you’re almost sure to find some Rieslings to love. Thousands of people who said they wouldn’t later admitted that they had.

The way Riesling wines range from feather-lightness to black hole density, yet always remain refreshing and energizing, is the second dimension of Riesling flavor. The wines from certain other fashionable grapes can pack a bigger punch up front, but they frequently become tiring the more you drink of them, whereas Riesling grows on you with each sip, gently tugging you back to the glass again and again until you suddenly realize…Oh no! That bottle’s empty.

One reason for this is the absence of wood aromas and flavors from aging in small oak barrels in Riesling wines. Good Riesling is a read-my-lips-wine. What you taste comes only from the grapes and the yeast which transformed them into wine. Oak aromas and flavors from barrels may be traditional for some other wine types, but it is most definitely a non-grape character, which makes them taste heavier. The somms rave about Riesling’s purity for this reason, pointing out how there’s so much aroma and freshness packed in ripe Riesling grapes that the winemaker has no need to add anything to it. If the winemaker did try and stamp his will on a Riesling, then he’d disrupt the delicate balancing act between ripeness and freshness in the wine.

Riesling-wines are even more diverse than this suggests though, because the smallest distance from one vineyard to the next lead to pronounced differences in the flavor of the wines from them. Riesling is all about location, location, location rather than what high-tech enables winemakers to do in the cellar. The somms call this transparency, which you could translate as “honesty”. To get this third dimension of my favorite grape you’re going to have to put your nose way into the glass and inhale deeply, then savor the Riesling as it rolls slowly over your palate like a big wave in Maui.

All of this became clear to me back in the 1980s when exciting Riesling wines  were few and far between; rare moments of illumination in a gloomy wine world. But, to be frank, back then Bordeaux and Napa weren’t achieving much higher strike-rates with their high-end reds. Looking back to that wine time feels like studying a distant geological epoch to me, so utterly has the situation changed since. And for no other white wine has it changed as radically as for German-speaking Riesling.

Some people have told me that this change is all down to me, because I spent the last 30 years writing about it, but that’s ridiculous, because I’m just one journalist, against hundreds of new winegrowers in Germany, Austria and beyond who created what the American press a decade ago christened the Riesling Renaissance. I also heard that I coined the phrase Generation Riesling for the “Jungwinzer” or young winegrowers of Germany who also started making a splash in their home country about a decade ago. That’s not true either. I was just repeating something I’d heard, though I have to admit it was a darned good quote. However, I have to admit that I did once say Rocky Horror Riesling Show. I was describing an ugly and cloyingly sweet American Riesling I tasted blind when helping to judge the Orange National Show in San Bernadino/California, the birthplace of the Big Mac. That was back in spring 1989 in though, during what I call the Long Night of American Riesling.

The fact that the story of the grape’s revival in the US and Canada since then hasn’t been told properly, is the result of its gradual progress from the release of Randall Grahm’s groundbreaking ‘Pacific Rim’ in California in 1992, through the launch of Chateau Ste. Michelle & Dr. Loosen joint-venture ‘Eroica’ in Washington State back in 2000 and on to Paul Grieco’s first Summer of Riesling festival at his Terroir wine bar in New York City in 2008. Now the United States of Riesling are on a roll and the media are beginning to ask themselves how they didn’t see that coming.

Maybe you haven’t heard of him yet, but I promise you that Mr. Wu is on the fast track to fame, and not only in Berlin where his Hot Spot restaurant in the Charlottenburg district of the city serves by far the most exciting Chinese food I tasted in Germany. The reason for his rapidly growing fame is that he’s become a double ambassador, for Chinese culture and German Riesling, moving back and forth between two worlds which appear separated by a mighty chasm with an agility that makes action movie heroes look feeble.

On one level Mr. Wu is just a regular guy working long hours running a small business with his wife and raising their kids like so many other people in Germany, China or America. There’s nothing fancy about Hot Spot either. It occupies a space that previously was home to a failed steak house in a rather boring street off Ku’damm, the main drag of West Berlin.  And instead of doing a lot of expensive redecorating almost the entire investment went into the kitchen and the cellar. However, there’s also no question for me that Jianhau Wu, to give him his full name, embodies 21st century globalization and his restaurant is a center for inter-cultural exchange. In Hot Spot „Planet Wine“ is real!

How could I forget the moment when I realized all this? I was at home on the morning of September 9th, 2010 and when I opened the New York Times website there right at the top of the front page was a photograph of Mr. Wu pouring a customer a glass of Riesling. The accompanying article was about the integration of foreigners in Germany, a political red-hot potato, with the journalist presenting him as an unusual positive example. However, that’s not the point. Again and again, for all kinds of reasons Mr. Wu has suddenly found himself in the beam of a spotlight; something which happens entirely without the work of PR people or marketing departments. Journalists, like so many other people, just latch on to Mr. Wu.

I always visualize him speaking with guests in his restaurant, pouring wine or putting the finishing touches to a dish at the table.  The way Mr. Wu feels entirely at home doing all these things and his complete openness with all his guests – be they famous German politicians, the Chinese ambassador or locals from around the corner –  sends out signals that expand like ripples moving out from the point where a stone falls into a pond.

Several years ago while my dentist was filling one of my teeth he spoke with great excitement about a new Chinese restaurant in Berlin called Hot Spot. With his drill whizzing in my mouth I had no choice but to listen to him. I know that I shouldn’t let myself be influenced by names, but I was, jumping to the conclusion that a Chinese restaurant with a western name that conventional couldn’t be any good. Still, my dentist raved about the wine list, „lots of older Rieslings from Christoffel“, that is sweet Rieslings from Kajo Christoffel of the Joh. Christoffel Jr. estate in the Middle Mosel/Germany. I mentally noted that, thinking maybe I should check out Hot Spot in spite of that name. Who knows? Those ripples were moving towards me.

Chinese food and Riesling doesn’t strike many people as a natural combo, but what they are usually thinking of is westernized „Chinese“ food and cheap sweet German wines (that may not even have been made from the Riesling grape) which they tried many years ago. Like a lot of other people I used to drink beer with Chinese food until I finally made it to Hot Spot and Mr. Wu blew my mind. I quickly realized there’s no such thing as „Chinese Food“, rather there are as many regional cuisines in China as in Europe. The various local and personal interpretations of these has created a spectrum of flavors as wide and multi-colored as that of Riesling.

At Hot Spot there are two chefs, one cooking in the Shanghai style, the other in the Sichuan style, but in both cases most of the dishes are seriously spicy. So the restaurant’s name does make sense. On the list are hundreds of Rieslings ranging from bone dry to lusciously sweet (plus many exciting wines from other grapes and other places), all at friendly prices. Mr. Wu’s talent lies in the marrying them with his expressive cuisine in ways that are continually surprising and sometimes breathtaking.

For example, Sichuan pepper has a palate-numbing taste quite different from the heat of chili or pepper. One evening Mr. Wu insisted that I drank a powerful dry Riesling from Tim Föhlich of Schäfer-Fröhlich in the Nahe/Germany, the Felseneck “GG” with chicken breast “mala” spicy; a dish crawling with chili and Sichuan pepper. Deeply skeptical I took a sip of the wine after a big mouthful of the dish and wow! Mr. Wu had wowed me again.

Though he acknowledges that Rieslings with a pronounced grape sweetness taste best with certain spicy Chinese dishes, Mr. Wu prefers wines that are almost dry with many of dishes on his menu. That certainly applies to the trio of beef and beef tongue and beef offal with coriander and chili. Once the Riesling “Superior” from Maximin Grünhaus (von Schubert) in the Ruwer/Germany was magical with that seriously hot spot of a dish. The combination of the subtly spicy lamb with onions and leeks with the Uhlen “Laubach” from Heymann-Löwenstein in the Terrassonmosel/Germany was also mightily satisfying. But you have to come to Berlin and discover for yourselves!

Afterword: At the end of January I went on a very different journey of discovery with Mr. Wu to China. Maybe there’ll be time to tell that story another time. However, I have to tell you know about how skeptical he was about the quality of Chinese wines and how surprised he was at how good they often were. That even happened when I insisted on ordering a bottle of ‘Great Wall’ Riesling which he holds in his hand in the photo below. As the great Chinese philosopher Lao Tse repeatedly points out: all things will change.

Restaurant Hot Spot – Eisenzahnstrasse 66 – D 10709 Berlin/Germany

Tel: (49) / 0  30 8900 6878 – Fax: (49) / 0  30 8900 6877

E-mail: wu@restaurant-hotspot.de  –  Web: www.restaurant-hotspot.de

How I desire you, how I miss you Love, Tilly Devine !

A few months ago at dusk on a warm summer day I walked down a dingy alley in Sydney/Australia and into one of the most astonishing bars on Planet Wine. To be frank that wasn’t such a great surprise, because already the name had told me that one way or another this place was going to be very different: Love, Tilly Devine. The first time I heard it I remember thinking „what the hell is that?“ I was sitting on the back seat of a Sydney taxi next to a sensitive young man who’d just introduced himself as Matt Swieboda, an Australian “somm”, or sommelier. I could get my head around the fact that he was a somm who had worked in some pretty fancy restaurants from his manner – at once civilized and enthusiastic – and from his easy familiarity with the good and great wines of the world. However, there was nothing about him which struck me as being obviously Australian. I have to point out that that I’d felt the same way when I first saw the Mad Max movies, so maybe this was no more than a symptom of my inability to get a grip on contemporary Australia. Either way, right there and then I decided that on my last evening in Sydney I had to visit his wine bar.

Now there are two of my very favorite words: wine and bar. And when Matt said them to me in that taxi they conjured up a wild tangle of memories, images and fantasies in all of which light and darkness mingled in just about every way you can possibly imagine. The fact that it is a few years since I danced on a table in a bar doesn’t mean that this seems a remote possibility, any more than the fact that I never picked up a woman in a bar makes that seem like an absurd impossibility. Of course, wine has a hundred thousand meanings for me, but in combination with bar it narrows the field narrows down to a seductive cocktail of warm conviviality, relaxed sinfulness and that deliciously cool jolt of excitement in the moment of unexpected discovery.

And that’s exactly what I experienced that evening at Love, Tilly Devine. If only it hadn’t been so brief! That, of course, is a sure sign that it’s true love. I want Love, Tilly Devine to be around the corner from my home, but I know that there’s no way it can be transplanted to East Berlin and that equally there’s no way I’ll end up living in East Sydney in the near future. So I’m writing this to relive some of the best bar hours I can remember and to soothe my broken heart.

An entire dimension of that experience was Riesling. Yes, this sophisticated dive is undoubtedly one of the world’s great Riesling bars. Matt doesn’t just appreciate Riesling, he believes in it and breathes it. He’s determined that you should also find about this remarkable dimension of wine, if you haven’t done so already, and sincerely hopes that both he and it could enrich seriously your life. At the latest you find that out when you open the wine list and turn to the first of the Riesling pages. There I read some of the most extraordinary things I ever encountered in a wine list and make no apology for quoting them at length, not least because I never wrote anything better on this subject in spite of almost 30 years of trying:

Riesling is not only one of the greatest joys of the known world, it is also one of the most maligned and misunderstood.

So in the interests of humanity and the patrons of this bar, we present some simple, objective and irrefutable facts on this most refreshing and delicious of beverages.

1. Riesling is the best drink in this bar.

2. Riesling is the best drink in any bar.

“We aren’t here to force people out of their comfort zones,” Matt said to me after serving me a bottle of Cooper’s Pale Ale – the first drink I ordered, since I had spent the previous two days tasting Riesling at the Frankland Estate International Riesling Tasting – but then I observed him with a bottle of Riesling from Weingut Gunderloch in Rheinhessen/Germany gently helping a couple of women sitting close to me try something they obviously weren’t familiar with. (And I know they loved it, because they told me so!) The way he performed that act of vinous seduction leaning through the bar’s open front window standing on the pavement outside was a startling little piece of street theater.

“I come from a fine dining environment where humility to your guests is important,” he told me a little later after the buzz of orders had cooled a little, “it’s very easy to be arrogant about wine.” This is surely one of the reasons for the success of Love, Tilly Devine since it’s opening in October 2010. Unlike so many somms around Planet Wine who’s sole purpose in life seems to be force their latest and weirdest discoveries down your throat, Matt simply wants to please you and is willing to pack up all his suggestions at the drop of a hat if that’s what you want. It doesn’t bug him at all that one of the reasons Riesling works so well here is the fact that its refreshing personality – those uplifting aromas and that vivid acidity – seems purpose built for Australia’s warm dry climate. (That’s a no brainer, but I also recommend Riesling when it rains in Sydney. Then you need Riesling to convince you that the sun will return at some point, even after the most torrential downpour!)

Why then did he jump ship from the lush 3 Michelin star habitat whose ecosystem he was an integral part to set up what he calls a “sly wine bar”? There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation before he answered “you shouldn’t have to send $200 on a meal in order to drink good wine.” And if you look at my pictures of Love, Tilly Devine then I don’t think you need any help from my feeble words to see how he has created a radical alternative to the “fine dining environment” which anyone not suffering from a fetish for crisp white linen table cloths or addicted to being served by men dressed up as penguins ought to feel at home in.

And you know what, the food was totally delicious too. “Liver Paté” sounds humble and rustic, but it was rich ad subtle. The toast served with it swimming in excellent butter. I was hungry and exhausted. It almost instantly revived me. By that point I was deep in conversation with the two women at the next table, but I’d already got talking with other guests sitting around me so it seemed totally normal to be talking to strangers in a strange city. I didn’t try to pick either of them up and I didn’t dance on one of the tables either – at Love, Tilly Devine you have to sit at a table, and there’s no lengthy standing at the bar – but I floated back to my hotel from this Riesling-soaked dive.

10. There are several unconfirmed reports of Rieslings curing the terminally ill.

Matt Swieboda in the Love, Tilly Devine wine list

Love, Tilly Devine – 91 Crown Lane – Darlinghurst (East Sydney) – NSW 2010 / Australia

Tel: (61)/0  2 9326 9297

E-mail: tilly@lovetillydevine.com  –  Web: www.lovetillydevine.com

MARTIN TESCH, Riesling’s Man in Black

“Truth in wine is a scarce commodity. If a wine is more than 50% true then that’s already quite something.“

„Sometimes you have to go through the door; other times you have to go through the wall.“

Those are just two of my favorite sayings by Dr. Martin Tesch, Riesling’s Man in Black, which I scribbled down on odd scraps of paper and tucked away in what is now a bulging file. Needless to say the wines made by someone who spits out that kind of stuff all the time are controversial. “Haveyoutastedthewines?” people in the wine scene often ask me excitedly, and they’re either knocked out by the sheer vitality of the Tesch wines, or they’re shocked and incredulous that anyone could possibly think these Bladerunnerdry Rieslings were good to drink. Nobody who knows them sits on the fence or lacks an opinion.

Tesch is a German winegrower who from the first time I met him didn’t fit into any of the existing categories. Though he was born in the sleepy small town of Langenlonsheim in the Nahe winegrowing region and still feels very much at home in the vineyards and forest where he grew up, he’s equally happy standing in the spotlight on stage with rock musicians in Berlin telling the crowd his story, “the time is right for dry Riesling.” In fact, he loves the world of rock music whether he’s on stage in a Hamburg night club, back stage at the Rock am Ring open-air festival, in the audience at a U2 concert in a Frankfurt football stadium or driving in his jeep with the Tote Hosen, his favorite punk band, pumped up so loud the windows rattle. More about them later.

Wherever I meet him he’s almost always dressed in black. In a black suit and black shirt he cuts an imposing figure in the fermentation cellar he calls „yellow submarine“. To be honest, even though the mini-U-boot size steel fermentation tanks Martin Tesch inherited from his father Hartmut are painted yellow the place reminds me more of the submarine in the Matrix movies than the Beatles cute psychedelic cartoon, but that fits Tesch too. If he didn’t already exist, then a cartoon artist would have to invent him and like Batman he would be surrounded by deep shadows. The gleaming Brave New Wine World of modern cellar technology and the cosy Grand Château nostalgia of serried oak barrique casks don’t suit him or his dry Rieslings. That’s why he turned his back on those possibilities long ago.

“Doc Martin” as one Berlin wine groupie calls him was a University research scientist until he got bored with bio-chemistry and returned to Weingut Tesch in Langenlonsheim back in 1996. The scientist is definitely still one side of him, though that might seem hard to square with the rock ‘n’ roll. Some people say he’s the Mad Scientist of German Wine, but he’s the person I ring up if I can’t understand some new winemaking technique or if I’m lost in the labyrinth of wine chemistry. I always get a clear, concise answer and I always learn something from him.

Through those conversations I got many glimpses of the rigorous way he thinks through the internal logic of his wines and the minimalist methods he uses to produce them. Then there are the times he calls me with very different questions relating to the world of wine marketing and media, though I don’t know if I was able to help him much with those things. If Tesch’s creativity in the cellar has mostly been about reinterpreting old winemaking ideas to give them a thoroughly contemporary form, then his creativity in the field of marketing has had exactly the same goal, even if it often looked way more radical than that sounds.

This first became strikingly obvious back in the spring of 2002 when he launched a wine called Riesling‘Unplugged’. The name referred to the MTV series of concerts at which famous rock musicians play acoustic instruments without amplification or electronic effects. In terms of winemaking at Weingut Tesch it means not adding sugar to the fermenting wine to increase its alcoholic strength, nor using any chemistry to reduce its acidity content (both of which would tend to make the wines taste rounder), much less manipulating the wine in any of the numerous other ways modern cellar technology make possible. Apart from adding a small amount of sulfur* to stabilize the wine ‘Unplugged’ is a totally straight, bone-dry Riesling.

In spite of that, many of Tesch’s older customers were incensed by the new wine with its austere black label and they abandoned him in droves, some even writing vicious letters denouncing him as a German Wine Heretic. A year later he reduced the rest of his range of dry Rieslings to just five vineyard-designated wines each with a package in an in-your-face color. (See below). Then with the 2003 vintage he released ‘Deep Blue’, a dry white made from the red Pinot Noir grape with a gracefully-swaying aqueous beauty that was the exact opposite of the strict linearity of his dry Rieslings.

All this action provoked a bunch of wine critics to ambush Tesh according to the simple Germanic motto, Verboten – forbidden, you can’t do that! But that failed to faze Doc Martin according to the equally Germanic motto, “thatwhichdoesnotkillmemakesmestronger” (thank you Friedrich Nietzsche) and with each year since he has become more and more successful.

Completely unexpected for me was the publication two years ago of Tesch’s book ‘Riesling People Vol. 1’, even though I posed for one of the black and white photographs which almost completely fill its 176 pages. There are only three words in the entire book, if you except the brief introduction to the Tesch wines at the back and they are a pun: COOL CLIMATE WINES. That’s a perfect description of Martin Tesch and of what he’s achieved with them.

He’s not the kind of guy who could ever be completely satisfied with what he’s done though, so last year ‘Riesling People Vol. 2’, a German language audio book appeared (on which my voice can also be heard), and the Tesch & Tote Hosen joint venture wine ‘WeissesRauschen’, or white noise, was released. It was, of course, a totally straight, bone-dry Riesling.

„Still confused, but on a higher level.“

Martin Teach

Weingut Tesch – Naheweinstrasse 99 – D 55450 Langenlonsheim

Tel: (49) /0  6704 93040  – Email: info@weingut-tesch.de – Web: www.weingut-tesch.de

UPDATE, May 15th 2012 -CONGRATULATIONS to Tesch fans Die Toten Hosen for their simultaneous number 1 in the German, Austrian and Swiss album charts with Ballast der Republik !

With their new album Ballast der Republik the German Punk band Die Toten Hosen, or the dead trousers, have achieved the rare feat of simultaneously making number 1 in the German, Austrian and Swiss charts. Not bad for punks who’ve been rocking for 30 years! As you can see from the album credits (see end of first para), it was Martin Tesch who turned them on to the taste of “ehrlichem”, or honest, Riesling. Scroll up to the top of this story and you’ll see that the question of truth in wine is central for Tesch. Without honesty there can be no truth and that is no joke in a world dominated by a culture of lies with names like “one size fits all”, “mission accomplished” and “AAA-rated derivatives”. In this situation the truth in wine takes on a whole new importance.

By the way, Ballast der Republik, or ballast of the republic, is a play on words. It rhymes with Pallast der Republik, the name of the old parliament building of the very undemocratic Ex-East Germany, or German Democratic Republic. It used to stand less than a mile from where I’m writing these words and was recently demolished to make way for a replica of the old Prussian Royal Palace whcih the communists dynamited in 1950. Is this planned reconstruction a good thing? I think so for the same reason as East-German journalist Alexander Osang gave, “young people need something like a palace to kick against.” Without that how can something like Punk Rock grow and develope?   

The Story according to Johannes Tesch (10)

“Dad, when we’re both dead and lying in our graves, then we’ll look back and say that we really had a great life!”

UNITED COLOURS OF TESCH RIESLING

Blackisblack, I want my Baby back…and she’s Riesling ‘Unplugged’. This is the one if you want to stick to the straight and narrow of dry Riesling, and if you’re strong enough to lick the blade.

Sap green is for the dry Riesling from the Löhrer Berg, or empty hill, vineyard site. It is full of discretely juicy green apple and lime flavors, the acidity is moderate for a Tesch’s Greensleeves Riesling.

Lemon yellow is for the Riesling from the Krone, or crown, vineyard site. If a princess ever kissed me then I hope to turn into the king frog on this label. I always think of sun-ripened lemons. Summertime and the living is easy.

Turquoise blue ain’t normally a wine color, but it certainly fits this playful joust of dry Riesling from the Königschild, or king’s shield, vineyard site. Girls just want to have fun…just like some of the boys.

Brick red is the color of the stony soil in the Rothenberg, or red hill, vineyard site. There’s iron in that soil and in the soul of this dry Riesling. Those who are patient will be rewarded with herbs and minerals that tingle your senses.

Deep orange is the color of the magma beneath the volcanic outcrop which is the St. Remigiusberg, or St. Remi’s hill, vineyard site. So expressive, so compelling and 100% Tesch. Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!

STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL is not a game reserve for footnotes, but if you see a * then there is going to be a footnote for those people who have to know all the ins and outs of the Great Riesling Story. This time sulfur in wine is the theme:

If you think the addition of sulfur is modern winemaking then think again, because in Germany it was legalized by the Reichstag in Freiburg/Baden in 1497. And if you’re anxious to avoid consuming sulfur to protect your health, then I’m afraid you’ll have to cut out a bunch of foods beginning with cauliflower and broccoli, which are packed with the stuff. Incidentally, some of the sulfur-containing molecules in those vegetables probably help prevent certain types of cancer. By far the most poisonous thing in any good modern wine is the alcohol, but since Riesling ‘Unplugged’ clocks in at a modest 12% alcohol it’s low on that too. Of course, it also does all kinds of really positive things for you if you consume enough of it, but not too much. Don’t forget: alcohol is a drug and Riesling contains alcohol !