Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

By Paula Sidore & Stuart Pigott

Here is the first half of the presentation that Paula Sidore (pictured above) and I made at the ProWein 2020: ProWein International Media Summit at the Geisenheim Wine University in the Rheingau/Germany on the 21^st November 2019. The second half – coming soon! – includes what we said about the 6 wines we poured that day. Minimal editing was been undertaken for the sake of clarity.

Paula Sidore: I am an American wine writer, certified sommeliere and translator, specializing in German wine. I came to Germany from the USA in 2002, shortly before the summer that really seemed to “kick off” the awareness of Climate Change here in Europe, here in the wine industry. It was the point at which people – my president perhaps excluded – could no longer deny what was happening. 2003 presented conditions unlike anything many producers – especially those in traditional cool climate regions – had ever seen before. People died; crops withered. This was the point at which winemakers realized that talking, noticing, watching wasn’t enough. This was the point at which they knew: “We have to do something different.”

Now we’ve all spent the last 24 hours learning about the threats of Climate Change to an industry we hold near and dear to our hearts, our pens, and our lips. And even if this information we’ve been receiving is upsetting, overwhelming, and frankly depressing, Stuart and I are here to present you various approaches to sustainability, or, as I like  survival. 

Our presentation is called: Stayin’ Alive — we decided to spare you the sound track but imagine it running in the background. Since 2003 we’ve all been talking about Climate Change, but I’d like to change the vocabulary. See for me a Change implies a start and an end. It’s finite. If the last 15 years have done anything, they have proven to us that what is happening is anything but finite. It’s ongoing and its unpredictable, a locomotive barreling down on us with no indications of stopping.  And farmers, winegrowers included, are in the crosshairs, standing on those railway tracks. So, for me, I prefer to think of it as a Challenge. A Climate Challenge. We all need to figure out an approach, realistically many varied and ever changing approaches to survival.

And part of that survival is based on resilience, on figuring out how to preserve a centuries’ long history and tradition, in many cases taste, in a changing world. Ripeness levels are rising, and with them alcohol levels. The last really “cool” vintage we had here in Germany was likely 2010, and in Bordeaux you have to look even further back than that to 2002.

And yet the modern palate is crying out for Freshness! Lower Alcohol! More Acid! LIght, bright, lean and green. According to the PW Business report, 63% of retailers expect consumers to demand lighter and more refreshing wines as the shift in seasons continue. Even as longer, hotter summers continue to naturally bring heavier, riper and hotter wines. A very real and very difficult dilemma, because there’s no silver bullet for it. Perhaps it’s simply a case of people want what they can’t have, but I don’t think so. And regardless, part of survival is not just getting the wine produced, but also getting it sold. So what’s a winemaker to do?

There are as many survival options as there are wine regions. And over the course of an hour we certainly cannot even begin to cover them all. I do think, however, that it’s possible to break them down into 3 basic categories.

I Change the LOCATION in the polar and/or high altitude directio

1.10% of producers for the ProWein business report 2019 reported moving to different vineyards, with 17% considering such a move in the near future.

2. Grapevines have long thrived best in borderline environments and today Winemakers are pushing those limits: by seeking out cooler climates

3. Poland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway (2018 saw a Norwegian Riesling from Klaus Peter and Julia Keller of 76°Oechsle at 58° North!)

II Change the set up of the VINEYARDS: 60% of producers reported specific adaptations taken or planned in viticulture as a result

1.Growers are looking to curtail sunlight exposure of the grapes and/or canopy through a number of approaches in order to prevent overripening, rather than prevent under-ripening as had been for years the thinking

2. Change in exposition, vine height, canopy, variety and rootstocks that might do better in riskier conditions (frost, drought, etc)

3. 14% of wine producers in the ProWein business reported already having experiencing the need for other grape varieties due to climate change. 24% are planning change of this kind

Here New World winemaking has an advantage, as they are not legally restricted as the Europe is in terms of varieties and winemaking methods. This gives them the freedom to pursue a number of different approaches in a short amount of time to see what works best

Boredeaux is allowing seven additional non-traditional grape varieties into the appellations Bordeaux and Bordeaux Superieur to mitigate the effects of climate change on the region

III Change the CELLAR (inkl. packaging)

1.Whole cluster pressing, yeast selection, blends, reserve wines under pressure, etc

2. One in two large wineries and bottlers reported having to employ new enological technologies to adapt their wines to market needs

3. Packaging: lighter glass bottles, since glass production is energy intensive:

For example, according to Jackson Family Wines who have been measuring their greenhouse emissions since 2008, they found that glass bottles from production to delivery accounted for 25% of the company’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Moving to lighter bottles immediately reduced their emissions by 3%.

Stuart Pigott: What does sustainable really mean? Mostly, for the contemporary wine industry it means certification that the producer/importer/distributor/retailer/restaurant/bar can hold up to show they are on the right side of the moral divide. In many places around Planet Wine consumers percepeive a moral hierarchy of these certifications with producers who are “natural” and biodynamic right at the top, then, in descending order, those who are biodynamic or natural, organic producers, sustainable producers and, at the bottom of the ladder, small conventional producers followed in last place by those of an industrial scale. I don’t want to knock sustainable certification of any kind, and I am certainly not attempting to make any moral judgments myself, but for me sustainability is all about survival. Given the Climate Crisis we find ourselves in due to the acceleration of global warming, that‘s the real S-word on Planet Wine in the 21^st century.

Of course, survival has multiple meanings. What’s the real bottom line? I suggest it’s the question if we have enough food to eat and water to drink, a matter we will have to think about during the coming decades, even in the wealthiest countries as crop shortfalls due to climate change become more common and severe. However, on Planet Wine whether we can still get, or will still be able to get, the styles of wine and wines from the grape varieties we want is also a question of survival. I’m going to call it cultural survival – the survival of things we don’t want to lose, like the Wehlener Sonnenuhr vineyard on the Mosel (pictured above) and the Riesling vines planted there. That example makes it clear that cultural survival also has social and economic aspects.

To show you where we really are now and why climate change really raises the issue of survival I have a couple of charts to show you. The first of them (below) shows the heat summations on the Huglin Index for the vine growing season (April – October in the Northern Hemisphere, the opposite end of the year in the Southern Hemisphere) for a range of winegrowing regions during the latter part of the 20^th century. Today, we are in Geisenheim in the Rheingau, so I suggest that you look at the bottom end of the table to see where this region was a generation ago.

You need to look up the table a long way to find where it would stand, because 2018 was the warmest year ever recorded in Germany, that is, since Geisenheim started regularly collecting weather data in 1884. With 2312 on the Huglin Index it was almost as warm in Geisenheim as on the floor of Barossa Valley, and that’s a region mostly associated with powerful Shiraz (Syrah) reds with alcoholic contents of 14% – 15% plus! In 2008-9 I was a visiting student at the Geisenheim Wine University and back then I learned this is where the climate models said we would be around 2050! That and the heat waves of late June and July 2019 are the reasons that earlier this year I wrote the headline Cool Climate is Dead in Old Wine Europe.

The second table (below) gives an overview over what happened in recent years. Each vintage is the product of the weather during the growing season and temperature is the most fundamental aspect of that. During the period 1961-1990 the average temperature during the growing season in Geisenheim was 14.5°C. Then the majority or vintages had average temperatures in the 14.0° – 14.9°C range and gave more or less good wines, but several times per decade there were poor vintages with average temperatures below 14°C and then there were problems with un-ripeness, meaning green aromas, aggressive acidity and gritty tannins.

The top vintages were those with those years with average temperatures during the growing season of 15°C or more. A lot has been talked about the fact that Riesling is a cool climate grape variety, but actually it was only in those vintages that it came close to optimum ripeness, e.g. 1971 & 1976 in the 1970s when the harvest was also significantly earlier than in those vintages with average temperatures below 15°C. Of course, this raises the question as whether the characterization of Riesling a cool climate, late-ripening grape variety is entirely correct. At least to some degree it is a legacy of the conditions that were typical during the last centuries. During the Middle Ages Warm Period conditions were more like those today than the situation in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Of course, the 2018 vintage raises the question whether it is now, or will soon be too warm for Riesling in Germany. Certainly, the fact that the last poor vintage, i.e. growing season with an average temperature below 14°C, was 1984 and that’s a long time ago. Just look at what happened since 2000, there was only one vintage, 2010, with an average temperature below 15°C (the previous ones were 1996 and 1991)!

If we turn back to Table 1, then close to the top is Clare Valley in South Australia. The largest Riesling growing region in the Southern Hemisphere has a higher heat summation than the floor of Barossa Valley, but the Riesling grape still gives crisp and aromatic wines there! This has a lot to do with not the dramatic diurnal temperature shift there; something Clare has in common with many other New World Riesling regions such as the Columbia Valley of Washington State/USA and Marlborough at the northern tip of the South Island of New Zealand.

Clearly, Riesling has a wider climatic range than is commonly supposed by most people in the wine business (never mind consumers), but as Professor Schulz of the Geisenheim Wine University, one of the problems we face in trying to plan the vineyards of the future is that we don’t know what the upper warmth limit is for many grape varieties. Wine growing regions at the cooler end of the climate scale for winegrowing where climate change has been more pronounced have entered uncharted waters.

Watch this space for Part 2!

The Wines of Germany by Anne Krebiehl MW was just published by Infinite Ideas Books in London (30 Pounds Sterling, ISBN 978-1-906821-85-2), is the first new book on German wines in English in quite a few years and it deserves your attention. My own Best White Wine on Earth (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, NYC) really doesn’t count, because it was about the global Riesling phenomenon in which Germany is a minority shareholder and it’s now a good five years old. In the dynamic wine industry of Germany things move fast and there are exciting new producers that were invisible or did not even exist back then.

At just over 300 pages The Wines of Germany is a substantial work that fits astonishingly neatly into the canon of modern British wine books. That’s surprising because Anne Krebiehl was born in Germany and only as a young adult did she adopt English as her culture of choice. It is as much this cultural synergy as her thoroughness and questioning mind that make Anne Krebiehl’s work such an excellent book of its type. She has an instinctive feeling for the socio-cultural context and history of her subject that is rare amongst British authors writing about things German (Giles MacDonogh is an important exception to this very peculiar British blindness). That helps her enormously in making this subject accessible and fascinating rather than dauntingly complex.

The introductory chapter of The Wines of Germany on the German wine laws has a clarity no other modern author on this subject achieved. Those on Riesling, Spätburgunder (aka Pinot Noir) and Sekt (aka German sparkling wine) tell you more about these subjects than some top sommeliers could. However, the heart of the book are the 12 chapters on Germany’s 13 winegrowing regions (the two small East German regions are rightly combined in a single chapter) that contain a couple of hundred short portraits of the most important producers. Some of them are not well-known outside Germany and for many readers it will be the first time they have read about talented winemakers like Johannes Sinß in Windesheim/Nahe and Uwe Lützkendorf in Bad Kösen/Saale-Unstrut. Together, these texts add up to an excellent overview of the best that contemporary Germany has to offer, and here lies the book’s prime importance.

Currently, a few German winemaking stars like Ernst Loosen in Bernkastel/Mosel, Egon Müller in Wiltingen-Schrzhof/Saar and Klaus-Peter Keller in Flörsheim-Dalsheim/Rheinhessen get a lot of international attention, but this barely helps the majority of Germany’s best winemakers tend to get the attention that they deserve based on wine quality. So deeply rooted is the widespread prejudices against German wines – that at best they’re light, playful and at least slightly sweet, but almost never of much consequence or originality – it usually takes blind tastings in which the top dry white wines (Weissburgunder aka Pinto Blanc and Silvaner deserve serious attention as much as Riesling) and the best new reds stand next to international competition to demonstrate their class. Only then do many wine professionals and wine lovers in the English-speaking world realize that these wines often offer stunning value for money. This book should play an important role in improving the understanding and appreciation of these wines that have remained stubbornly underexposed.

I’m not trying to become some kind of climate prophet, but my work for Club of Stones reporting on the wines from the stony places around Planet Wine keeps confronting me with shocking new evidence of the reality of climate change. I recently got another jolt when my friend Sean O’Keefe posted on Facebook a story about climate warming in the USA published by The Washington Post on 13^th August, 2019. It included the map below where the intensity of red-brown color corresponds to the degree of warming One of the darkest spots (scroll down for a detailed view of the map) is centered on Sean’s home town of Traverse City/Michigan and Mari Vineyards on the Old Mission Peninsula (OMP) where he works as winemaker. Hence his very serious interest in what the map has to say.

Since I first met Sean at a conference in Seattle in July 2000 I also have an interest in this beautiful and fascinating wine region. When I first travelled there in October 2005 it was sunny and the temperatures were balmy, but when I arrived for my second visit in December 2007 it looked like an icy wasteland. As Sean said to me then, “we are right at the climatic edge where sometimes, very late in the fall, miraculous things happen…and of course, sometimes we fall off the edge.” If you’re on the edge then even a small movement one way or another can make a huge difference.

In the winter temperatures fall so low here that there’s a real danger of winter vine kill, but as long as the waters of Grand Traverse Bay, part of Lake Michigan, don’t freeze, the vineyards along the narrow OMP aren’t threatened with extinction. Additionally, the cold waters of the lake at the beginning of the year delay the arrival of spring, reducing the risk of frost damage to the young vine shoots. Then, the warm waters of the lake at the end of summer extend the fall, crucially assisting the ripening process. As Sean also likes to say, “we’re a very continental location, but, paradoxically, we’re also maritime.” 

When Donald Trump and other Americans with the same perspective deny the reality of climate change they often point to scenes like that I encountered in late 2007, but the weather stats have no axe to grind and speak a very different language. The taste of the wines confirms the pattern of warming, their aromas and flavors having got progressively riper during the almost 20 years I’ve followed them. For example, today Mari vineyards makes a string of surprisingly powerful reds along with excellent dry Rieslings.

Some of you are no doubt wondering if you really need to pay attention to the wines of this region, that’s so little known compared with Napa Valley/California. However, the growth and increasing sophistication of tourism in the Traverse City area and the stunning Lake Michigan shoreline (think spectacular giant sand dunes) is introducing ever more Americans to them. On top of that, the hard work of Sean and colleagues like Lee Lutes of Black Star Farms and Brian Ulbrich of Left Foot Charley has made the international wine scene rather well aware of the rapid improvement in wine quality achieved there during the last decade.

These facts, no less than my friendships with Sean’s family and colleagues, were in my mind when I saw that dark spot on the climate change map of America at the breakfast table of my home close to Frankfurt/Germany. My heart missed a beat. Then my mind kicked in and I thought, “Oh shit!” because there’s no pause button for climate change, no cherry picking the positives and leaving out the negatives. The cherry metaphor fits well, because the area around Traverse City is also the Cherry Capital of America.

So, I asked Sean if he could organize me heat summations for his region, specifically Huglin Index figures. They measure the total amount of warmth during April to September when the vines are growing and the grapes ripening. Shortly afterwards I received a table of this data for four locations in Northern Michigan from Professor Jeffrey Andresen of Michigan State University and the state climatologist. The Huglin Index figures for the OMP only went back to 2001, but those for Traverse City started in 1900.

The 2001-2018 average Huglin Index figures for the OMP and Traverse City are 1641.57 and 1,725.935 respectively. However, if you decide to take inro account the influence of the Lake in pushing back the growing season and calculate the Huglin Index for the months of May to October), then you get significantly higher figures, 1,753,74 for the OMP and 1,823.33 for Traverse City. The former is easily enough to fully ripen Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir, almost enough for Cabernet Franc. This gives a good idea of what kind of wines are currently successful here.

But for the sake of comparability with other regions let’s be classical and stick with the Huglin Index figures for April to September. They say that the climate of the area is roughly comparable to that of the Rheingau or Burgundy in the period 1961 – 1999 (scroll down to the first table in my penultimate blog posting for this comparison). In which years during the 20^th century was the Huglin Index for Traverse City at least the current average figure, i.e. which were the warm years? They were:

1900

– – – –

1921, 1922, 1925

1930, 1933, 1934, 1937, 1938

1941, 1944 

1955, 1959

1970, 1975, 1977

1987, 1988

1991, 1995, 1998, 1999

It’s striking how there are several duos of consecutive warm years, but no trios. Now let’s turn to the 21^st century:

2005, 2006, 2007

2010, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018

In less than 20 years there have already been two trios of consecutive warm vintages and one quartet of consecutive warm vintages! That is a very major change and it seems to acceleration of warming from 2010.

There’s a flip side to this pattern of warming though, which is the increasing frequency and duration of so-called Polar Vortices. The warming arctic seems to have resulted in a sluggish arctic jet stream that enables very cold air to push down through Canada and across Lakes Superior and Michigan into the USA during winter. “We can handle a couple of days of this and have so in the past, but several weeks of sub-zero (F) weather is deadly to grapevines, especially if the lakes freeze,” Sean explains. “That happened back during the winters of 2013/14 and 2014/2015. We just barely missed getting hit again last winter, though Southern Michigan and Ohio were not so lucky.”

Anyone who thinks that Northern Michigan is an unusually negative example of what climate change can do to a wine region, and that other region’s have it much better should think hard. For example, a glance at the map at the top of this story shows that Napa Valley only warmed a fraction as much as Traverse City and the OMP. However, back in early October 2017 it was hit by terrible fires that resulted in smoke tainted Cabernet Sauvignon grapes (the region’s most important and valuable crop) and a couple of wineries were burnt down. In next door Sonoma County entire residential districts were reduced to ash. Those fires were part of a pattern that’s undoubtedly connected to climate change.

How much more proof is needed for politicians to join us in uniting behind the science, rather than doing what the fossil fuel industry lobbies want, which is exactly nothing. We need action NOW!

This photograph shows “sunburned” Riesling grapes in the Mosel Valley immediately after the second extreme heat wave of 2019 Germany in late July. No less than the melting ice cap of Greenland or the catastrophic damage just caused in the Bahamas by hurricane Dorian it should be regarded as a warning of what it is to come. Things are moving fast and we need to act now before it is too late.

Almost six weeks have passed since I gave my seminar about Riesling in regions with warm and warming climates titles Wrong Side of the Tracks at the FLXcursion conference in the Finger Lakes (FLX), Upstate New York/USA. It’s now high time for an update on the latest developments regarding climate change and it’s influence upon wines made from the Riesling and other grapes in what used to be the cool climate regions of Europe and of the other wine continents.

My last blog posting (scroll down) ran under the headline Cool Climate is Dead in Old Europe, because during my research for my FLXcursion seminar I came to that conclusion. To be precise, if it is a decade or more since there was a genuinely cool vintage in a winegrowing region, then I don’t see how that region can be called “cool climate” any longer. For the Riesling regions of Germany 2010 was the last cool year (and the one before that was 1996). Of course, as I wrote, how the wines taste is another matter and I’ll return to this point after we’ve looked at the weather stats of the last three months for Norheim in the Nahe Valley. I have a particular interest in the Nahe, because I work as Riesling Ambassador at the Gut Hermannsberg (GHB) estate just upstream from Norheim, with the nearest weather station. I therefore experience much of this personally too.

The weather summary for June 2019 in Norheim is below in my previous blog posting, above is that for July 2019 and below for August 2019. In all these months the monthly average temperature was just above 20°C, which means that in both July and August it was 2.6°C above the late 20^th century (1961-1990) average, and in June it was 3.9°C above that figure. This results largely from the high number of warm days with the temperature reaching or exceeding 25°C on 67 days and 30°C on 31 days – more than a third of all 92 days! – during this three month period. On only 25 days – less than a third of all days – did it fail to reach 25°C. There was one heat wave each month, the maximums recorded for each being 39.6°C in June (on the 30^th), 39.7° in July (on the 25^th) and 34.2°C in August (on the 31st).

This lines up with the total of 840 sunshine hours during the last three months, with 297 hours in June alone. That’s 42.4% above the late 20^th century average! This is something with fundamental implications that’s far too little discussed in the German wine scene Rainfall is the other side of this equation. After the extremely dry June with just 18mm of rainfall we were lucky there was slightly more than 50mm of rain in both July and August and this was enough to keep the vines in decent shape. And if that’s the case on the extremely stony soils at GHB, then it should be no great problem elsewhere in Germany.

Except where there was massive sunburn damage late July the vineyards of Germany look very good as the Riesling grapes go into their last ripening phase. Picking of the pinot family of grapes (another quarter of Germany’s whole vineyard area) will begin much sooner and they also look good. Thankfully the acidity levels look healthy. However, that doesn’t mean 2019 was a “normal” year. I now expect that the growing season average temperature will not be far below the figure for 2018, the warmest growing season ever recorded in Germany with an average temperature of 18°C. Compare that figure with the late 20^th century average of just 14.5°C and 16.9°C, the average for the warmest year of the 20^th century, 1947, to get a feeling for what has changed and how fast.

The truth is that nobody knows how the 2019 wines will taste. It may be counterintuitive, but in 2018 GHB, along with many other German Riesling producers with vineyards on stony soils, made wines that still have cool climate characteristics. By that I mean they have bright aromas, sleek body, and a refreshing acidity. Analytically this translates into moderate alcoholic content and low pH. The problem is that what happened in 2018 doesn’t mean that in 2019 German Riesling producers are in the clear, only that they have a good chance of not losing the “cool climate” characteristics that historically made those wines special. I wish them the best of luck.

The next instalment of this story will look at developments in a distant location in North America where things are also changing fast. This is a local and global challenge and we need action on both those levels!

When I was a child in England I hated it when my parents, grandparents and other adults repeated expressions like „practice makes perfect“ or „all good things come to an end“ to me. That it happened frequently only increased my inner resistance to accepting these painful truths. Later, much later, I realized that this was egotistical of me and I flipped over in the other direction and started frequently repeating the American catch phrase, “it is what it is.” However, there are, of course, moments when it is still painful to accept that one or other of these things are unavoidable, and this is one of them.

On the 31^st July 2019 the wine bar Weinstein in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg will close forever. Maybe it sounds childish to find that painful and probably it is rather childish of me, but I don’t care. The reason for my pain is that for almost a quarter of a century those rooms – they reminded me of a tapas bar in Spain when I first walked into them in 1995 – were not only my second Berlin living room in the obvious sense of those words, but the place that I met with winegrowers, journalistic colleagues and other wine business people visiting my home town to exchange thoughts and experiences.

It goes even further than that though, because over those years my conversations with them and the Weinstein team reshaped the entire way I saw the world. I know that’s a sweeping statement, but if I’d recorded just one of my conversations with Roy Metzdorf, Weinstein’s guiding spirit, and could play it to you now I’m convinced that you’d get what I mean. For me Weinstein wasn’t just a wine bar, rather it was a state of mind, and in today’s world that also means a state of resistance to the brutal forms of thinking that are currently rampant.

Roy sudden death of heart failure in March 2017 aged 54 was a huge shock for everyone who knew him,  (you can scroll down to read more about him). That his brother Marc couldn’t solve the business problems that slowly grew in scale during Roy’s last years despite long and dogged efforts, should be no surprise. The result of this is that many people including myself are about to lose what for felt like a fixed point which helped us navigate the turbulence of our own lives and of the wider world. What should I say? It is what it is and all good things come to an end.

What does that really mean? I’m not going to be analytical, also because that was something Roy’s training in electrical engineering made him much better at than I am or will ever be. Instead, I’m going to tell a Weinstein story. Not the one of my evening in Weinstein with star German TV presenter Thomas Gottschalk (who was very charming), or how I got to know the German singer Max Raabe (who was very drunk). To be frank, I always missed meeting the most interesting of Weinstein’s famous guests, notably British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and members of the German heavy metal group Ramstein. Instead, I’m going to tell you about someone who is only known to a few people in the New York and German wine scenes, Rienne (pictured above with me in Bistro Sommelier in Düsseldorf, Germany on the 8th July this year).

Paul Grieco is the larger than life Canadian sommerlier with a goatee beard who runs the Terroir wine bars in New York City (NYC), started the global Summer of Riesling festival and has often stirred up the city’s wine scene in a positive way. One day in early September 2012 I got an email from Paul saying that a young member of his staff a “somm”, that is sommelier in American English, called Rienne Martinez was coming to Germany to work the wine harvest and would arrive shortly in Berlin. Could I meet with her and help her make sense of German wines? “Show her how it really is!” Paul instructed me.

I was fascinated by her name and I had to pay Paul back for all his generosity, so of course I said yes. I was not in a good state at the time thanks to a grinding depression caused by the failed marriage I’d failed to extract myself from, so it felt good to get out alone and have something positive to do. I packed a bag full of interesting German wines that I felt reflected the dynamism of the nation’s wine industry and set off on my bicycle from my then home on Hackescher Markt.

As I waited in Weinsten my plans to leave Berlin for New York City later in the year went through my mind. I planned to stay for two months from the end of November, I’d already found a place to stay and booked the flights. My plan was to find a publisher and write my first English language book in many years.  It was only just before my departure date that I realized this trip could be my exit strategy, but I no idea that two months would turn into four years of a very different life to the almost two decades in Berlin before.

Rienne was so engaging and interested that it was a delight to take the vision of German wine she’d acquired in NYC and gently demolish it. The very first wine I’d brought for her, the full-bodied bone-dry Hasennest Müller-Thurgau Christian Stahl makes at Winzerhof Stahl in Auernhofen/Franken accomplished most of that process all by itself. It was (and still is) a quintessentially German wine far removed from the more or less sweet Rieslings that made up most of the good German wine then sold in America. Instead it had a bright passion fruit aroma, was crisp, mineral and exciting; all things that were (and still are) abnormal for the wines of the humble Müller-Thurgau grape. Rienne was stunned and I could sense her struggle to cope with the way the ground was moving beneath her feet as if an earthquake was happening.

“So most German wine isn’t the way I was taught it is?” she asked as I poured tasted the third wine for her. “That’s right,” I replied, “the sweet Rieslings you have got to know in NYC are just one of many styles. The majority of German wines are dry and made from other grapes than Riesling. And there are plenty of innovative winemakers like Christian Stahl, who I call the Quentin Tarantino of German wine!”

This kind of revelation was one of the most important things that happened at Weinstein and Roy’s presence really wasn’t necessary for it to happen, though he was often the catalyst and sometimes the shaper of such situations. Those things that Rienne realized that evening have now become much less astonishing to NYC somms than they were back then, and now it would probably be impossible to repeat this “trick”. But so much of what passes for truth in the wine scene is myth and that has only got worse in recent years due to the idealization of so-called “natural wines”. So, there’s still enormous potential for sudden revelation.

However, very soon there will be no Weinstein, no perfect stage for this to be played out upon. Then I will have no choice, but to focus on memories of such moments in Weinstein when I have to gently point out to a somm or someone else that the world isn’t how they think it is. At this point Roy would say that we never understand the world as well as we think that we do, and that it’s healthy to be reminded of that fact as often as possible. I couldn’t agree more.

14th July, 2019 – New York City

Today is my 59th birthday and to celebrate that here’s the story of the crucial moment in my life as a wine journalist. Leonard Humbrecht, how can I thank you properly?

What was that „pungent“ taste I found in the first Kupfergrube wines I encountered at Gut Hermannsberg (GHB) back in 1984? The word “encountered” seems appropriate, because for me it was a kind of sensual Close Encounter of the Third Kind; my first contact with an alien world of taste far removed from all the flavours of my youth. Sometimes it shocked me, other times I felt it me pulling in with erotic force, but its mystery always fascinated me. Blindly, I searched for the answer.

Today, I would say that a taste characteristic to the wines from a single specific vineyard is definitely an example of terroir. Back in the mid-1980s I was already familiar with the French word terroir, or the taste of the place, but I assumed it could only apply to certain French wines, that is terroir was the taste of certain French places. During the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall Germany was such a different place from the France and when you looked at wine in the two countries the contrast was stark. That only reinforced that assumption, which certainly wasn’t limited to me.

Serendipity means chance discovery, and for me that means it is always revelatory. In this case, it all began at a tasting of fancy French wines in London one evening during the mid-1980s, an event that began in an atmosphere of reverence towards the Grand Cru of Francetypical for the period. In spite of the fact that vintage and the degree of human commitment clearly influenced their quality, these wines were often treated as timeless and holy, existing on a different plane to all others. Of course, that attitude made some of these tasting extremely boring, but this one was different.

After a cautious start, the expert presenting the tasting began drifting ever farther from the beaten track, and by the end of the evening I was hanging on his every word. It was poetry compared with the usual predictable platitudes and I wish I could remember you who he was and which wines we tasted that evening. However, one moment etched itself deeply into my memory. Speaking of the final wine he said, “as the Roman Emperor Hadrian once wrote, wine introduces us to the volcanic mysteries of the soil.” That sounded so exciting, but what did it really mean? Just a few days ago I discovered that those words sound too good to be true, because they actually come from Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1951 novel Memoires d’ Hadrien: “wine introduces us to the volcanic mysteries of the soil, to its hidden richness.”

Shortly afterwards the organizer of that tasting, Liz Berry MW of wine merchant La Vigneronne helped set up a trip to Alsace for me. Back in January 1987 when I departed from London Alsace meant France and the recent introduction of a Grand Cru vineyard classification system there only seemed to confirm that. However, when I arrived at Domaine Marc Kreydenweiss and tasted the last vintages of the cool and very mineral dry Rieslings from the Kastelberg Grand Cru I realized that Alsace had one foot in French wine traditions and the other firmly in Germanic wine culture. Even those wine names tell that story!

The next day I visited Domaine Zind-Humbrecht in Turkheim and met Leonard Humbrecht, the charismatic and gentle giant who was the most important promoter of the Grand Cru system in Alsace. Leonard’s influence not only on his home region of France, but also on Germany and can hardly be underestimated, but this is largely forgotten, because it all happened back in the 1980s. In fact Leonard’s revolution began during the 1970s when he was one of a handful of growers who purchased the steep vineyards that most producers were abandoning in favour of gentle slopes that were easier to cultivate.

As we tasted his current releases in bottle and the 1986s from the barrel Leonard took great trouble to explain the typical aromas and flavours for each of his vineyard sites. We visited many of them so that I could better understand how the soil-type influenced the taste of the wine. I remember feeling enormously excited as Leonard revealed to me how terroir functioned in this wine culture outside the French main stream, also with Germanic varieties like Riesling and Gewürztraminer. The bulk of my work of the following 20 years grew out of these experiences and what I learned during those days is still essential for my work, also now at GHB.

On the last day we had lunch in a Winstub and Leonard poured some older wines each of which was so fascinating that I could have spent hours studying it. The last of these was the 1983 Riesling Grand Cru Rangen and I’ll never forget the moment of complete astonishment when I lifted that glass to my nose and smelt the wine for the first time. With its wild and intensely smoky character it was like nothing else I’d ever tasted from Alsace.

Then, Leonard told me the story of how the tasting team of the magazine Revue du Vin de France had been split down the middle by it: one half considered it untypical and therefore disappointing; the other was convinced it was remarkable and unique. He explained the reason for this special character was the Rangen’s volcanic bedrock. There it was in my glass in the most literal form, the volcanic mystery of the soil that Leonard Humbrecht had rediscovered, then kindly passed on to me.

In that moment, when the reality of terroir unbound by national and cultural borders became totally clear to me, a long journey of discovery began. It was one thing to grasp some general principals and quite another to make sense of the whole world of wine, not least because winemaking (for example, the decision on fermentation yeast type – adding no yeast is also a winemaking decision) always influences the taste of the wine in a major way. And so it was some time before, again by chance, I read in a wine book that the soil of the Kupfergrube vineyard was volcanic melaphry (from a strict geological perspective it is composed of andesite, an igneous rock with porphyritic structure). Suddenly that pungent character which had etched itself into my memory way back in 1984 made total sense to me: it’s the soil stupid!

#GHBismyDRC

#loveNahe

To be continued…