New York Riesling Diary: Day 31

The last few days were a bit short on postings because of the holidays and my continuing struggle to recover from the influenza-type virus which has been going around. Today I was in the American Museum for Natural History in New York for the exhibition ‘Our Global Kitchen’, which sadly tried to do a thousands things at once and got a bit lost as a result (though there was plenty of interesting stuff in it). Before going in I was in the fascinating gallery devoted to the Native Americans of the woodland Northeast. There I saw the above garment made by members of the Ojibwa tribe a couple of hundred years ago which seems to depict some kind of composite climbing plant including grape elements. I feel sure depict what we call Vitis riparia, a native vine which also grows around Lake Superior where the Ojibwa originate. The picture below show Vitis riparia growing on the Rosebud Reservation/South Dakota which is the modern homeland of the Sicangu Lakota Sioux tribe. Just to show that all of this is not of merely academic interest, Eldon Nygard’s Valiant Vineyards of Vermillion/South makes an impressive and highly original red wine from those grapes called ‘The Wild Grape’.

All this just goes to show that wine in America is about so much more than massive and pretentious Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons with three figure Parker scores and dollar price tags. Riesling is another important part of the complex reality of American wine, and has been since at least the 1860s. Numerous restaurant wine lists document the fact that immediately prior to prohibition Riesling was one of the most expensive California wines. Like many “noble” varietals it made a slow comeback after prohibition was repealed, then had the bad luck to be sweetened up with grape concentrate and turned into a “cash cow” during the Chardonnay boom of the 1980s. During the red wine boom that began when CBS ’60 Minutes’ broke the French Paradox back in November 1991. Riesling’s only sin back t then was being white, which is thankfully no longer a problem and the vineyard area planted with it is expanding in just about every state it grows in from New York to Oregon as people taste the wines and discover how good American Riesling can taste. For further information visit: www.drinkriesling.com

There was one important thought for wine drinkers and producers alike which I brought away from the ‘Our Global Kitchen’ exhibition. Currently global agriculture uses 80 million tons of chemical nitrogen fertilizer. The production of that fertilizer is highly energy-intensive and almost invariably consumes fossil fuels, thereby helping to drive global warming. Then there’s the run off which results from not all of the fertilizer landing in the crops, be they grapes, wheat or whatever. The remainder (more or less quickly dependent upon soil type) runs off the fields into the rivers from where it drains into places like the Gulf of Mexico. There it causes an explosion of algal growth which strips the seawater of oxygen creating a Dead Zone. See the following for more details of the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, one of the largest in the world:

http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/index.html

The wine industry’s share of global chemical fertilizer use is small, but it is really unnecessary for grape growing. Organic fertilizer can easily supply the vines’ meagre nitrogen needs. So what about a global initiative to eradicate its use in the wine industry? And why shouldn’t American Riesling producers grab the moral high ground by being the first to adopt this goal?