So far I’ve said precious little about this cosy and mind-expanding place I’m staying in New York Wine City, or the astonishing process by which these stories make their way from the inner recesses of my brain into the wide expanses of the internet. In answer to this criticism I now give you the first part of an epic story that makes Hermann Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ look small, and even upstages the fast-approaching Fiscal Cliff (GOP Freak Show Part XVII).
Before we get started properly I have to point out that I’ve been here before. By that I don’t mean that I’ve visited New York City before, (I first visited the city back in December 1988), but this apartment on East 7th Street in Manhattan’s East Village. At the end of July I was in New York for a week to shoot my first short film. Not only did the planned 5 to 6 minutes turn into 13 minutes and 57 breathtaking seconds, but that first short stay at the ‘Hotel of Hope’ turned into a long-term relationship.
‘Hotel of Hope’ is what my landlord Jürgen Fränznick, a journalist for the German public TV channel ARD, calls this home for vagrant creative types like myself who need a centrally located place to stare blankly at the wall and workshop for their dreams. By the time I arrived in the city November 26th STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL had been running for seven months, which might be a long time for the internet, but for Planet Wine is well short of one cycle from bud-break to bottling. In the case of Riesling that is 12 – 18 months. My experience as a writer is that a major project needs a full gestation period to reach fruition, which would mean that by the time I climb on the big silver bird to return to Berlin/Germany January 25th then I should have given birth to…a beautiful girl!
In German – my second language, which once nearly became the official first language of the USA – the vine, grape, and berries that make up the cluster, are all feminine, only the resulting must and wine being masculine. Books are neuter and films are masculine, but a story is feminine, and I am in the storytelling business. Just as grapes must ferment to become wine so stories must ferment before they become a book or a film. The Hotel of Hope is the fermentation vessel for the STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL book and film projects. Not only have I been sorting content to determine which items are really essential and which are merely “interesting”, but I’ve also been experimenting with new and different forms of storytelling for wine subject as regular readers already know.
I’ve sometimes called wine writing part of the Third World of Journalism, so horrendously undeveloped is it, so limited the range of styles and forms available off the peg to the journalist; so poor its achievements to date. When I’ve woken at Hotel of Hope, drunk a cup of tea while listening to Jürgen analyze American and world events with his eye for the comic aspect of the mundane and murderous, then run along the East River I come back here to the Hotel of Hope and feel that the possibilities of wine journalism are infinite. And that’s worth the hefty rent I have to pay for this room with a view over East 7th Street in order that Jürgen can continue to afford to rent this workshop for dreams.
At this point I have to thank the many people who I’ve become friends with in the city for their input, both conscious and unconscious, to my outlandish projects. Without this mass of raw material being pumped in I don’t think this wild ferment would have gained such a brisk pace or that such interesting aromas would have developed during the process. Some of them like Terroir Group designer Steven Solomon, portrayed below in the entry for Day 21, are well aware of their direct input in the shape of perfectly formed ideas that I simply inserted into the matrix of my plans. Others like Volker Donabaum Of A.I. Selections and Amy Troiano of American Flatbread know that they introduced me to people and places featured here, but probably don’t see the importance of what they did. Then there are people like Robin Schwartz of Garnet wines who nourished my thought process in more subtle but important ways. Without all of these diverse influences – their diversity strikes me as being typical for New York – I would still be struggling with the basics as I was a couple of months ago back in Berlin.
More about Berlin’s contribution to STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL another time…when I’ve had the time to figure out what the hell it was.