My two months in NYC are drawing fast to a close and it seems appropriate that finally I get a short blast of icy winter weather. While I’ve been staying at the Hotel of Hope in the East 7th Street of the East Village/Manhattan I’ve pursued many lines of long-standing Riesling inquiry and completed many Riesling stories that have gestated in my mind for months or even years. However, the most important aspects of my stay were the unexpected ones, the fruits of serendipity, what washed ashore when I went with flow and let the tide take me where it willed.
My companions in this most unusual “Hotel” were a vital element of this process and I therefore have to introduce them to readers properly. Above is Birgitta Böckeler from the north of Germany who worked the last two years and two months for a software development company here in NYC and has now moved to another company in the same field in Hamburg. At first she was a bit disorientated that I, the “wine expert”, was not telling her what to think of the wines I poured in her glass, but once she got used to this idea we had a lot of fun drinking wine and a bunch of other things together. I also learnt a lot of new ideas from her, such as the IT expression, “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” That describes very well a lot of what I’m trying to do in my writing. Just before she left for Germany we went out to see the new Quentin Tarantino movie, Django Unchained, which I might not have bothered with if she hadn’t insisted. In ways she couldn’t have imagined this movie – in my view Tarantino’s best since Jackie Brown – had a wonderfully liberating effect upon me. Thanks again Birgitta for helping to open my mind!
Jürgen Fränznick, who’s work for the ARD public service TV channel in Germany as a reporter in NYC for the past five years, had to leave for a stay in the Fatherland a couple of weeks back and hasn’t been the same without him. Again and again he would surprise me with his suggestions and observations, always having a different perspective on how this city ticks and how the media tick. When you’re trying to push ahead new and daring projects in several different media simultaneously in a foreign city as I am that kind of help is vital. For this, but also for purely personal reasons, I look forward immensely to seeing Jürgen again when my NEW YORK RIESLING DIARY and I return to the city on March 4th.
Since the party I’ve been catching up with all kinds of work relating to it and a bunch of domestic chores here at the Hotel of Hope, because after my lunchtime meeting tomorrow I have to head out to JFK and fly back to Germany. I’ve also been thinking back over my time here and trying to decide what it is about New York Wine City that made my stay here so incredibly helpful to developing the various STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL projects. Certainly I’ve sometimes encountered people who’s convictions about wine get in the way of their clear perception of the truth in wine, but that’s something you find everywhere on Planet Wine. Far more often I have been stunned by the openness, particularly of Young Upwardly Mobile Wine Professions (Yupwips?) in New York. It is surely this, in combination with a long-standing culture of excellence, which keeps the city pushing the wine envelope. And my bet is that exactly the same combination of factors is behind Riesling’s rise, which clearly has some way to go before it reaches its zenith. That is reason enough to return!
