Chris Miller, the somm of Spago Beverley Hills, sitting next to me in one of the Riesling Road Trip vehicles at an undisclosed location in the American West just made an important observation about the Riesling Road Trip’s last stop: “Las Vegas is everything poor Midwesterners dream of come true.” Certainly there were a lot of Midwesterners in the Wynn hotel on the Strip where we were staying until a couple of hours ago, but there were also a lot of my countrymen, and the Brits were the loudest-mouthed people in the place. I heard one instructing a group of Americans in the elevators how to pronounce “asshole” in the correct English way according to the imperialistic motto, “it’s our language”. I felt like yelling in his face, “NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION!!!”
The other bizarre thing about this hotel-resort-mall-casino was the mind-numbing inefficiency of this sprawling complex with pretensions to being a glitzy destination for the Midwest and the Rest of the World. Yesterday after our tasting outside the Lotus of Siam Thai restaurant our “roadies” Alfonso and Devin (thanks guys, also for those hamburgers from the In and Out Burger at midnight last night !) were working until 3am packing everything for the drive to our next stop today. When they got to the hotel the reception made a huge and totally unnecessary fuss before finally giving them their room keys almost an hour later. All things are relative but my check in of sluggish slowness compared to every major hotel I’ve stayed in around the globe during the last couple of years. It felt like being sucked into a Communist system with designer interior décor, hordes of bimbos, plus 24/7 blackjack.
Lotus of Siam was a devastating contrast to all this with its unpretentious commitment to great Thai food and great wine, most importantly a stunning list of German Rieslings from QbA to TBA. We may have started our tasting a bit late, but once we got going the enthusiasm of the group made me forget the heat and the long drive through the desert during which we passed the ugliest trailer parks on the entire planet, ghost towns of various sizes and outlet malls pretending to be towns. I also forgot all the casinos in this world of beauty and suffering (including the largest of ‘em all, Wall Street). Thank you Dönnhoff, Kloster Eberbach, von Schubert and Wagner-Stempel for bringing joy and nuance to this den of iniquity where it almost never rains water, never mind fire and brimstone.
But, I must finally explain the picture of Chris Miller and I above. We were standing under the dress of a 26 foot high statue of Marilyn Monroe which is currently parked in Downtown Palm Springs/California. It depicts her in that famous pose from the movie ‘The Seven Year Itch’ when her dress blows up. I can honestly report that her underwear was very proper. We stopped to say “hi” to her after our tasting in neighboring Palm Desert where we did a lunchtime tasting. The high point of it was the 2008 Riesling Kabinett from Emrich-Schönleber in the Nahe, a wine that was simultaneously effusively youthful and had some of the sexy patina of maturity. Chris finished the last drop of it under Marilyn, and yes that German Riesling paradox was perfectly suited to the desert climate and that iconically American situation.
Of course, there’s another side to our mad undertaking and Chris found out all about that last night when we arrived at that parking lot behind the Lotus of Siam. “Could somebody hold this for me?” Devin called out to us and Chris rushed forward to grab the pole supporting the opened side of the whale, that is our shipping container that was customized to become a mobile tasting room. Chris ended up minding that pole for a good twenty minutes, pointing out that it wasn’t exactly his idea of pole dancing. Jokes like that help keep up our spirits in places like the stretch of Arizona wilderness we’re currently passing through. We just passed a place called ‘Burgers and Bullets’ where you could shoot a machine gun while chewing on charred ground beef…
It’s now to sign off for a while and to try and catch up on sleep. We’ll be driving through the next night from Phoenix/Arizona to Marfa/Texas and in spite of the soothing influence of the Riesling Force I don’t imagine that we’ll get much sleep. If you see us and our whale (see the posting below for assistance in identifying the beast), then knock on wood for the Riesling Road Trip.
