Riesling Road Trip: Day 4 – 25 Hours Later in Austin/Texas

Yes, our drive from Phoenix/Arizona to Austin Texas via Marfa/Texas clocked in at 25 hours. 25 hours is a really strange unit of time and if you decide to do it, then I promise that it will do something really strange to you. What the hell were we thinking of when we dreamed up that schedule? Well, it may not have been my idea, but I certainly signed off on the plan which involved driving thru the night and more than a thousand miles of American Emptiness. And I dreamed that it in that vastness I might garner some fundamental insight into this country, or at least to shoot some really cool footage for my movie.

By the time the 24 hours mark rolled by we were still in the hill country – beautiful wine country! – between Austin and Fredericksburg and I was wondering who the hell I was. Sleep deprivation of this kind is banned by a slew of international treaties, but of course Extraordinary Rendition still happened. And how many seconds of usable footage had I shot with my improvised movie-making equipment? Not enough for a trailer, never mind a full scene!

Then we reached ‘The Whip In’ an ex-grocery store turned Indian restaurant, live music venue, bar, wine, beer and grocery store, and something miraculous happened, as you can see from the photograph above. It certainly had a lot to do with Paul Grieco who’d flown in “fresh” from New York Wine City (NYWC), and with the great group of Austin wine people who turned up and filled the belly of our Great Riesling Whale for the tasting. Maybe our ragged appearance – finally we looked as scratchy as our Whale (a customized shipping container) – and equally deranged mental state actually helped stimulate the “buzz” too? Whatever the correct A to that Q is I’d say that it was our best tasting to date. Even the opening wine, the regular dry 2011 Pinot Gris from Heger in Baden in liter bottles, seemed to hit a nerve, and the 2011 Riesling Kabinett from Jungwinzer Matthias Meirer in the Mosel was tailor-made for that steamy evening parked at the side of a freeway in Downtown Austin. Anyone who tells you that America is boring is not only bullshitting, but they certainly haven’t attended one of our tastings!

Then came the final wine, the 2003 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Auslese from Joh. Jos. Prüm, a wine from a vintage rejected by the American wine press as “untypical”, although the climatic data and analytical data of the wines is an almost 1:1 match for 1959. And  according to every vintage chart that was a great year! It was so creamy-dreamy and so drop-dead gorgeous that I forgot all the suffering endured on the back seat of our White Whale (the GM Suburban the Riesling Road Trip team and I are travelling in) to reach Austin. I felt truly inspired and that’s why it happened.

I can’t remember exactly who brought up the subject of Bordeaux, but it definitely was one of our guests. I may drink red BDX less often than I used to, but I regularly run into seriously impressive red wines. However, during the last twenty years I didn’t have one dry white BDX which excited me. Many solid everyday wines, yes, and occasionally something that tasted a bit better than that, but absolutely nothing which could stand next to a wine like J.J.’s 2003 Riesling Auslese. Not even close! And I blurted all that out finishing with the words, “for me Haut Brion blanc and the other high-end Bordeauxs are huge pointless lumps of dry white wine”.

“Could you be more direct?” someone asked with a tinge of irony. “We’ll I could be even more explicit, but I don’t think I should,” I replied realizing that I’d just added the producers of dry white BDX to Global Sauvignon Blanc and the lunatic fringe of the Bullshit Chardonnay lobby on the growing list of my enemies. But what am I supposed to do after espousing the idea that every wine is as good/bad as it tastes to you (or in this case me) for more than a decade? To my mind there’s a bunch of exaggerated and clumsy “fancy” wines out there which are grossly over-priced because they’ve got a famous name on the label. High-end dry white BDX is just one particularly ugly example. German wines almost never suffer from that problem, in fact much more often the opposite is the case. That is the wines have no famous names on the label, but taste great, are full of character and modestly-priced. Is that Good News, or what?

So what did I learn about America? Well, certainly that I have to return to Austin/Texas and this time not just for 12 hours in order to further explore this place which defies all the stereotypes of Texas and America. ‘Keep Austin Weird’ is the city’s slogan and you can buy T-shirts emblazoned with that slogan at the airport, so it’s mainstream. However, I didn’t find Austin at all weird, in fact everything I experienced from the moment my feet hit the sidewalk of that downtown freeway deserved another W-word: wonderful.

OK, I managed to recharge my devices during the night, but 6 hours sleep were barely enough to do anything for my internal batteries. And now we’re rolling way yonder to our next tasting, my next faux pas and, perhaps, somewhere along the Riesling Road, maybe at a gas station or in a hotel lobby, some kind of revelation about this country who’s vastness I’m finally beginning to appreciate.