Riesling Road Trip: Day 4 (Part II) – The Houston Principal

This lunchtime I wasn’t expecting anything particular in Houston/Texas except a (hopefully) interested crowd at our next tasting on the Riesling Road Trip, but without even looking for it I discovered an aspect of contemporary America, which also says something important about its future. And because I found that out in Houston I’m going to call my discovery the Houston Principal.

Before today for me Houston was Mission Control for the Apollo moon program. July 21^st 1969 was the day the Eagle landed, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to step on the moon, and my parents forbade me to watch the live TV pictures because they reached us at 2am local time and I had to go to school the next day. Actually I’d been hooked the previous Xmas when the Apollo 8 astronauts become the first men to leave earth orbit. Later the words, “Houston, we have a problem,” would etch themselves into my mind and popular consciousness around the world. “ETA” or Estimated Time of Arrival took on a whole new meaning during the following days.

For once we arrived at the location for our tasting, the ‘Underbelly’ restaurant, early and this enabled us to visit first the neighboring ‘Blacksmith’ café, then ‘The Hay Merchant’ beer bar on the other side of the building from Underbelly. In the Hay Merchant we met the owner of all three establishment Kevin Floyd (pictured below – for more info visit www.haymerchant.com), who took us “backstage” where we saw the technology (pictured above) which enables them to serve 73 American craft beers on draft. We tasted a bunch of extremely diverse and individual beers with Kevin and it was impressive to see how quickly he honed in on my personal taste (as with wine, a little bit of funk goes a long way). But that’s not my subject today, rather what interests me here is the whole nature of what Kevin Floyd’s doing, that is how extremely professional, innovative and stylish the Hay Merchant is.

“If only you could take things like this place back home with you!” Michael Schemmel of the German Wine Institute, who lives between Frankfurt and Mainz/Germany, said to me. What he meant was if only this was his local bar, down the road in Frankfurt, or at least easily reachable in Berlin. The important thing here is that someone from a country renowned around the world for its beer culture wanted to take a beer bar from Houston/Texas, a city and a state not traditionally renowned for beer in a country not internationally renowned for the quality of its beer, back home. Michael drinks beer for refreshment, but also comes to it from a wine perspective, so this really says something.

Then Paul Grieco of Hearth restaurant and the Terroir wine bars in New York Wine City (NYWC) added a decisive observation. “It used to be that you had to go New York in order to find out what was happening in the wine and food scene, but it’s not that way any more!” Exactly! Just like San Francisco and Los Angeles, New York still often claims that it’s the capital of the American wine and food scene, but this very notion of a center and backwater has now gone out the window. The Houston Principal says that if it can be done in NYWC, SF or LA, then it can be done in your city just as well, or maybe even way better.

That impression was confirmed by our tasting, which attracted an extremely knowledgeable crowd, who really put Paul Grieco and I through our paces. They had no difficulty making sense of the complex feinherb/medium-dry 2011 Drohner Riesling from A.J. Adam in the Mosel, which is light years removed from any kind of “standard” German Riesling style. They may have never tasted a 44 year old Rheingau Riesling before, but the 1969 Schloss Joahnnisberg Riesling Spätlese lit their fire. It had an aroma that was at once mellow and of jewel-like brightness which will haunt me all the way back to NYWC where we are due around lunchtime on June 27^th. The Eagle has landed again!