“Amazing yumminess for all,” is the first principal of the Riesling “Gospel” according to Paul Grieco, co-owner of Restaurant Hearth and the Terroir chain of bars in New York Wine City (NYWC). He’s sitting next to me on the back seat of the GM Suburban propelling the Riesling Road Trip towards our final destination in NYWC. Plenty has been written about the self-styled “Overlord”, and much of it was good to read, but nothing really captured his combination of highly-motivated somm(elier), cool-headed businessman and full-throttle wine anarchist. Hence the dire need for this brief exposé of the man who is the eye of the Riesling hurricane.
According to Andrea Davidoff of Wines of Germany sitting in front of me in the car Grieco’s Wine Anarchy in the USA means, “a hundred ideas per day”. Grieco admits that, “I need minions to realize all the ideas”. The paucity of those minions means that anyone who ventures into his vicinity risks being sucked into the storm and being put to work on one bizarre project or another. This mad, bad morning was a perfect example of that.
A couple of days ago while we were driving through the desert I heard that amongst our copious luggage was a “baptismal font”, but nobody in the team seemed willing or able to explain why we were dragging the darned thing right across America. Shortly after leaving our hotel in Charlotte/North Carolina this morning we pulled up outside a Baptist church surrounded by a swathe of leafy suburbia. Suddenly the “font” appeared on the sidewalk, Grieco donned robes reminiscent of a preacher’s and our driver Alfonso Ruiz was “baptized” into the “Church” of Riesling by Grieco. First he had to be absolved of his sins, which the “Gospel” according to Paul Grieco said were drinking Chardonnay. All of this was recorded for posterity on video, also by yours truly. I’m making a movie so that’s how I got sucked in, but how did he talk Wines of Germany into all this? Well, talking people into things they’d regularly dismiss out of hand is one of his great talents.
Our tasting at ‘VinMaster’ in Charlotte last night was rather tame in comparison to all this, but looked at from the point of view of the professionals who joined our Riesling Boot Camp it surely looked and sounded very different. Or would you say that swearing allegiance to the wines you’re about to sample is normal practice at wine tastings? That’s one of Grieco’s standard practices, the “Holy Communion” of his Riesling “Church” during which he reminds everybody of Rieslings strengths: balance, delicacy, amazing aging ability, etc. Maybe that’s all showmanship, but even I don’t get to taste wines like the 2003 Bernkasteler Lay Riesling Kabinett from Dr. Loosen in the Mosel or the 2010 Bienenberg Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir) from Bernhard Huber in Baden every day. So we weren’t low on conventional content and the discussion about our perception of acidity in our mobile tasting room was very serious. Talking about them he was in his element.
It was a perfect Summer of Riesling night at ‘VinMaster’, and after the serious business of analyzing how Riesling ticks (rather differently from most other wines and totally different from Bullshit Chardonnay) we sat out under the XL moon and wallowed in Riesling wine and the Riesling Spirit until the thought of today’s 8 hours of driving finally made us think seriously about heading back to our hotel. By this point Grieco was hungry again, but the prospect of the prices which the local titty bar charges for mediocre food saved us from that fate (worse than death).
As the Great Alfonso puts his foot to the metal (“ain’t no shame in my game!”) and we speed towards our next secret destination I’m wondering what the next “black ops mission” he’s cooking up is. Am I about to be co-opted into another “commando raid”? Watch this space to find out, and to discover what our next secret destination of the Riesling Road Trip is. To see some highlights of the first section of our mad-cap adventure go to:
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