Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

I sit in My Sun Room on West 16th Street in Manhattan impatiently waiting for the last set of proofs for my book BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story, which Stewart, Tabori & Chang (an imprint of Abrams Books) will publish in June, before it finally goes off to the printers. That makes me think about how the book has been shaped by the inspiration of New York Wine City (NYWC). Of course, some of the inspiration was of a direct kind, most obviously in the form of many wine tastings in all manner of  settings here in the city. Some of them were devoted to Riesling, but the best discoveries came from events I was expecting nothing of. Then there were the many discussions with somms and wine directors, wine merchants and other involved professionally with Riesling. There were several sources of vital historical material here too, most notably the menu card collection of the New York Public Library which also contains many historic wine lists from right across over America. However, some of this inspiration, like that pictured above, had nothing directly to do with wine, but my mind often connected the dots such that this kind of stuff also got absorbed into the every-shifting network of ideas, images, words and wonder in my mind out of which the book grew and changed. And it really did keep changing right up to the last minute.

No book, not even that which wins an already world-famous author a Nobel Prize, is written by entirely one person. The widespread impression that a Great Work of Literature is solely the work of  The Great Author is an optical illusion created by keeping the editor(s) hidden away. I relish the process of editing and this time the throwing back and forth of ideas between myself and my editor, Leslie Stoker, was extremely productive. During this process all kinds of massive changes were considered and in the end one of them was implemented (cutting an entire text), but I haven’t regretted it for a second. On the level of detail, Leslie rapidly developed a great feeling for the flow of the story and what this required of the language. I think I reversed just one of her proposed changes, because a formulation she found “odd” came from this blog, many of you would already know it and I figured that made it work.

The way that David Blatty of Abrams oversaw the design process was no less vital to the book taking its present elegant, but startling form. He seemed to instinctively know what to do with my photographs – most of the pictures in the book are mine – and with those I was given by various people to fill the gaps in my photo archive. No less important was his feeling for how the various texts should fit together on the page. That’s actually something which can only make sense for you once you’ve got the book in front of you, and for that there’s still a good three month wait. However, I can tell you that there are two types of boxes which pop up at irregular intervals taking sideways glances that demystify Riesling and other wines (First Base), and analyze statistics to see what really happened to my favorite wine grape during the last years (Crazy Riesling Stats) and how it fits into the bigger picture of wine production and consumption in general.

More fundamentally, NYWC enormously influenced the way I approached this project, making me more radical in my open-mindedness, but also in my rejection of all the bullshit that is spouted about wine. Once you remove that, and the various types of national and regional chauvinism lurking behind it, wine of all kinds becomes such a fascinating subject, one connection always leading to many more others. This continual multiplication of connections was the reason it was a good thing to have a limited, clearly defined subject. That enabled me to have a global perspective and dig deep, but still write a rather compact book (it will come in at 208 pages, all included) and finish the research and writing in just over two years. Now I also have to wait those three months!

Almost exactly two years and two months ago I began research for BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story, which Stewart, Tabori & Chang will publish here in New York Wine City (NYWC) in June and the book is just about to go off to the printers. That means there’s no longer any possibility of adding anything more than a couple of words. I’ve long been aware that for certain Riesling regions, most notably the Mosel with its many excellent small producers, I could only present a selection of producers. After all, a book with just over 200 pages cannot be an encyclopedia, and I have to fit the whole of Planet Riesling into that limited space. However, I was hopeful that for most regions I had found and reported on most of the important rising stars. Then, yesterday, I met Vincent Sipp and tasted the wines from his Domain Agapé in Riquewihr/Alsace.

I was at the portfolio tasting of Savio Soares, one of New York’s most innovative and eclectic wine importers. I expect to find interesting French red wines, German Riesling (Hahnmühle in the Nahe!) and Spätburgunder reds (Ziereisen in Baden) at Savio’s tastings, but I was not expecting to bump into an excellent producer from Alsace/France I’d never heard of before. Various branches of the Sipp family have wineries in the Ribeauville area of Alsace, but I wasn’t aware that one of them had moved to Riquewihr and was making innovative wines in that historic town. Riquewihr always struck me as being more of a picture on the lid of a box of chocolates than a real place. It is, of course, the very real home of the house of Hugel, but for me those wines seem to have got stuck in a tradition-laden rut, which is really a shame.

Full of youthful vitality, but also with plenty of acidity and mineral character to balance the full body of good Alsace Rieslings Vincent Sipp’s wines are the opposite of Hugel’s and it’s tempting to declare him to be the “Anti-Hugel”. However, I think it makes more sense to take his wines on their own terms, and if I do that than I have to say that he’s a Riesling Superman! Look out for properly dry, vibrant and charming 2012 Riesling ‘Expression’ and the much more powerful, but still light-footed and elegant 2011 Riesling Grand Cru Osterberg from Domaine Agapé. The latter comes from Ribeauville and is serious competition for that town’s leading Riesling producer, the house of Trimbach which is world-famous for Clos Ste. Hune and Cuvée Frédéric Emile.

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It really ought not to be a very original observation at all, but wine is sometimes a crowd phenomenon. This struck me very forcefully when I was at the Kosher Food & Wine Experience at the Chelsea Piers/NYWC two days ago. Why did it strike me then, rather than at one of numerous other packed tastings I’ve attended here? Perhaps because (for no good reason at all) Kosher wine seemed to me the least least likely types of wine to not create a crowd. I must point out that by a crowd I don’t just mean a large number of people standing close together, rather I mean that as well as this some kind of crowd buzz and crowd dynamic developed. That certainly happened at the Kosher Food & Wine Experience, and I don’t think it would have happened if there hadn’t been so many interesting wines and a few great ones. They were the dynamo.

Why didn’t I write about this straight away? I think the observation that wine, no less than politics, religion, sport and music, can be a genuine crowd phenomenon struck me as too obvious. However, on reflection I felt that it deserves and demands to be said, if only because our image of wine drinking is so strongly shaped by those situations where a lone person at a bar, a couple at a dinner table or a small group of people consume wine in one or other of those situations. Those of us that, in one way or another, belong to the wine scene frequently become part of crowds at tastings and other events, but when we think back to those experiences we tend to focus on our own personal judgements of the wine, or those of our close friends and colleagues. That way in our memories we turn those experiences into individual ones, pretending that the crowd buzz had no influence upon them. That’s something I feel very suspicious of, in fact I’d say that the influence of the crowd buzz (or lack of it) is the Black Box of wine criticism! Surely a positive crowd buzz is making us feel more inclined to see the wines positively and a negative crowd buzz is doing the opposite? However, nobody’s really looked into this thing seriously.

Yes, even at the wonderful Rieslingfeier last friday evening at Rouge Tomate (who cooked a fantastic Riesling-friendly meal for way over 100 people) which was a seriously exclusive event it was the crowd buzz, as much as all those remarkable Rieslings, which made the evening. I think this picture captures some of that. Sure, you can mentally zoom in on this image and pick out Rosemary Gray of Flatiron Wines/NYWC or Clemens Busch from Pünderich in the Mosel/Germany. However, if you do that I think you’ll filter out the crowd buzz in just the way that we do in our memories when we focus on the wine in the glass at big tastings. We do we want to avoid accepting that all hell was loose around us and that this also shaped our experience of the wine? Is it that we want to avoid admitting that something akin to herd instinct also affects our own thoughts and behavior? I shall be thinking a lot more about that in the future. For anyone interested to learn more about the crowd phenomenon I strongly recommend Elias Cannetti’s remarkable book on the subject ‘Crowds and Power’.

Two years ago Stephen Bitterolf of the vom Boden wine importing company took a daring decision and launched the Rieslingfeier festival celebrating German Rieslings in New York Wine City (NYWC). Last night this year’s Rieslingfeier began with a dinner at Má Peche restaurant with wines from Emrich-Schönleber of Monzingen/Nahe and Rebholz of Siebeldingen/Pfalz. It was sold out as are this evening’s big event at Rouge Tomate restaurant and tomorrow’s dinner with wines from Willi Schaefer of Graach/Mosel and Dönnhoff of Oberhausen/Nahe at Betony restaurant. All the winemakers are present for these events too. That means that although it looked a bit risky two years ago Bitterolf’s decision to give German Riesling this platform in NYWC was spot on. Of course, all of you who don’t already have tickets are now wondering how you can be some part of the Rieslingfeier. The answer is that tomorrow (Saturday, February 22nd) is the Riesling Crawl in Manhattan with a handful of stunning tastings you don’t need a ticket for or even to pay for, just come along. I look forward to seeing you there! Here’s the list:

12:00-2:00pm: Cornelius Dönnhoff 

at Acker Merral & Condit, 160 West 72nd Street

1:00-3:00pm: Hansjörg Rebholz and Christoph Schaefer 

at Crush Wine & Spirits, 153 East 57th Street

2:00-4:00pm: Florian Lauer 

at Flatiron Wines & Spirts, 929 Broadway

3:00-5:00pm: Frank Schönleber of Emrich-Schönleber
 

at Moore Brothers Wine Co., 33 East 20th Street

4:00-6:00pm: Johannes Leitz and Egon Müller IV

at Union Square Wines & Spirits, 140 4th Avenue

5:00-7:00pm: Christian Vogt of Karthäuserhof

at Astor Wine & Spirits, 399 Lafayette Street

PS Many thanks to Birgitta Böckeler for the great picture of NYWC!

Yesterday I was at a very interesting blind tasting hosted by Patz & Hall winery of Sonoma/California at Corkbuzz Wine Studio in New York Wine City (NYWC). Called “site matters”, it was divided into two halves and it was the first devoted to the Chardonnays made by the duo of Donald Patz and James Hall’s that really interested me for professional and for personal reasons. You see, some somms, bloggers and journalists treat me as if I was the embodiment of the ABC phenomenon, that is the widespread desire for Anything But Chardonnay. Generally no evidence is offered to back up for this demonization of me apart from pointing to the fact they I’m pro-Riesling, which is so obvious it sticks out like dog balls. To be frank all this doesn’t bug me very much, because if you stick your neck out like I do you’ve got to expect a left hook or two, and rolling with the punches is the best strategy when they come. However, the truth often get lost due to all this.

It is that I often enjoy and sometimes love elegant Chardonnay. My problem with that delicious and often fascinating group of wines is its rarity (and sometimes its price) compared to the huge crowd of “Bullshit Chardonnays”, in which it all too often gets lost. Bullshit Chardonnay is my term for the generally cheap wines of this grape made from over-cropped vines that need considerable manipulation in the cellar. By manipulation I mean  doing things like adding a slew of oak aromas through steeping oak “chips” in the wine and/or blending with grape concentrate to sweeten up the wines and/or blending with more aromatic grapes to add fruit aromas (Muscat was a favorite for this before the Moscato craze started) to make them at least superficially attractive. Then there’s the sub-group of Bullshit Chardonnays that would be pleasant, even very good to drink if the vanilla and toast aromas form the oak (barrels and/or chips) weren’t so horribly dominant. The Chardonnays from Patz & Hall are an elegant contrast to these kinds of “comic book” wines.

At the NYWC tasting I wasn’t wowed by every one of the Patz & Hall Chardonnays I tasted, but that wasn’t the really important point. Rather, it was that all of these wines tasted very distinctive and there was no way you could mistake one of them for another. Although they’d all been made in small barrels, the oak aromas in all of them, even the recently bottled 2012s, were strikingly discrete. There was a healthy acidity in each of wine too, although all of them had been put through complete malolactic fermentation, which softens the acidity of any wine. If Chardonnay always managed all those things, then I’d be really happy!

Tasting them blind I was unable to discern which appellation each wine came from, much less each vineyard, lacking the deep tasting experience of Chardonnays from this part of California. However, it was really interesting to compare my impressions with James Hall’s comments about each of his wines at the end, because my descriptions were always close to his own. So there was definitely a logic to those differences in aroma and flavor, call it “terroir” or whatever else you want. My favorite amongst them? It was the as yet unreleased 2012 Hudson Vineyard Chardonnay from  Carneros, which was a bit funky, but also had an excellent balance of richness and creaminess with fresh acidity. It got better and better the longer it stood in the glass and my guess is that it will become more elegant with a couple of years of age, and should keep a good decade if the cork holds. One bottle of the 2003 Alder Springs Vineyard Chardonnay proved that Patz & Hall’s Chardonnays can age well in contrast to the many fancy California Chardonnays which either fade or crack up after a couple of years in the bottle.

Does that make it plain that I’m not an ABC axe-wielding maniac, and that you can please me by pouring a glass of elegant Chardonnay?

Joelle Thomson (the women with the Riesling back turned to the camera) is a journalist, wine writer and author of 14 books about wine in New Zealand. She was first bitten by the Riesling bug in 1994 and has never looked back. www.joellethomson.com. Here is her report on the current state of NZ Riesling, an underexposed part of Planet Riesling. 

The bus that took New Zealand Riesling devotees up State Highway 1 to this year’s National Riesling Tasting might have been half full but our glasses were over-flowing as we tasted our way through over 100 Rieslings from dawn till dusk – and beyond.

How important is Riesling to New Zealand? It’s a question that’s easy to dismiss, if numbers are all you go by.

On one hand, Riesling is the sixth most planted grape in New Zealand today; on the other, it’s been completely eclipsed by Pinot Gris over the past decade but – the biggest but – Kiwi Riesling has always aged brilliantly and its quality has never been better.

The country’s slow growth of Riesling – just 356 hectares since 2003 compared to Pinot Gris’ rise by 1,448 hectares during the same period (to 1,764 hectares today) in New Zealand.

Marlborough winemaker Andrew Hedley from Framingham Wines is one of the country’s most avowed Riesling devotees and the way he sees it, New Zealand will never compete on volume or price.

“Riesling is not trendy, popular or big volume for New Zealand, but it adds to New Zealand’s high quality image,” says Hedley.

Fellow Riesling maker Mat Donaldson from Pegasus Bay Winery used to think Riesling might one day be the new Sauvignon Blanc but now he thinks the quality is the best it’s ever been and that those who understand it are staunch followers. The wines prove both of them right.

This year is the third that New Zealand has had a National Riesling Tasting and it has been part of the country’s Summer of Riesling movement; picked up and carried from what New York restaurateur Paul Grieco first began. And as importantly, this year was the first in which New Zealand Winegrowers supported the National Riesling Tasting; coordinating logistics, promoting it to New Zealand wineries, collecting information about the wines entered and collating  tasting sheets. If it all sounds functional rather than the romantic Riesling dream, Angela Clifford is not complaining. She is New Zealand’s go-to Riesling organizer for the Summer of Riesling event each year, which she co-founded in New Zealand with winemaker Duncan Forsyth.

Clifford also co-owns Tongue in Groove wines with winemaker Lynnette Hudson while Forsyth is one of the owners and chief winemaker at Mount Edward in Central Otago. The pair both hope to see the support of New Zealand Winegrowers grow.

But there is no profit in Summer of Riesling. It wasn’t designed to be profitable, but to entertain and to champion diversity.

So, what is the future of New Zealand’s Riesling movement?

The lack of profit in the annual Summer of Riesling almost echoes the lack of profitability which has seen so many Kiwi winemakers turn to Pinot Gris instead. Almost. Those who champion Riesling in New Zealand are getting more adept at marketing and selling it, not least because they recognize just how superbly well it ages. Marlborough winemaker Dr John Forrest cracked open a bottle of eight year old low alcohol Doctor’s Riesling with me last month and it blew both of us away. As always with Riesling, it tasted about half its age. Screwcaps help no end, as a long lineup of Pegasus Bay Rieslings tasted this year, which dated back to 1996, showed. This year there were 70 wineries who took part in Summer of Riesling. There were 12 international media at the National Riesling Tasting and two local media (myself and fellow wine writer Jo Burzynska).

“One international journalist told me there was just no way they could write another story about Sauvignon Blanc  because it’s taken up so much airtime and they needed another white wine to write about from New Zealand. That person was hugely supportive of our Riesling,” says Clifford.

There is strong support for Summer of Riesling from those who attend, but as Framingham winemaker and Riesling fanatic Andrew Hedley said, “Riesling doesn’t have to just for   summer. Where would I be in winter without a big, dry, full bodied Riesling with pork belly? That’s my ultimate comfort food.”

Summer of Riesling, autumn of Riesling, Winter of Riesling or spring… I need no convincing; my New Zealand Riesling glass overflows with great choice from an exceptional line-up of top producers; my pick are shared below. No doubt many of their wines are not available internationally but if the chance presents itself to try these wines, leap in.

Joelle Thomson’s top New Zealand Riesling producers

Aurum Wines, Central Otago, winemaker Max Marriott

Babich Wines, Marlborough

Black Estate, North Canterbury

Cloudy Bay Wines, Marlborough

Forrest Estate, Marlborough

Framingham Wines, Marlborough

Fromm, Marlborough

Greenhough, Nelson

Greywacke, Marlborough

Maude, Central Otago

Misha’s Vineyard, Central Otago

Mount Edward, Central Otago

Neudorf Vineyards, Nelson

Nga Waka, Martinborough

Palliser Estate, Martinborough

Pegasus Bay Wines, North Canterbury

Prophet’s Rock, Central Otago

Seifried, Nelson

Terrace Edge, North Canterbury

Tongue in Groove Wines, North Canterbury

Waipara Hills, North Canterbury

Zephyr, Marlborough

America is famously the place where everything, including the portions in restaurants, is BIG, but in many respects in recent years America has been overtaken in this by China, parts of the Ex-Soviet Union, the Arabian Peninsula and Brazil (just to name the most obvious candidates). However, in Florida it’s hard to remember that any of this has happened. If it wasn’t for the fact that I heard a few Russian accents I’d have thought the Cold War was still being fought. In Florida the America of the ’80s, ’70s, ’60s and even the ’50s live on, and I keep being reminded of photos, movies and movies from those periods. I’m not talking about some kind of zombie-like state of un-death either. No, the nostalgic glow that envelopes everything from freeway-side palms to high-rise apartment blocks is like the rosy cheeks which indicate good health.

Above you can see me with one of those BIG portions (but certainly not the biggest portion) I was served here. It reminded me of a cartoon book called ‘Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head’ which I read as a teenager. I ate this mega-salad on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, which in one important way was a total exception to the Florida Rule. I’m 53 years old, but usually here I’ve been the youngest person in the room/on the street. In contrast, in Miami Beach I was surrounded by cool young sex-bombs flaunting their smooth, evenly-tanned flesh.

Then something ugly happened and the glossy magazine calm of Lincoln Road was ripped asunder. As I was attempting to make a dent in that salad suddenly two big dogs were locked in what looked like a battle to the death, and people in this outdoor sub-tropical mall were panicking. In the end (miraculously) no blood was spilt and everything quickly returned to what they consider normalcy here. Later a new friend in Miami Beach explained to me that this was definitely a, “Miami Moment”, giving the appearance on the street of a guy riding a bicycle dressed only in a golden thong as another example…

Although I’m anything but a beach person, and I try very hard to keep my tendency towards nostalgia tightly in check (in order to focus on that strange place called NOW) I’ve really enjoyed the experience of being immersed in this preserved version of earlier decades. You see, there’s no whiff of formaldehyde, in fact the place and the people almost always smell fresh, even when you know that they’re way too old to count as fresh. Wine was sometimes an exception to that rule. In liquor stores I found entire shelving units filled with White Zinfandel, a product invented back in 1975 by Sutter Home Winery, which I thought had long since disappeared from the market and been replaced by cool Pink Moscato. One of the younger people I talked to opened his wine cooler and pulled out a bottle of 2002 Liebfraumlich to ask me what I thought of it. That wine sure fits the nostalgia of this place, but I’m not sure that it would smell fresh if he’d opened the bottle. In fact I’d say that it was a full decade past its drink-by date and that proper Riesling (medium-sweet with a spritz of natural carbon dioxide?) would make much more sense in this climate. While New York has been hit with snow again every day here the temperature topped 80° F. Where is that Mosel Riesling Kabinett?

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learnt here, apart from how richly-colored and seductive nostalgia can be, is how everything is relative. I mean that very personally. When my self-confidence is below normal and work problems are bugging me (a combination we all face sometimes), then I start to think of myself as rather old, a bit unfit and slightly over-weight. Florida kept on showing me that I’m young, in great physical shape and positively lean. At the pool I felt like a an olympic athlete at peak fitness. And I’m really grateful to Florida for hammering that home again and again. I recommend it!

Vaughn Tan is one of the most interesting people I ever met. From the moment he opened his mouth the first time we met in a Cambridge/MA café on a snowy afternoon in early 2012 I could tell that we were what are simplistically called “kindred spirits”. This was and is extraordinary considering that Vaughn is a radically new type of sociologist and I’m trying to be a radically new type of wine guy. He grew up in Singapore and I did so on the edge of London. That first brief conversation opened up multiple new vistas of thought for me, and simultaneously encouraged me that my rejection of the conventional way that wine authors focus on the wine in the glass in favor of seeking out as many connections between it and the rest of the world as possible was the right path for me to follow. This is what my forthcoming book BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story (Stewart, Tabori & Chang from June 2014) does.

So it was probably inevitable that when I met with Vaughn earlier today in Maison Bertaux on Greek Street (my favorite café in the city and so much more than just a café) I should begin by returning to that point. “I think the type of wine journalism which focusses in on the wine in the glass to the exclusion of everything else is a lie. The problem is that it pretends that there aren’t all these connections between the wine and the rest of the world, beginning with how it got in that glass on this table.” Actually only cups of coffee and tumblers of water were on the table in front of us, but that same argument could equally be applied to them.

This set Vaughn talking about how his efforts to find a publisher for a book on “new food” have run into some difficulties, because the editors of publishing houses insist on regarding it as a Food Book, rather than a book about the interconnection between cooking, creativity, agriculture, the economy and the entire social dimension. That’s too big and too new for them, so they scuttle for safety on what they think is the firm ground of conventional food literature and what they call objectivity. For Vaughn (and I) the latter is complete nonsense as there is no objectivity, only continually shifting activity, ideas, sensory impressions and emotions. We feel the most honest thing to do is not only to present things in their context (i.e. how the wine got in that glass on that table and what that means to people in the situation it’s consumed in), but also how we came to the conviction that those things and that context demanded our attention. For us, the why and how of reaching our conclusions are inseparable from the conclusions themselves. We go a step further than Nietzsche when he wrote that, “the context is the facts”.

“How long have you been in Las Vegas?” Vaughn suggested I ask him, which seemed like a strange question considering he recently began three years of teaching at University College, London . I felt a bit silly as I dutifully threw back the question, although everything Vaughn ever suggested I do turned out to be right. “About five weeks,” was the beginning of a long story about the “Anti-Strip” of Vegas, a city I had a short and sharp introduction to last summer. He was referring to Spring Mountain Road, which is composed of a string of strip malls where a food revolution is clearly happening. That took me back to Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”  and made me start feeling I ought to go back there with Vaughn as a guide. Last summer when I was there briefly for the first time I felt that I completely failed to find a story worth telling about the city.

“Las Vegas is a place which seems to be predicated on chance, but actually it’s not, it’s based on risk.” Obviously out on Spring Mountain Road a bunch of chefs are taking some serious risks that have nothing to do with the huge casino-resorts, but may express some new American Dream. Surely this is a great food story and my guess is that there’s a wine story in there too. However, if you’re thinking in terms of conventional food literature and objectivity, then you won’t see it because your gave will be fixed on the rear-view mirror instead of looking at what’s in front of you thru the windshield.

Outrageous! The energy and creativity, greed and arrogance of London are right outside the window as I write this (above) and I don’t think there’s anything I need to say more about them than to observe that I’m currently torn this way and that by them.  Instead let’s turning the clock back a few days to my visit to Winzerhof Stahl in Auernhofen/Franken and my tasting of Christian Stahl’s (below) embryonic 2013 wines.

With just 150 inhabitants the sleepy hamlet of Auernhofen is about as far removed from Central London as you could possibly imagine. “Where the hell is that???” asks London looking down its long nose. The thing that London could never believe about Auernhofen is that, as well as growing a lot of wheat and using most of it to raise pigs it is also home to the Quentin Tarantino of Dry White Wines (as I christened him back in 2009). Already when I first met him a decade ago Christian Stahl was turning what “ignoble” white grapes like Müller-Thurgau and Bacchus can do upside down. Since then he has expanded this endeavor to include Silvaner, Scheurebe and the supposedly “noble” Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc grapes (which he reinterprets no less radically). However, Christian isn’t just a talented winemaker he’s also a thinker who pulls the myths of the wine world apart as if they were so much pink candy floss!

For him the terroir theory of wine is pushed way too far by some of its proponents and he pours scorn on the idea (let’s face it this is part of many sales pitches) that, somehow, those wines widely praised as being the ultimate expression of terroir are produced without any winemaking taking place; as if terroir removed the need for winemaking and enabled the production process to happen all by itself. The truth is that all wines are made, at least in the sense that they’re all the result of various decisions being taken in the press house and cellar, certain techniques having been chosen in preference to other possible methods.

The best argument in favor of this position are Christian’s 2013s wines, which strike me as being a remarkable work-in-progress. They have a racy brilliance and cool fruit aromas and mineral freshness that make me long for hot days and balmy evenings.  For Stahl the harmonization of this vintage’s substantial acidity is the greatest challenge in the cellar (assuming that only clean grapes were used, which doesn’t go without saying in this rot-prone vintage), and the normal German method of using a few grams of unfermented sweetness to do this job is really a last resort for him. Lees (the deposit of yeast left after fermentation) contact, lees stirring and some cautious use of malolactic fermentation (which turns the “unripe” malice acid in wine into the softer lactic acid) are his main methods of achieving this. However, if a small amount of chemical deacidification helps, then he doesn’t hesitate to do that. The proof this works is the wines success in the German market.

Christian is also an excellent cook (see left) and I’d certainly have given the guinea fowl breast he cooked after our tasting a Michelin star if I’d been a tester. No wonder his wines sell so well in the good and great restaurants of Germany (right up to Tantris in Munich!). I think his excitement about cooking and food has driven the development of his wine style, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he started an even more ambitious gastronomic venture than the excellent catering he and his wife Simone already do at their estate. Then the story of this winegrower who’s name means steel and who has steel in his soul will enter a new phase that London will find even more impossible to understand. However, the truth is that he doesn’t need the London market, just like a bunch of other German Jungwinzer!