Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

One of the most fundamental aspects of the way we think about wine is the division of grape varieties into two groups, the “noble” wine grapes and all the other wine grapes which are considered more or less “ignoble”. For insiders the “noble” wine grapes are those from which a significant number of highly-regarded wines are produced, but the average consumer’s perspective is always behind the times, shaped primarily by the wines produced 20 years to 50 years ago. For them, the list of “noble” wine grapes  is much shorter, because back then many fewer exciting wines with a high international reputation were only being produced. However, whichever list it is the red Portugieser grape is not on there! Then it takes a daring pioneer like Horst Hummel, pictured above, to show that the Portugieser grape ending up in the “ignoble” corner is far too simplistic.

Recent research suggests Portugieser a native grape of Austria, and the story of it having been brought to Austria from Portugal by an aristocrat during the 18th century seems to be as much a fairy tale as the Shiraz grape (the Australian synonym for Syrah, recently adopted by various other winegrowing nations) coming from the Persian city of that name.  Today, Portugieser is only widely cultivated in Austria, Germany and Hungary, but in all those places it is renowned as a grape variety for the mass-production of pale, insipid reds. The reason for that it its ability to regularly give crops of 120 hectoliters per hectare or 8 tons per acre without any trouble, and more is possible with the help of generous additions of nitrogen fertilizer to the soil. Grapes grown that way give red wines with weak color and a low tannin content. The genetic make-up of Portugieser is far removed from that of say Cabernet Sauvignon and the family grape varieties related to it, all of which still give wines with plenty of color and tannin even when over-cropped.  (Those tannins don’t taste as good as those from low-cropped vines, but that’s another story). When Portugieser is cropped heavily the acidity content also shoots up and can make it taste seriously tart. Then winemakers can be tempted to add sweetness in the form of grape juice or grape concentrate to “balance” it. My first ever Portugieser was consumed in a apartment block in the industrial town of Ludwigshafen am Rhein/Germany back in the spring of 1975. It called itself a red wine, but was more like a rosé. It tasted thin, cold (although it was served at room temperature) and sweet-sour. Ouch, ouch, ouch!

It took me a long time to realize that, along with Pinot Noir, Portugieser belongs to the group of grape varieties which give light red wines (i.e. with weak color and low tannin-content) when heavily cropped, but respond to drastic yield-reduction by giving much more color and tannin. For that reason the vertical tasting of Portugieser red wines which Berlin lawyer Horst Hummel gave at the Weinstein wine bar in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg the other evening was not fundamentally surprising to me. He has been making wine in the Hungarian region of Villány since 1998 and the first wine he ever made was a Portugieser red. For most of the somms and wine lovers that attended the Weinstein tasting it was a total revelation. Many of them said things like, “how can this 15 year old Portugieser have such a deep color and still be so vivid and powerful?” And I have to admit that even I was stunned by Horst Hummel’s 1999 Portugieser “Reserve”, because I’d never experienced a mature wine from this grape which had aged so well.

This photo looking directly down into the glass gives an idea of how the wine looked (although the color at the rim of the glass didn’t look quite that amber in Weinstein). The current vintage of Horst Hummel’s top Portugieser, the 2011 Jammertal, is far deeper in color, has really polished supple tannins and a pronounced mineral note at the long filigree finish. It costs about 20 Euros, which is quite something for a wine from this grape variety, but in absolute terms that is still moderate. What red wines can you get from Burgundy for this price? Nothing that comes close to the sophistication of this wine from one of those “ignoble” grapes! Hats off to Horst Hummel!

PS Almost every wine in this vertical tasting was at least impressive (although the 1996 had an acetone problem – one of the dangers of “wild ferments” without any added yeast), and to describe them all would require another two postings of this length.

The Kurpfalz Weinstuben is one of the world’s best wine restaurantsand a very good reason to travel to Berlin (like I just did). But it’s so eccentric that many unadventurous people, who really ought to know better, i.e. be more open-minded, say things about it like, “well…yes I suppose if the other interesting places are full…”. That’s just the sign of a lack of imagination and appreciation though, that they aren’t able to accept how some “old-fashioned” things only seem that way because over decades and they’ve been perfected to the point where it’s very difficult to push them any further. Those words certainly apply to the Saumagen which Rainer Schultz, cook and patron (pictured above), has served since 1976. This pork and potatoes-based haggis like “sausage” from the Pfalz never tasted better than in Berlin’s Kurpfalz Weinstuben (the herbs and spices! the delicious pork fat!) although it often tasted wonderful in the Pfalz. The ideal wine for this dish is a bold, but subtle dry Riesling from the same region from dyed-in-the-wool traditional winemaking specialist Philippi of the Koehler-Ruprecht winery in Kallstadt/Pfaz. Many mature vintages of this wine are on offer in the Kurpfalz Weinstuben for the simple reason that this is a wine which really does taste so much more exciting when it’s had a few years in the bottle to mellow, then double-melloow, after which it is still bursting with life and energy. Need I write more? No, but of course I could go on and on. However, since I got to Berlin I’ve not been in good health and this is best kept short and to the point, as in this is a place you have to experience!

PS All I’ve done is to hint at what this place has to offer. The wine list is mind-blowing with sometimes absurdly friendly prices. The only things you shouldn’t expect here are light, low-fat food, bright modern lighting or permission to use your cellphone/smartphone. It might even be an NSA/GCHQ-free zone!

http://www.kurpfalz-weinstuben.de

I may be British and a visitor to the USA, but the assertion of the American Declaration of Independence of July 4th 1776 that there are certain  rights and that these include, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” made a great impression upon me from the moment I first heard those words as a small school boy in suburban London. The opening words of the preamble of the American Constitution of September 17th 1787, “We the people…“, struck me as being no less momentous. 2013 was a year during which I thought often about those two statements in all manner of situations, and as you can see from the picture above here in New York I managed to find the right direction for happiness, even if that path has been anything but straight or smooth. I hope very much that all of you, wherever you are reading this, have also been able to move in that direction. If not I extend my sincere hope that you will succeed in doing so during the coming year. To all readers, the occasional no less than the regulars I send my best wishes for the New Year!

A lot of stuff happened to me during 2013 and I don’t propose to review it all, because that would be too long-winded. My aim on this blog is to be up-to-date yet thoughtful, reporting in depth without becoming long-winded. However, certain things stand out and deserve a mention. The first of these was the planting of  almost a thousand vines of the red grape variety Pinotin at Klosterhof Töplitz vineyard in Töplitz just SW of Berlin at roughly 52° 30´North. Excepting those in the very driest corner of the slope they grew well, as you can see left, and we are set for a first harvest (probably one barrique) in 2015. Thank you everyone who helped with the planting and subsequent care of the vines. Soon after that my attention switched back to Riesling and I began traveling to all the important winergowing regions in North America where Riesling is grown. They are, in the order that I visited them, Columbia Valley/Washington State, Willamette Valley/Oregon, various parts of California, the Finger Lakes/New York, Okanagan Valley in British Columbia/Canada, the Old Mission and Leelanau Peninsulas/Michigan and the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario/Canada. It was striking to how Riesling seemed to be more or less on a roll in all of these locations. In New York State it recently became the main vinifera grape variety, in Ontario it is about to become the most important white vinifera grape variety and in Washington State the vineyard area devoted to it doubled during the last decade. Even in Oregon where it is overshadowed by the vast Pinot Noir acreage and the serious Pinot Gris plantings it has grown a third during the last ten years. I photographed the bunches of Riesling pictured here in a vineyard belonging to Cave Spring on the Beamsville Bench of Niagara in Mid-September. Many thanks to all the winemakers who went out of their way to help me understand how Riesling ticks in their regions and who introduced me to competitors.

I must also thank the team from Wines of Germany in New York with whom I undertook the first Riesling Road Trip from Venice Beach in Los Angeles/California to New York City during the latter part of June. Not only did I see a great swathe of the country I’d never been to before (e.g. Arizona, Texas, New Orleans, Alabama), but I got to hear how Riesling is developing in the US market. Perhaps it isn’t racing ahead as Moscato did during the last years, but the foundations of its growth seem rock solid and consumers right across America are slowly drifting in the direction of less sweet wines. That strikes me as extremely positive news.

Of course, at this point my mind also turns back to the many amazing wines, Riesling and otherwise which I drank and tasted during the last year. It’s hard to single one out of the many Riesling discoveries and innovations I encountered over the others, although I gladly did so for www.Wine-Searcher.com and you can find it by clicking on the link below. Interestingly, I wasn’t the only one of their authors to pick a new North American Riesling as their wine of the year. That was also a wine I considered picking, so congratulations are also  due to Bob Berthau of Chateau Set. Michelle in Washington State for the revolutionary Auslese-style ‘Eroica Gold’:

http://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2013/12/our-wines-of-the-year

The bottle I enjoyed drinking the most was probably this one. In a tasting of the 2003 vintage dry German Rieslings for the German wine magazine FINE at the end of August (see issue #4 / 2013 for my report) the 2003 Hermannshöhle ‘Großes Gewächs’ (GG) from Helmut Dönnhoff in Oberhausen/Nahe was the most ravishing of the handful of stand-out wines. Was I ever going to drink it though? Then, when I got back to New York in early September I found I had a bottle of it in a box of mixed mature dry Rieslings saved for a blind tasting. Because too many wines were now lined up for that tasting I pulled it and drank it with friends one evening instead. This wines has a liveliness and delicacy for the vintage shaped by the “summer of the century”, for a vintage which was an almost 1:1 rerun of the opulence and creaminess of the 1959 vintage in Germany. It also has a treasure chest brimming with golden aromas of all kinds that I could spend all evening going back to again and again. Time has only improved it and if you can run get hold of well-stored bottles and the cork is good this is one of the most amazing Rieslings young or old I can recommend you. And yes, it ought to hold, I’d say at least another decade. So, to all intents and purposes this is my wine of the year!

The late summer and early fall were dominated by work on the manuscript of the book which I’ve been researching since February 1st 2012 (when I arrived in Adelaide/South Australia) BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story, due for publication in Stewart, Tabori & Chang in early June 2014. I wrote most of it at this small desk on the 14th floor high above West 16th Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues) in Manhattan. Perhaps the cramped working space helped me to be concise. Certainly, at just under 200 pages it is much more compact than anything I’ve written in a good while, although the subject is the Riesling wines of the world and the global Riesling phenomenon. It’s also my first book in English in almost a decade. In a few days I’ll get the first sample pages back from the designer and the last phase of work before the book’s appearance will begin. Since it will primarily be illustrated with my own photography that will be particularly exciting. But don’t let me turn this short look back turn into a tome!

MAY THE RIESLING FORCE BE WITH YOU IN 2014!

When I see New York Wine City (NYWC) looking like this the music I hear in my head is Wynton Marsalis’ trumpet, for even though he was raised in New Orleans no other contemporary jazz musician strikes me as having absorbed so much of the musical history of this city into his own playing as he has. To be frank until hours ago that statement would have been based on the shaky evidence of  listening to a few of his many albums. Then, suddenly, I received a telephone call from Jürgen Fränznick of the Hotel of Hope in the East Village, my first real address in NYWC, who told me that he had a free ticket for the Wynton Marsalis Septet at Dizzy’s Jazz Club in the Time Warner Building. So I raced up there for what turned out to be the best jazz concert I can remember experiencing in many years.

I’m not an expert on jazz, but I could clearly hear how Eric Reed (piano), Victor Goines (sax and clarinet), Wessel Anderson (sax), Wycliffe Gordon (trombone), Reginald Veal (bass), Herlin Riley (drums) and Wynton Marsalis all have a great appreciation and knowledge of jazz and many other types music. It oozed from their precise and finely-nuanced performance. The remarkable thing is how in spite of this their music never had a hint of cold virtuosity, even when they took a jazz classic like Thelonious Monk’s ‘Thelonious’ and turned it upside down in a way that was as brilliant as it was  sophisticated. Perhaps the most amazing thing they played was a no less radically reinterpreted version of Geroge Gershwin’s ‘Embraceable You’ in which Wynton Marsalis’ trumpet took on the role of the vocal. It was breathy – I mean that we could hear him breathing through his trumpet! – and yet it was also warmly melodic, it was joyful and it was haunting. It was also totally New York in the way musical worlds were intertwined with a delight in cultural cross-pollination, but actually the latter is one of the things which has made America great and continues to do so.

PS I drank a glass or two of Riesling, a German wine appropriately called simply ‘Hooked’, and the view out of the window over Central Park and the Upper West Side had something of the mood of the photo of the Financial District above.

25 years ago today Pan Am Flight 103 from London Heathrow to New York JFK broke up in mid-air after a bomb ripped a hole in it and crashed on the village of Lockerbie in Scotland. This anniversary has a special significance for me, because I was on that flight to New York exactly one week before and when the news of the bombing came through I had just returned to London from New York and was still suffering from jet lag. I think about the victims of this terrorist act, but also the New Yorkers who I got to know during that first visit to the city who have since died. The most important of them are Lamar Elmore the then head of Wines of Germany, and Louis Broman who was later head of Wines of Spain with whom I stayed. Both were generous, extremely intelligent and charming people. No image can adequately accompany these thoughts.

PS Regular stories will return to this blog very shortly. Several have been delayed because of the bout of influenza I’ve just had.