Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

It wasn’t part of any plan, but one thing lead to another and yesterday afternoon at Hotel Delmano in Williamsburg/Brooklyn I hosted a tasting of Rieslings and Pinot Noirs from the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario/Canada for a group of New York somms. I find Niagara, where 93% of Ontario’s 15,000 acres/6,000 hectares of vineyards are situated, a totally fascinating place. It seems to us to be rather far north, but it’s actually at the same latitude as Chianti Classico, 43° N. We think of it as cold because of the winters, but the mean July temperature of 71° F/21.7° C is identical to that for Napa Valley! Most of the vineyards are either on the bench lands of the Niagara Escarpment (cool) or on the alluvial plain below (uncool), but either way most of them are either flat or north-facing. Sure there are limestone soils on the benches, but the glaciers dumped a lot of other rocks from the Canadian Shield on top of them; an odd mix. However, for me the more important reason for doing this tasting was that when I was in Niagara this September I found a huge leap in quality compared with my previous visit 9 years before. Then there were no good Pinots and only a few exciting Rieslings, and now there’s a bunch of both.

On paper the timing of the tasting was good for the Rieslings, since we mostly tasted wines of the unremarkable 2011 vintage. However, that kind of vintage is the real test for a winemaker, and this was a test that Charles Baker and Hidden Bench (Marlize Beyers and Harald Thiel) passed with flying colors. Their 2011s – the Vinemount Ridge from Charles Baker with its delicate herbal character and near-perfect (medium-dry) balance, the sleek and dry Roman’s Block from Hidden Bench with its pronounced mineral character – showed what’s possible in Niagara even when nature doesn’t smile. There was general agreement that most concentrated and remarkable of the Rieslings was certainly the medium-dry 2010 CSV from Cave Spring, and we were sad that it wasn’t possible to give this one more time in the glass. It was also interesting to see that the group had the same trouble I have guessing how much grape sweetness is in these wines. It is always more than you think, that is more than you can taste.

There was some general comment about the Pinots being too oaky, but I remember hearing this same comment being made by somms about Pinots from all kinds of other places. Only when Burgundy is in the glass does the subject of the oak aromas and tannins suddenly evaporate (although they are certainly in those wines and sometimes there’s too much of them in Pinots from Burgundy too). The stars of this group were definitely the regular 2010 and 2006 Pinot Noirs from Hidden Bench. As Lisa Granik said of the 2006, “there’s some delicacy to the tannins here, the wine has poise”, and that was something the other wines lacked. These are wines which ought to be much better known in places like New York Wine City (NYWC).

We finished with three Riesling Ice Wines. After all it was with Ice Wine (the 1989 Vidal Ice Wine from Inniskillin won the Grand Prix d’Honneur at the 1991 VINEXPO) that Canadian wine first attracted international attention. Everyone seemed to love the bloodorange and passionfruit aromas of the 2008 from Cave Spring, but for some in the group the acidity of this wine was clearly a bit too much. Certainly the 2008 from Inniskillin was lusher with more baked fruit (pear tarte tatin) character, but for me didn’t have the vibrancy of the Cave Spring wine. These are really details though. The main result was that many in the group tasted a row of Canadian wines for the first time, and we were all agreed that this is an important winegrowing nation that deserves to be taken more seriously.

For a moment yesterday afternoon I was lost in the designer basement of the ACE Hotel on West 29th Street. Which of the many black doors was it behind? I decided to start “at the beginning” with the door with a big white A on it, and when I opened it I found Clark Smith and the audience for his tasting of American wines. I’d met the author of the brilliant ‘Postmodern Winemaking’ (University of California Press, 2013) on Saturday evening at Lisa Granik MW’s dinner table in the snowy wilderness of Brooklyn, but that conversation with him barely prepared me for yesterday’s tasting.

He began with some general, yes, sweeping assertions. “The paparazzi of the wine industry have hit us with the accusation of manipulation.” He was talking about my profession, and I cast nervously around the room to see which of my colleagues were there, but apart there were no other wine journalists present, in fact the New York Wine City (NYWC) scene was conspicuous by its absence. “It is my view that all winemaking is extremely manipulative. It’s all about artisanality,”he continued. Of course, artisanal derives from art, which we in the West instinctively contrast with nature. Today “natural” and “authentic” are crucial words for the wine scene and not only in NYWC, but when I hear them I often wonder what my colleagues are really talking about. From the beginning of the tasting we were in deep waters, but I gladly let myself be sucked into Clark’s maelstrom where so much conventional thinking gets turned upside down.

The first two wines were both 2003 Chardonnays from Wine Smith, Clark’s own micro-winery for hi-end bottlings. The first had an alcoholic content of 12.9% and the second of 14.8%, and no wonder we all preferred the first of them! With it’s aromas of lemon oil and lees funk (technical term: sulfides) it was very much in the Chablis mould. Best of all it had a mineral freshness at the finish (it was remarkably fresh for a 10 year old Napa Chardonnay) which was not dependent upon the wine’s (moderate) acidity, just as the mineral note in good Chablis isn’t. In contrast, the second wine was hot and bitter with none of that freshness. Then Clark hit us with the horribly truth: the first wine with it’s “terroir” character was made from the same grapes as the second, but had just shy of 2% alcoholic content removed from it through the use of reverse osmosis (which Clark describes as, “just a really tight filtration). So, the wine which we journalists would regard as manipulated tasted better and had the “terroir” character we’re looking for!!!

Then came the next bombshell in the form of the 2005 ‘Crucible’ from Wine Smith, a Napa Valley Cabernet with medium-body and the kind of dry fine-grained tannins that the NYWC and other wine scenes tend to associate with Bordeaux and find very cool. After we’d all praised it Clark revealed that it has, “lots of Brett”. Brett is short for Brettanomyces, a type of yeast that lives in wine barrels (and sometimes other places). If it becomes too active can give the wine a smell of band-aid or horse stalls. Of course, that’s negative, so how did his wine have so much Brett, but lack those ugly aromas? “By knitting together the wine’s structure with oxygen,” was Clark’s answer. What he means is that if the maturation process goes well (something the winemaker strive for), then the tannins, color, aroma and other substances in red wine “build structure” giving it a “soulful resonance”. Then aromas like Brett, that can stick out like dog balls, become subsumed in the whole and are no longer directly perceptible. More deep stuff for a Sunday afternoon!

Additional examples of structured reds followed in the form of under-appreciated American wines like the cool, lively 2007 Cabernet Franc from Jamesport Vineyards on Long Island/New York with its nose of raspberry and lemongrass, a graceful wine for this grape with polished tannins and no hint of green bell pepper (a Cabernet aroma I hate). The 2010 Norton from Augusta Winery in Augusta/Missouri just a short drive west of St. Louis was one of the best wines I’ve tasted from this grape (that from Chrysalis Vineyards in Middleburg/Virginia being the other star). I loved its bitter chocolate and blackberry character, and it was a seriously concentrated with generous supple tannins. That’s pretty amazing for $18.93 direct from the winery! More extraordinary still was the 2012 Petit Blue from Hermit Woods in Meredith/New Hampshire, which provoked a lot of discussion when served blind. However, nobody got the reason for the great berry aromas: It had actually been made from wild blueberries. “I heavily manipulated it!” winemaker Ken Hardcastle with an wry smile. However, it did not taste one dimensionally fruity (there were some discrete tannins) and it had great balance. Maybe I’m amazed!

By this point the entire audience was reeling in the best possible way. Then came the whites and amongst them was the single most surprising new wine I’ve tasted in a long time. It too was served blind and from its peach, passion fruit, grapefruit and floral aromas you could have thought that it was a young Riesling from a cool climate region. In spite of the delicious interplay of a juicy grape sweetness with a bright acidity and those aromas I immediately sensed that this couldn’t be a Riesling. But what the hell was it? It turned out to be from the Le Crescent grape, a new hybrid from Minnesota, made by Coyote Moon  Vineyards in Clayton/New York. I’m not talking about Long Island, the Finger Lakes or even the Hudson Valley though, for Clayton lies on the St. Lawrence Seaway! Although it has won a slew of medals including Best of Class at the San Francisco Chronicle’s wine competition, direct from the winery it costs just $14,95! Then came the Cahaba White from Morgan Creek Vineyards in Harpersville/Alabama, a Muscadine with an eye-popping bouquet that reminded me of my rare childhood candy orgies, but was delicious in an entirely adult way and costs just $10.99 direct from the winery.

Because more than 20% of all American vineyards are planted with Chardonnay and the big brands of Chardonnay dominate grocery and supermarket shelves right across America  – something that the handful of big Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Pinot Grigio brands also do – so the majority of wine drinkers here have no idea that such wines exist, never mind how good they taste. The American wine market is one huge optical illusion which creates a no less widespread “taste illusion”!

I share Clark’s belief in the enormous potential of the other wine regions of America (i.e. those outside mainstream California) and the other wine grapes (i.e. those that are not Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot or Pinot Grigio), and this tasting was a very convincing argument in their favor. What made it one of the most amazing tastings of my life was the way Clark’s thoughts on so many of the key issues for the wine industry and for wine drinkers in the 21st century were interwoven with the actual tasting.

“The revolutions in wine are not the work of scientists,” the scientist and winemaker explained, “but of lunatic heroes who try stuff which orthodox thinking says should never be tried. There’s maybe a 3% success rate, but once in a while something really works.” Yesterday’s tasting had a success rate many times that and I felt that it was also just the beginning of a great journey of discovery to the unknown Wine America.

My book manuscript has been edited and is now with the designer, so I can finally catch up with a slew of other things that spent months circling unable to land. High on this list is a new bio for this blog. To read the final version click on the link below or on the tab I AM RIESLING above:

http://www.stuartpigott.de/?page_id=2

Seldom have I experienced a tasting like that of Georgian wines which Lisa Granik MW presented this afternoon at Hotel Delmano in Williamsburg/Brooklyn. Even in New York Wine City (NYWC) where the culture of excellence and plain old hot competition drives standards up, sometimes with bizarre results, I never before experienced a tasting where the winemaking background and the cultural background to the wines were presented in such fullness and with such a clear feeling for what is decisive or essential. What I mean is that Lisa didn’t just dump an avalanche of detail on us and leave us to try and find the connections. The fact that she lived in Georgia for a year at the beginning of the 1990s obviously helped, but I promise you I’ve been to tastings of French wines by people who’d lived in France for a year that were rubbish compared to this tasting! Although I’d been to Georgia in the Caucasus in June 2008 just weeks before that ugly little war with Russia erupted and been given a crash course in Georgian wine and culture, but this afternoon I still learnt a lot of vital stuff.

For most of the other participants it was like being thrown in the deep end of an olympic diving pool, because all the comparisons with Western Europe and most of the paradigms and metaphors we derive from the wine cultures of those nations don’t help you make sense of Georgian wines, rather they make it way more difficult to piece the information your palate is telling your brain into something resembling a coherent picture reflecting the reality on the ground. For me it was not only the chance to refresh my memory, but also to catch up on what several major producers have done during the last few years. The most important of those was Vinoterra in Kakheti (in the east of the country where the majority of the vineyards are).

During my June 2008 tour of Georgia the most exciting wines were those being made by Dr. Giorgi Dakishvili at Vinoterra in Qvevri, that is fermenting them in Georgian “amphora”, were the most striking and exciting of all. That was also the case at today’s tasting, but the best wines were even better than those I experienced there five years ago. The most remarkable of the whites for me, and for many of the other young somms present, were the white 2011 Rkatiseli (the nation’s most important white grape) with its dense apricot aroma, rich body and full, but harmonious, tannins. The two 2009 Saperavi (the nation’s most important red grape) reds, regular and Selection, were both delicious with the aromas Lisa regards as classic fro this grape, “blackberry, blueberry, pomegranate, licorice, smoke and graphite.” The Selection is still very young, but even it has well-integrated tannins, and for wines that taste this big and imposing 13% is really moderate. There’s also nothing sweet about them, but this is logical for these wines all spent their first months of life on the skins in Qvevri and anything that could be extracted from the skins was extracted from them during that time. The remarkable thing given this hardcore method is the wines harmony and feeling of proportion.

Thank you again Lisa, not just for the wines and all the information, but also creating an atmosphere where everybody felt free to say whatever they thought and there was an open, friendly, but entirely professional discussion of all that was said. That is the Riesling Spirit, even if there wasn’t one drop of Riesling in this great tasting!

Suddenly, yesterday afternoon I got a text message from a French number telling me that Florain Busch of the Clemens Busch estate in Pünderich/Mosel was in town and would like to meet up for lunch today. Luckily I didn’t have a road trip to New Jersey or any other up and coming Riesling destination planned for today, so we met up at Shanghai Asian Manor, 21 Mott Street in Chinatown/Manhattan for soup dumplings and a couple of Rieslings I brought along.

Florian explained that for some months he’s been working at Domaine d’Aupilhac in Montpeyroux,  just over 20 miles northwest of Montpellier. It’s quite a close neighbor to the famous Domaines Daumas Gassac and Grand des Pères, although to be honest I prefer the Montpeyroux wines to them. Florian was very excited by the d’Aupilhac’s Les Cocalières red from a vineyard with more than a thousand feet elevation and northwesterly exposure. I really have to taste it. For more information see:

http://kermitlynch.com/our_wines/domaine-daupilhac/

I poured the dry 2012 Navrarro Riesling for Florian and he was very surprised when I revealed that it was from Mendocino/California. He’d just said, “it could be from Rheinhessen”. He thought the lusciously sweet 2013 ‘F Series’ Riesling Auslese form Framingham in Marlborough/New Zealand might be a 2010, but was unsure where on Planet Riesling it came from. I felt very reassured by his excitement about these wines, because these were some of the hottest discoveries from my research trips for BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story.

Of course, I asked Florian the obvious question that is also the title of this posting. The answer was that he and his French girlfriend are here for just a week on their down to Argentina for nine months to work on organic farms there. When they return to Languedoc they plan to start their own farm growing wine and raising various kinds of animals. The great wheel of time is turning and the trend of the last decades towards farms devoted to wine called wine estates/Weingüter/Domaines/Fincas/Quintas is turning back in the direction of mixed agriculture. That fits with the Riesling spirit, which always admitted other grape varieties alongside my favorite grape.

PS Florian’s girlfriend insisted I got in the picture too.

Yes, the world (i.e. New York Wine City, or NYWC) may not want to believe it, but Northern New Jersey is making some great wines including Riesling! That’s where I was yesterday, on my second New Jersey Wine Road Trip (NJWRT) with wine economist Karl Storchmann of NYU and documentary filmmaker Marcarthur Baralla of Defendshee Productions in Brooklyn. We found a great winemakers and also a future Riesling star, but first let me explain the reason I’ve been hunting and gathering in Jersey.

New Jersey wines need champions and in Cameron Stark of Unionville Vineyards in Ringoes the state has one of America’s great winemakers, not that you could even guess this from reading the mainstream wine press. For most of them there seems to be a hierarchy of East Coast wine regions with the North Fork of Long Island at the top, then Finger Lakes, followed a long way behind by everywhere else that wine is grown in New England. The very idea that someone in Northern New Jersey could be a great winemaker must seem absurd to anyone trapped inside this rear view mirror mindset.

What makes Cameron so important for Jersey and in the national context is his mastery of a wide range of wine styles. I need to tell you about his most important wines to make this clear. They begin with a style which the mainstream wine press consistently underestimates: medium-dry aromatic whites. Unionville’s 2012 ‘Eureka’, a blend of Riesling, Pinot Gris and Albarino is a delicious wine in this style with a cocktail of fresh fruit aromas, the discrete sweetness accentuating the juicy fruit and crisp acidity beautifully. I hate Viognier, but the 2012 Amwell Ridge Viognier from Unionville manages to marry the over-ripe peach character of the grape with moderate richness of texture and a liveliness rare for this grape. The Pheasant Hill Chardonnay is surely one of the best wines from this grape anywhere in America. I tasted the 2013 from barrel and am convinced this is a great wine in the making! Cameron poured the 2012 alongside the other single vineyard Chardonnays of this vintage from Unionville. Back at Marcarthur’s New Jersey tasting in Brooklyn on November 10th I found a tropical fruit character in that wine over-ripe. In fact, the 2012 Bell Well is the only Chardonnay from Unionville with this kind of aroma. Cameron is convinced that several cases of this wine were wrongly labelled Pheasant Hill by an employee and that our samples were drawn from one of those cases. Certainly the 2012 Pheasant Hill Chardonnay  is cool and more herbal than fruity in aroma with the same sleek silhouette as the great 2010 and just a hint of funk from long lees contact. OK it costs just over $50, but this is a great wine. Let me say it straight, forget Kistler!

The 2011 Pheasant Hill Syrah is a great example of this grape and a stunning achievement for that very difficult vintage. It has the smoky bacon, pepper, blackberry and leather aromas of a top Northern Rhône wine and very elegant dry tannins. Equally impressive is the 2011 ‘The Big O’, Unionville’s Bordeaux-type blend although this vintage it is 85% Cabernet Sauvignon and 15% Petit Verdot, and I never tasted a red Bordeaux with those vital stats. The black cherry and cranberry aromas are supported by less smoky oak than the more muscular 2010, and once again Cameron has judge the tannins perfectly. From barrel we also tasted the 2013 and 2012 vintages of a Syrah-Grenache-Viognier that is another stunning Unionville red in the making. Then there’s the ‘Vat 19’ Port, a multi-vintage wine made entirely from the hybrid Chambourcin, which can stand next to the best LBV ports.

Just like Jersey the Chambourcin grape has an image problem, because it is way down another hierarchy, that of grape varieties. If you were to stick ‘Merlot’ and ‘North Fork’ on the label of the 2011 Silver Decoy Chambourcin red from Working Dog winery in East Windsor then you could easily sell it for several times the $16.99 they charge in the tasting room, a corner of which is pictured above. Mark Carduner is rightly proud of this wine with its forest berry aromas, its rich tannins and fresh finish. We also tasted several lots of his 2013 Chambourcin and that vintage is at least going to match the 2011. At Marcarthur’s Brooklyn tasting my top wine was the 2010 Silver Decoy Cabernet Franc from Working Dog and once again this really impressed. This winery’s high-end reds always have some obvious oak aromas, but also great fruit and there was only a hint of the bell pepper type aromas and sappy character of this grape. By the way, this winery was previously know as Silver Decoy, but a law suit recently forced them to change name. Because the new label doesn’t yet have official approval it will be the Silver Decoy label you’ll encounter.

Peter Leitner of Mount Salem Vineyards in Pittstown is not only a talented home baker, as the baguette pictured above shows, but is also the man who proved that Blaufränkisch (the Austrian name for the grape the Germans call Lemberger and the Hungarians know as Kéfrankos) is a vital part of New Jersey’s wine future. Asked about that he said, “I’d rather be lucky than smart”, but frankly it now looks pretty smart! He showed us two 2012 Blaufränkisch which we’d tasted from cask during NJWRT1 on December 20th last year as bottled wines. Together they prove that there’s such a thing as terroir in Jersey. Of them the 2012 Leitner is clearly the superior wine with a wonderful fragrance and silkiness in spite of generous supple tannins, the oak aromas discreet. This is the best red wine Peter’s made to date, but you’re probably going to have to wait a full year to enjoy it, then pay more than $50 for the privilege. Anyone who wants to taste an example of Peter’s hand-crafted reds for a more modest price is recommended the delicious 2012 Zweigelt, which is brimming with cherry aromas, but also has the tannic power he strives for and costs $25. These healthy prices for the top Jersey wines is something else almost nobody in NYWC or the mainstream American wine media have picked up on yet. And now on to Riesling!

Mike Beneduce of Beneduce Vineyards also in Pittstown/NJ has just put his first wines on the market, although the best of them – the rather oaky, but fresh and peppery 2012 Blueprint Blaufränkisch – isn’t quite out there yet. However, it will be the 2013 whites, which we tasted from tank and barrel, that are going to make his reputation. Of these the most important for me is the dry 2013 Estate Riesling, the first wine of this kind from Jersey which completely convinced me. It is quite a powerful and complex with a certain amount of spice, and that’s perhaps why Mike compares it with Alsace. Frankly, though I think its closer to the Riesling GGs from Germany. The medium-dry 2012 Three Windows Riesling made part from estate fruit and part from Finger Lakes fruit is a juicy and polished wine with pear and citrus aromas for just $16. Jersey has a Riesling star in the making and the only question is if anyone in NYWC or America’s mainstream wine media really cares about that.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, its the corrected copyedited manuscript of BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story and it is now on course for Planet Earth. I can’t give you an exact ETA yet because of it’s eccentric flight path, but at the latest it will land in New York Wine City (NYWC) on June 21st for the beginning of the Summer of Riesling 2014. Even the foreword by Paul Grieco (also known as Mr. Terroir and The Overlord) in on board! The publisher is Stewart, Tabori & Chang, an imprint of Abrams Books here in NYWC. You can already pre-order with a discount:

http://www.amazon.com/Best-White-Wine-Earth-Riesling/dp/1617691100/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386004324&sr=8-1&keywords=Best+White+Wine+on+Earth

For me this is a great relief, because I’ve been working like a lunatic for the last four months to make sure that we launched (delivery of manuscript) on time, then managed the crucial burn today (delivery of corrected copyedited manuscript) that set us on course across the solar system in order to make that reentry window at the very end of spring next year. I never wrote and corrected a manuscript at anything like this speed before. However, the months before I started work I had sorted through nearly all the material very thoroughly and published first drafts of some of the material here. My last research trip was to Northern Michigan and Niagara Ontario late in September, immediately before the Riesling harvest there in order to be as up to date as possible. I was tasting the last wines until just a couple of days ago. Research began when I arrived in Adelaide, South Australia on February 1st, 2012. Given my goal of covering the Riesling wines of thee entire world from a global perspective faster than 22 months would only have been possible if I had abandoned all other work, which simply wasn’t realistic. I carried the great majority of the research expenses myself and I’d really prefer not to add up what I spent. In the end it doesn’t matter. What matters is if the result connects with you and expands your Riesling experience. May the Riesling Force be with You!

This enigmatic picture reminds me of the 2007 Todd Haynes movie ‘I’m not There’ staring a handful of actors including Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan. That fits, because the person pictured, Rienne Martinez, has just become the ex-manager of the Terroir wine bar in Murray Hill/New York Wine City (NYWC) and today also left the city. Writing that reminds me of how at the end of Led Zeppelin concerts someone would portentously announce over the PA that, “Led Zeppelin have left the building”. Although she’ll be back for a few weeks in December after that Rienne heads off to the Carl Erhard winery in Rüdesheim am Rhein (Rheingau) to live and work in the town I spent just under a year living in when I attended the nearby Geisenheim wine school in 2008/9. She already test drove this position and the town so she knows that she won’t hate it and figured out that Star Market on the Geisenheimer Strasse is the place to shop for food, which is more than I did before moving into my rented room there on October 3rd 2008!

For those of you who’ve never met Rienne I add the picture left in which her features are more easily recognizable and she looks less like a Francis Bacon painting. I hope that you can get a good idea from this of how Rienne combines an enormous enthusiasm for wine with considerable knowledge and experience, yet has retained a drinker’s perspective rather than drifting off into the geekosphere as so many somms do after a while. Given this, it fits that she should want to deeply immerse herself in wine for a longer period and somewhere like the Erhards’ small winery is ideal, not only because they are very friendly and open people, but also because the wine culture of Germany has hardly been bastardized at all by the bean counters and marketing spin doctors who have got their claws so deeply into so many regions around Planet Wine. This is something I recommend all readers to do if you can find a way to make it work: Live the Riesling Story!

Happy Holidays!

It was exactly one year ago that I arrived for my first long visit to NYWC, so why is there a photograph of artist and graphic designer Steven Solomon at the top of this anniversary posting on STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL? Well, it was a meeting with Steven just a couple of weeks after my arrival in NYWC which persuaded me to abandon my irrational rejection of social media and certain forms of non-virtual social interaction. That was the beginning of the sea change which turned me into the person I am now and made my new book BBWOE – The Riesling Story possible. The other reason is that yesterday I got a sneak preview of Steven’s latest work, some of which is seen behind him.

There are several thing which makes it so interesting, beginning with the fact that it manages the very rare balancing act of being readable, i.e. literature in some sense, yet it also has a fully developed optical aesthetic, i.e. it is definitely visual art. The second is that as different as their content is – e.g. SWEAT / PONDER / FREAK OUT – these new images grow out of the graphic design work that Steven has done for the Terroir wine bars and the Summer of Riesling over the last years. Normally it’s the other way around and graphic design parasitic upon visual art. I think this can only work in the case of someone like Steven who has been continually pushing the limits of what graphic design can be over an extended period. Now the writing is literally on the wall (at Foliage, 547 West 27th Street, # 600, between 10th and 11th Avenues – opening times to be announced soon).

There is more to all this though, for Steven has also transformed himself through producing this work, that is has turned himself from the great Stickermeister of old into the brand new Speedpasterobot. What exactly this new identity means for Steven I’m not entirely sure, though I feel sure that I will find out bit by bit as I delve into this pool of joyful angst that needs the daylight to bring out its outrageous humor, just as Franz Kafka’s stories need to be read as comedy in order that the contrast and color saturation are adjusted to the right levels. Further information can be found at:

www.speedpasterobot.com

PS Now I must return to solitary confinement in writers’ prison to continue work on the copyedited manuscript of BWWOE – The Riesling Story in order to keep my book on schedule for publication very late May/very early June by Stewart, Tabori & Chang (a division of Abrams Books here in NYWC).