Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

Great Mosel Rieslings grow on slate, have a racy acidity and taste most exciting when some natural grape sweetness was retained. Well, yes…sometimes. I’d known that Riesling is also grown on limestone in the German Obermosel, or Upper Mosel, and just across the river in Luxembourg for decades. Since a few years I’ve known that one of the best producers of such wines was the Domaine Alice Hartmann in Wormeldange. But, when I tasted the 2011 vintage dry Rieslings made there by German winemaker Hans-Jörg Befort my jaw dropped. This is the most exciting discovery I made in Europe during my research for BWWOE – The Riesling Book, and I made it almost at the last possible moment. The manuscript has to be finished on coming Friday, November 1st!

The place of origin and quality of these wines is just one aspect of this thing though. The other is that they taste absolutely nothing like the Mosel Rieslings grown on slate. Although they have a lively and animating acidity, this isn’t pointed, much less piercing; words I would use for typical Mosel Riesling which grew on slate. Let’s take the best wine I tasted as an example, the 2011 ‘Sélection du Château’ (you can still buy the 2012 for 19 Euros direct from the domaine) had super-ripe yellow fruit aromas, not only peach, but apricot and some mango. In the mouth it was really creamy, but properly dry with a very long silky finish that was delicately spicy. There was none of the tension of a Mosel Riesling grown on slate, but in an entirely different way the wine was really complete. The first time I visited wine producers in Luxembourg I was told that the Wormeldange Koeppchen was a great vineyard site and here is a wine that proves that.

I always found Luxembourg a slightly odd place. Take one of the bridges across the Mosel River from Germany to Luxembourg and it’s like stepping off a flight in China. Everything is veryFrench, yet inexplicably unlike any actual part of France. Then you listen to the locals talking and you realize that although a lot of French is spoken, the dialect is actually a form of German. For a long time their combination of low taxes, a liberal financial sector, and a highly chauvinistic attitude to everything indigenous held the wines back. It was just too easy to sell mediocre quality for an inflated price. Now there’s a new spirit and it requires investigation. Unfortunately, I have to keep this short in order to catch my flight to New York where I will finish work on BWWOE – The Riesling Book! For more information visit:

www.alice-hartmann.lu

As a fiercely passionate student of wine, I, Caitlin Harrison, in a moment of panic and indifference for my direction in life, decided to quit my longstanding career in restaurant work to throw myself fully into what any normal 28 year-old woman would do. I signed up to for Wein lesen, to work the harvest in the Rheinhessen region of Germany with a female winemaker, whose style I adore. Because, well, why not.

I met Eva Vollmer at the Long Night of German Wine at Hearth Restaurant this past July and fell pretty hard for her style. Her wines are modern without disrespecting traditions. Her observance of the process that takes place in the field is something I look for as a wine buyer. And I found her to be no bullshit, which I really appreciated. She, along with the other women at the Long Night, was not there to exploit her wine or her story. So I kept her information, reached out to her in August and received a prompt “YES!” in response to my request to work harvest.

In anticipation for this trip, I did what any normal restaurant manager would do: I worked until the night before I left and barely prepared my belongings. I never really conceptualized my exact role during harvest or even how totally screwed I was with my utter lack of the German language (except for swears and food words, natürlich). I just fearlessly marched into Mainz-Ebersheim, put on some pink rubber boots and got to work.

The most satisfying aspect for me was the quietness that the Handlese, hand picking provided me with. This sudden lack of massive responsibility. The task at hand was Wein lesen, or literally translated, “wine reading”.  And while I am not an avid or accomplished reader, I enjoyed more than I ever imagined the task of reading wine.

In each vineyard, we are asked to read the grapes differently. Sometimes we would only cut what is rotten (botrytis or penicillin) or brown stemmed, other times it was about rotten clusters or 3 shoots from the base of the stalk or too densely clustered and so on. If a cluster is cleaned of rot and doesn’t look awesome, we simply tossed it on the ground.  My favorite cluster to slay was the Geiztrauben, or second crop, the most densely compacted “late-to-the-party, free-loading” lean, mean and green grapes. Woof!

One morning that changed the way I looked at Handlese altogether was on the sixth day. Robert called Eva to express his concerns regarding about how our pre-harvest work was going and before I knew it, I was told, “every grape that you were throwing on the ground is now coming back to the winery to see if we can use it someway. So, no more grapes on the ground.” I looked at Robert, slightly puzzled. He handed me a black bucket and said, “here is your schwarz eimer, you must TAKE THE GROUND GRAPES WITH YOU.” So, there it was. A two bucket day. But it was a good two bucket day.

I will say that Wein lesen taught me so much more than wine reading; it has taught me to read conversations being held around me in German through tonality, inference and context. My worries about my lack of language slowly dissipated. In fact, all of the worries I had diminished and the focus was always whatever was the task at hand. I often thought about nothing. I just read grapes, sounds, smells, tastes, and I tried my best to listen to everything around me. And I did not plan for what is next. I did not anticipate the day’s work being done. I just lived for each cluster of grapes I was reading, making sure I put it towards an exceptional wine, or I put it on the ground and took it with me.

Yesterday evening was mad, bad and exciting all at once. When I arrived at the ‘Tasting on Thin Ice’ organized by Lenz Moser ( the man behind TxB Wine Imports in Germany and the globally distributed ‘Laurenz V.’ brand of Austrian Grüner Veltliner) at the Ellington Hotel in Berlin early yesterday evening I expected another interesting blind tasting. What I got was so startling that when I got home just before midnight I sat blankly in front of my computer. Normally when I feel the need to write I know almost exactly what I want to write. After yesterday’s tasting I knew I must be somebody, but I didn’t know who the hell I was!

Blind tastings with a group of journalists and/or somms and/or wine lovers as the jury are a well established ritual of the wine scene and they takes place daily in the major metropoles (and a bunch of other places) around Planet Wine. First each taster assesses the wines alone in silence, then the results are collected and there is some kind of discussion of the results. This process is what interests me here, although the wines themselves were also fascinating. I shall write about them in my column in the FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE SONNTAGSZEITUNG on Sunday, October 27th, to read which you either have to buy the newspaper or tune to this channel for an english language summary of the column.

Yesterday evening’s tasting was basically trying to answer the question, “which are the best dry white wines in the world?” Of course, Lenz Moser included a couple of his own Grüner Veltliners, but we’re talking about three wines of 24. Apart from them there was an enormous diversity of dry whites from right around the globe including Rieslings, Chardonnays, Sauvignon Blancs, and, and, and. Possibly that stylistic richness made the results more “crazy” than they otherwise would have been, but maybe not. Now I have to explain what I mean by “crazy”. Often at this kind of blind tasting a list of scores is collected from each taster at the end, but this time we each had to say our scores out loud. One of the team who organized the tasting would call out the number of a wine, then, beginning with me, each of us had to say what our score was. In this way everybody got to find out how much or little each of us liked every one of the 24 wines, and the divergence of opinions was as great at the distance to the next star; light years!

We used the 20 points scale at Lenz’s request, and to give an idea of that divergence of opinions there was one wine which received the maximum 20 points from one taster and just 9 of 20 possible points from another. Two other wines much liked by the majority of tasters received scores of 6 and 7 points from two others. Traditionally scores under 10 of 20 points indicate faulty wines, and those tasters seemed to be aware of that. I was expecting a couple of the more extreme wines to divide opinion, but not to the point of some tasters giving just 5 points, or in one instance 1 point, “for the glass of the bottle!” he added when saying his score. In fact, it hailed low numbers and such comments the entire time our scores were being collected. Already I was wondering what the average of 20 and 9 points actually says about the wine and asking myself why my friend the economist Karl Storchmann wasn’t there to do a statistical analysis of these results.

Then it hit me. People like Lenz Moser, my colleague Jens Priewe and I – we sat in a row on one side of the table – belong to a particular generation which was brought up to approach wine in a systematic and even-handed manner. On the other side of the table the tasters who shot all those low scores straight from the hip were much younger than us living fossils. I know I’ve got a reputation for being  a Wine Punk and not without reason, but I was brought up with the spirit of fair play (justice and equality!) and to feel a professional responsibility to do my research thoroughly and tell the story how it really was (at least for me). I’m not saying that the young tasters who sprayed those low scores around don’t understand or appreciate such things, rather that they have a completely different attitude to wine and this will change everything.

PS Now I must get back to the manuscript of BWWOE – The Riesling Book, because a bad cold I caught in Venice or on the Orient Express slowed me down badly this week. Today and tomorrow I must catch again!

“What are you doing here Stuart? This isn’t Riesling!” someone called out to me across the room this afternoon at The Astor Center in New York Wine City (NYWC). I was there attending the NYWC Sherryfest Grand Tasting. As if my enthusiasm for Riesling somehow precluded either me from appreciating other wines or meant that other wines could somehow be unworthy of my appreciation. Let me make it plain that the Riesling Spirit is inclusive and likes the company of other wines as long as they have character and balance. Not for the first time does my Riesling Diary therefore stray completely “off” subject and devote itself to another amazing world of Sherry, which, like Riesling, is cool in the NYWC scene, but not widely appreciated enough.

I went there today with the firm attention of tasting only mature dry Sherry, to be precise only the Amontillado, Palo Cortado and Oloroso types. However, after tasting dozens of these and finding many Sherries with an enormous amount of character and with great balance my will became weak and I flip-flopped over (sorry John Kerry, I didn’t want to bring back those horrible memories!) over to sweet and found the two gems in the photo above. Bodega 501 is almost completely unknown and therefore it’s wines are (still) aged for a very long time, which means decades. Cream is really the last style of Sherry I’d normally order, although not because it was one of the few alcoholic drinks my maternal grandmother enjoyed. It simply sounds so very old-fashioned, even to me. However, the ‘Zurbarán’ Cream has a bouquet of caramelized nuts and tarte tatin, is lush and creamy, but also has an underlying acidity and (positive) bitterness which make it tantalizing, give it a seductive tension. Although the ‘Gades’ Pedro Ximénez is even sweeter it has a complex bouquet of prunes marinated in wine and spices. Neither taste the slightest bit like any sweet Rieslings I ever tasted, and that is something which makes Sherries like this enrich my world, our world of wine.

PS Sorry if my reply to your comment about “This isn’t Riesling!” didn’t sound more friendly.

PPS My next posting may take a few days, because on October 9th I fly to Venice to meet my mother and don’t get back to Berlin until very late on October 13th.

Writing this book (BWWOE – The Riesling Book, for Abrams in NYC) against a crazy deadline ought to be sending me insane, but thankfully it isn’t. One  reason for that is that most days I make great progress with it and forget the gargantuan mass of material I still have to cover by November 1st. The other reason is that every couple of days I sneak out of my solitary confinement cell in this writers’ prison on West 16th Street and hit a wine tasting somewhere in New York Wine City (NYWC). They have also provided some useful material for BWWOE, or at least reminded me of something important that I have to cover in the book.

The last of these was the annual portfolio tasting of Savio Soares Selections on Wednesday, one of the most interesting smaller importer’s in the NYWC area. The location was the top floor glased-in terrace of a hotel just off Gramercy Park and it meant that I realized how great the current fall weather is. As well as tasting an excellent 2001 vintage drier Rieslings from Carl Erhard in Rüdesheim/Rheingau and several great mature dry Rieslings from Franz Künstler in Hochheim/Rheingau I discovered the bottle pictured above in an ice bucket.

“What are the wines of Hahnmühle doing here???” I asked myself, because this is a small producer in an out of the way location in the Nahe region (i.e. nowhere near Dönnhoff) who have ploughed their own furrow every since I can remember (and I’ve been doing this “job” for decades now). The answer obviously is that Savio obviously ran into them and he’s a lot more daring than most of his competitors. In fact, the Hahnmühle wine you have to try is not the above, but the 2012 “Sandstein” (sandstone) Riesling which is so subtly peachy, so pure and elegant I could have sat down and drained the bottle straight away. Hahnmühle’s bargain Riesling (75%) and Traminer (25%) blend is a beautiful wine that could retail for around $20. It marries a modicum of Traminer richness and yellow rose aroma with dry Riesling mineral freshness and is a great Fall Wine!

I’d unexpectedly stumbled into the subject of blends of  Riesling with other grape varieties the day before at the Wine of Argentina tasting when tasting all the dry whites from the indigenous Terrontés grape. After tasting the very elegant 2012 from the Colomé winery their representative asked me if I’d be interested to try the 2012 Terrontés (85%) and Riesling (15%) blend from the company’s sister winery. Interested? Of course I was, although also skeptical as to whether just 15% Riesling in the blend could make such a huge difference. However, with its ripe apple and lime aromas, mineral power and freshness the almost bone-dry wine was certainly very different. Earlier I’d tried a high-end Terrontés which had been “improved” by the addition of some Sauvignon Blanc, but as good a glass of dry white wine as it was, the two elements clashed a bit. So Amalaya have really hit upon something with this blend, and my guess is that we’ll see more of them.

At each of the tasting there was also a serious surprise. On Tuesday at the Wines of Argentina tasting it wasMS Evan Goldstein thanking me for the tasting at Fort Mason in San Francisco, then realizing he was referring to an event held in 1991! Then on Wednewsday at the Savio Soares event it was Eduardo ofDBGB Kitchen & Bar telling me, “You’ve been as you imagine you’ve been!” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it certainly help me with my Zen and the Art of not becoming “insanely busy” when writing a Book against a Crazy Deadline project. Thank you Eduardo!

Now back to that book manuscript…

PS Alice Feiring was at the Savio Soares tasting, but disappeared before I could speak to her. Alice, did you get to taste the Hahnmühle wines?

Sometimes the Great God of Wine knows it all so much better than I can ever hope to do and gives me a helping hand. The last days I was struggling to finish the Australian chapter of my forthcoming book BWWOE – The Riesling Book, then suddenly I received an invitation from Volker Donabaum from A.I. Selections to lunch today with Mac Forbes of the eponymous micro-winery in Victoria/Australia (pictured above). Mac’s Rieslings had already struck me as being some of the most new OZ Rieslings I’d tasted since beginning research for my book (in Australia!) on February 1st last year. It was too good to miss meeting Mac in spite of the enormous pressure of writing work on the manuscript (deadline 6pm, Friday, November 1st!) so I headed down to Taqueria Empellón on West 4th Street this lunchtime for what turned out to be one of the most interesting tastings in a long time.

Not only were the 2013 Rieslings even more exciting than I’d dared to hope they were seriously provocative, and Mac was also full of wonderful surprises. This began with the story of how he’d done a bunch of work as a winemaker in Austria – yes, Austria! – including making the first vintage of Dirk van der Niepoort and Dorli Muhr’s game-changing Blaufränkisch red wines in Carnuntum. Then came the discovery that I wasn’t the only one not to know where the Strathbogie Ranges – the home of his high altitude Riesling vineyard (1,950 feet/600 meters above sea level) – are located. “Most Australians don’t know where that is!” he insisted.

After tasting his 2013 Riesling ‘RS16’ and 2013 Riesling ‘RS37′ (yes, the names give the residual sweetness content of each wine in grams per liter!) I shall have to visit those granitic hills the next time I get to OZ. Not only are those wines medium-dry and medium-sweet, instead of bone-dry like most OZ Rieslings, but they also lack more than the a hint of the lime aroma widely considered “typical” for them, and are gentle and delicate in flavor instead of complying with the stridently acidic norm. The flavors I noted for the drier of this pair as “beeswax and fresh ginger”! All this raised exactly the probing questions I’d been struggling to formulate about the true nature of OZ Rieslings and this all I had to do was to get them down on paper.

I was also seriously impressed by the other wines I tasted, of which the most extreme was the 2011 Yarra Valley Chardonnay with just 12% alcohol and almost no perceptible oak aromas or tannins, although it had been vinified in barriques (including a few that were new). Instead it smelt of dried apple and pear, was fresh and – again! – gentle and delicate. There was quite a contrast between the crisp and vibrantly fresh Mac’s 2012 Yarra Valley Pinot Noir, and the more floral character and firmer flavors of his 2012 Worri Yallock Vineyard Pinot Noir.

Even more extraordinary is Mac Forbes’ determination not to expand his production above the current total of max 4,000 cases of wine per year. That’s not only counter-intuitive for the wine industry, but might be considered by some of his OZ colleagues to be Anti-Australian behavior! That’s fine by me though if it means he keeps making Rieslings and other wines as remarkable as these.

Today I was back at the small desk in my New York Wine City (NYWC) writing cell and I had my head down all day in order to complete the Northern Michigan chapter of ‘BBWOE The Riesling Book’ and make a serious start on the Ontario chapter. Going over all the impressions I gathered last week in those regions I couldn’t help thinking about meeting up with Shawn Walters, the winemaker at Chateau Fontaine on the Leelanau Peninsula in Northern Michigan, as well as a large handful of other small wineries who also use that cellar facility. As you can see from the photograph of our right forearms Sean has an even more impressive Riesling tattoo than I do! What the photograph doesn’t show is the buckle of one of his belt, which says “FUCK”. He told me that when it came to wine he was only interested in doing, “Rock Star Shit”, and hard as it may be for the citizens of NYWC or Planet Wine to believe that the Semi-Sweet White Riesling from Chateau Fontaine really rocks, although it costs less than $15!

This was all just too much to fit in my posting giving general impressions of Northern Michigan’s wine industry, but here it is now. I think it’s only fair to show Shawn Waters (left) with Chateau Fontaine’s owner Dan Matthies (right), as they make a strange duo, but judging form most of the wines I tasted – I loved the dry Riesling, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Auxerrois and liked the Grüner Veltliner – it is a strangely dynamic duo. It’s amazing stuff like this which nobody outside the region has written about seriously which inspires me here in my NYWC book writing cell!

When I went out for my run early this morning here in Jordan it seemed fairly cool – although distinctly warmer than in Northern Michigan where I was before I came to the Niagara Peninsula. When I got back half an hour later I was soaked in sweat and realized just how different (more humid and warmer) the weather is here compared to there. I heard that the cherries, which are an important crop in both places, typically ripen two weeks in this part of Ontario than in Northern Michigan, and now I can believe it. Hence, the Riesling grapes here are already ripe enough to pick and make wine, although all the good producers are holding off with Riesling and busy with Pinot Noir at present. It already has enough sugar to give 13% – 14% alcohol in the finished wine and the only reason to wait longer before is for the tannins in the skins to taste more appealing. The picture shows Riesling in the vineyard where Cave Spring’s top Riesling, the medium-dry CSV, grows. A vertical of that wine in which every wine from the 2012 back to the 2003 was stunning was the Riesling high point of my visit.

So far I visited 5 wineries and this evening I tasted a slew of extra wines – not just Riesling! – which Magdalena Kaiser-Smit of Wine Country Ontario gathered together for me. Now I’m beginning to get a clear feel for how this region has shifted focus since I was last here 9 years ago, with Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc now clearly the grape varieties which are most interesting for almost all the talented winemakers. They are now putting a lot of ambition into perfecting those wines. Today, apart form many exciting Rieslings, I also tasted some world class Pinot Noirs from Harald Thiel’s Hidden Bench estate. The stars of this evening’s tasting were the Cabernet Francs from Tawes and Pearl Morisette in dramatically contrasting styles. All of those reds were from the 2010 vintage, and the 2012s ought to be similarly good. The new vintage also has the advantage of being an excellent Riesling year, the wines more vibrant and exotic than the 2010s. Interestingly that vintage comparison is almost exactly the same in Michigan, although (counterintuitively) the Michigan wines are rather lower in acidity. Simple logic says that a cooler climate should give more acidic wines!

The biggest differences between the two wine regions, apart form the warmer summer and fall in Ontario is that more money is flowing into the wine industry here, also for the simple reason that the wine prices are generally higher. That has the advantage that dreams can be more easily fulfilled, experiments more readily undertaken. Pictured above is Marlize Beyers, the South African winemaker of Hidden Bench, with one of her two new concrete eggs. I’m pleased to report that the first wine going into them will be a Chardonnay, not a Riesling!

Michigan sounds like a disaster zone to most of America, indeed, to most of the world, because everybody thinks about bankrupt Detroit and not about the North where some of the best Rielsing wines in America are produced. I have some sympathy for most of America/the world’s ignorance, because it’s only in the last years (with the vintages 2010, ’11 and ’12) that a substantial group of producers there has shone with their Rieslings. On the other hand, while I was there during the last few days Sean O’Keefe from Chateau Grand Traverse showed me a vertical tasting of his medium-dry ‘Whole Cluster’ Riesling going back to 1998 in which every wine was good, and the 2002 and 2004 were still in great shape. So this isn’t totally new, rather the only new thing is the number of really good producers and the consistency of their wines. I’d say that since my last visit in the summer of 2010 the region had gone from being interesting, but very erratic to having achieved “critical mass”. However, I suggest that you taste and make up your own minds though, because this blog is never interested to tell you what you should think.

The other thing which makes Northern Michigan so fascinating is the incredible diversity of the winemakers. Not only do Chateau Fontaine, Blackstar Farms, Left Foot Charley, Bowers Harbor Vineyards, 2 Lads, Shady Lane and Chateau Grand Traverse make very good Rieslings, but the people behind those wines are all incredibly different and incredibly interesting. Why nobody outside the regional press has written that story yet is truly incomprehensible to me. I think it says how a bunch of theoretically pro-America publications are actually only pro-Califronia or pro-California & pro-Washington State when it comes to wine. This is a form of  blindness, and I think they need to overcome this real fast or face the consequences. Due to the rapid and dramatic developments in the wine states outside Califronia and Washington, which these publications  have (consciously or unconsciously) ignored they now look dangerously behind the times, and possibly even guilty of something akin to racism at the state level. Too harsh? If so, then I have completely misjudged what is happening in the United States of Riesling and Wine America as a whole.

Let me give a concrete example from Michigan. Larry Mawby of the eponymous winery on the Leelanau Peninsula (the “other” Peninsula to Sean O’Keefe on the Old Mission), pictured above with a couple of his sparkling wines  is certainly a “maverick”, ND a “backwoods philosopher”. However, he produces a slew of modestly priced and high-end sparkling wines that are amongst the best produced in the country. Beyond that he’s a phenomenon, in winemaking, innovative product development and marketing. I never tasted a sparkling wine before that was anything like his Cremant Classic, which is made of 100% Vignoles, yes I mean Vignoles that “ugly” hybrid grape variety. However, this is a sparkling wine with a lot of exotic aromatic power and a tremendously exciting acidity, which blew my socks off. You have to experience the “finish”, i.e. aftertaste on this sparkling wine to believe it, and it costs a modest $27. That is very seriously cool! The point of this is that Michigan has as little reputation for sparkling wines as for Riesling, and on paper cannot have anything to say on the subject. I suggest that this is a horribly narrow European-style way of thinking and that the American tradition is for saying, “show me what is possible!” Amen to that!

PS In a couple of days I hope to report from Niagara/Ontario where I am up to my neck in serious Rieslings of a very different kind!

This is the extraordinary label for an extraordinary Riesling that I bumped into this week. Theoretically I’m in 24/7 solitary confinement frantically working on the manuscript for my new book BWWOE, which Abrams Books of New York will be publishing in June of next year. However, I do occasionally get out of the apartment on West 16th Street where I’m staying, for example on Tuesday when the cleaning woman came and I had to get out of her way. I took the opportunity to visit the annual portfolio tasting of Regal Wines, where I bumped into this image of Ganesh on the label of the 2012 ‘Folk Machine’ Riesling from Hobo Wine Co., the best dry Riesling I’ve ever tasted from Monterey County/California. It had a rich apricot character, and a great balance of powerful and freshness. Sadly only around 1,700 bottles of this wine were produced, the reason being that it comes from a small plot of old vines going back to the 1960s. Is this the oldest Riesling vineyard in California? Maybe one of you can tell me.

Also at the Regal tasting I encountered the 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon from …purusued by bear, which means the actor Kyle MacLachlan. A bunch of famous actors and musicians make wines and often these are either disastrous (no names mentioned), or grossly over-priced (Gerard Depardieu in France). This wine is rare exception to that rule and regardless of who made it this is one of the most distinctive wines I’ve ever tasted from Walla Walla/Washington State. In the best sense it’s a dark wine, meaning an elderberry aroma, but also a balsamic notes, and positively chewy tannins. Sure it has 14.4% alcohol, but this makes it neither sweetish nor heavy.

I’m calling this entry to my Riesling Diary ‘Rear View Window’ because I was so busy writing this week that none of this is up to the minute in the way I normally am. On Monday night I had dinner with Janie Brooks Heuck of Brooks Wines in Oregon, one of the foremost producers of Riesling in that state, at Hearth Restaurant. She suggested that I order the wine and I picked the very rare ‘Kaiton’ Riesling from Peter Pliger/Kuen Hof in the Alto Adige of Italy. The reason that this wine is so rare is not that the production is tiny, rather that the demand for it in Italy is huge. It is a huge swirl of herbal notes, rotating around a black hole of minerality that threatens to suck us all in. It made sense to try this with Janie, because she too is making daring Rieslings that are attracting a cult following. Both these winemakers are helping define what’s possible with Riesling in their regions, and doing a lot to raise awareness of the grape in their respective countries.

As I said, I spent a lot of time at home at this desk with this computer, but last night I went to the Corkbuzz wine bar on 13th Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues where I bumped into an old friend, the Saperavi red wine from NIKA. Georgian artist-winemaker Nika Bakhia lives around the corner from me in Berlin and I got to know him immediately before my trip to Georgia (I mean the one in the Caucasus) in June of 2008. He was invaluable in helping me make some sense of this country which is neither European nor properly Asian, rather bridges those two continents. That was the year Nika produced his first commercial wine, a Saperavi red that he fermented and matured exclusively in Qvevri, the traditional amphora-like wine vessel of the region which is buried in the ground. I say “amphora-like”, because the Greeks adopted its use from the Georgians, then the Romans took it over from the Greeks, so Qvevri is the original name for this vessel. The 2009 which I drank at Corkbuzz was also a “pure” Qvevri wine and is still inky tannic. It needed an hour of exposure to the air before it revealed all its dark secrets. It was a steal for $45 and a great counterpoint to the warm, but urbane ambience of Corkbuzz.

I shall return there, but not until after me trip to Northern Michigan and Ontario which begins Monday, September 16th and ends Sunday, September 22nd. I will try to report from on the road, but have a stack of work for BWWOE with me, so no promises.