Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

Returning to Berlin after an absence of two and  half months early on Monday was quite a shock and I have to admit that I still miss New York, as this piece of graffiti I captured on East 7th Street a couple of days before my departure said I would.  But, of course, it’s way easier for me to taste the full gamut of German, Austrian, Alsatian and other European Rieslings here than in the USA (where many of them are not imported or only reach a few states, and not always New York).

My re-immersion in those wines abruptly made me aware of the fact that today the cliché of “New World” Riesling being lower in acidity than “Old World” Riesling has nothing to do with the contemporary reality. Climate change has made the whole range of European Rieslings less acidic and they are now generally lower in acidity than American Rieslings. That applies no less to wines like those from Anderson Valley in Mendocino County/California, than those from the Willamette Valley in Oregon, or the Finger Lakes in Upstate New York. During my two and a half months in North America I visited those and  bunch of other regions where Riesling is grown. The most acidic wines I tasted were those from the Okanagan Valley, which probably has the warmest summer weather of anywhere in Canada. But in wines like those from Tantalus Vineyards and 8th Generation in Kelowna acidities for which the analytic figures sounded terrifying tasted fantastic. So the high acidity of North American Rieslings are not fundamentally a problem, though they do challenge winemakers to achieve a satisfying balance.

Yesterday evening I met up with Gerrit Walter, a 26 year old winemaker from the Mosel (pictured above) who I met at the famous wine school in Geisenheim/Rheingau when I was a guest student there back in 2008-9. At the Weinstein wine bar – one of the world’s best Riesling bars! – I tasted his dry 2012 Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc) and several of his dry 2012 Rieslings. Since I last tasted them back in the spring these wines have all developed really well. The basic 2012 Riesling trocken, what we call call “Gutsriesling” here in Germany is a spectacular vibrant wine with yellow apple and white peach aromas for its price, just Euro 6.50 for private customers direct from Weingut Walter in Briedel on the Mosel. It weighs in at a moderate 12% alcohol and is properly dry.

“Biredel???” I can already hear some of you asking incredulously, and I admit this is one of the least well-known wine growing communes on the Mosel. For the purpose of orientation Briedel’s the next village downstream from Pünderich home to the famous Clemens Busch estate, but frankly just 15 years ago few people outside Germany had ever heard of Clemens Busch or Pünderich. The wine map of Germany has changed dramatically during that time and will continue to change during the years to come, so I suggest that you try and memorize Briedel now, rather than get left behind the rest of the wine scene. If you doubt that this is really worth the effort, then taste Gerrit Walter’s rich, juicy and complex 2012 Briedeler Riesling feinherb.

PS My book writing progresses well, but has also distracted me from this blog. Sorry!

2012 Dry Riesling from Dr. Konstantin Frank for $14.99

German Riesling is calling to me from afar, and today I have to climb on a plane and return to Berlin. Not only will I miss New York, but I’ll also miss the good and great Rieslings of New York State. None more so than the one I’ve drunk most frequently, the dry Riesling from Dr. Konstantin Frank in Hammondsport on Keuka Lake in the Finger Lakes. 2012 is a wonderful vintage for Riesling from the Finger Lakes, and this is neither the first nor the last time I’ll be reporting on these wines, because from what I’ve tasted it’s the best vintage for this region to date. The Dr. Frank 2012 Dry Riesling is one of the finest wines Frederick Frank, pictured above, has made during the twenty years he has been running the family wine company close to Hammondsport on the western bank of Keuka Lake.

It comes from the first Riesling vineyards planted in the Finger Lakes and from other vineyards very close to them. Dr. Konstantin Frank planted his first Riesling vines back in the late 1950s when most of the experts still claimed that the European wine grapes (including the frost-hardy Riesling) wouldn’t survive the cold winters in the region.  Dr. Frank harvested the first commercial crop of Riesling in the Finger Lakes in 1962, also harvesting the first Trockenbeerenauslese style desert wine made in the US that fall. So you could say that with the 2012 vintage, the 51st vintage for the grape at Dr. Frank Riesling has come of age here. By that I mean that it’s now become something traditional for the Frank family and the region as a whole, rather than a fashion or an experiment (however long-running). Now there’s no longer any doubt about the matter!

This is a real “terroir” (taste of the place) wine too. It has the lemon and blossoms aromas plus the racy acidity which I associate with Riesling grown on stony slate soils in this fairly cool climate region. Either you will find that acidity enormously refreshing during hot humid weather of the kind New York generally “enjoys” in August (did somebody say SUMMER OF RIESLING, and if not why?), stunning with all the kinds of seafood indigenous to the waters off the East Coast of the USA (which really bring out the mineral side of this wine), or you’ll find it way too much (take the Stuart Pigott Riesling Global ACID TEST and discover that soda and cola contain at least as much acid as this wine). I know where I stand, and that’s best explained by paraphrasing a famous New York quote, “let’s get out of these sweaty things and into some dry Riesling!”

2012 Dr. Konstantin Frank Dry Riesling is $14.99 at Astor Wines & Spirits

399 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10003

Tel.: (1) 212 674 7500

http://www.astorwines.com/

PS As Aristotle noted, every story has a beginning, a middle and an end, but what he failed to observe is that the end of one story is also the beginning of another story (to which the first story then becomes the backstory). Tomorrow my Berlin Riesling Diary resumes. Please excuse the erratic postings of the coming weeks, but I must chain myself to my desk and throw myself into the writing of my Riesling book for Abrams Books of New York. Wish me luck in my attempt to hit a very tight deadline (November 1st)!

I just returned from a couple of days in the Hudson Valley (pictured above minutes before my arrival) visiting my new friends Liz and Don O’Toole close to Rhinebeck. The landscape was almost invariably beautiful, sometimes utterly breathtaking and it was all very refreshing after some intense days in New York Wine City (NYWC) and the three months of toil writing my Riesling book BWWOE which begin in earnest tomorrow (August 1^st). Some great food is being produced here, of which the pungent Hudson Red washed-rind cows’  milk cheese is a great ambassador.

I hadn’t planned to do anything but R&R, but yesterday Liz was suddenly energized and had marked a route on maps of the East and West banks of the Hudson connecting a string of wineries. This turned out to be slightly too ambitious, because the tasting rooms at several of the wineries turned out to be closed (also today sadly). So, in the end I saw a bunch of vineyards, but only tasted at two wineries. This makes it impossible to make the more general kind of observations I made about New Jersey wines after my day on the road there with Karl Storchman back in December. However, even what I saw and tasted at the well-regarded Millbrook close to the eponymous town and Whitecliff near Gardiner left me with the feeling that there’s still a lot of unrealized potential here. Hell, if the Hudson Valley wines tasted as good as those landscapes looked I’d have had a series of orgasms in the tasting rooms.

Here, as in many other cool climate regions, one of the fundamental mistakes made is putting a lot of energy and ambition into grape varieties which can barely ripen except in the best vintages. One of the best wines I tasted here was the 2012 Traminette at Whitecliff, because this unfashionable, early-ripening hybrid does well in this climate, giving a wine reminiscent of Gewürztraminer, but with more freshness and acidity (in this case it balanced the wine’s sweetness beautifully). Likewise at Millbrook I was charmed by the rather unpretentious light and dry 2012 Tocai Fruilano with its juicy, fruit salad flavors and a clean, bright finish. The red wines at both wineries were way more ambitious, but they didn’t impress in the same way, and to be frank for $20 plus per bottle at the cellar door I expect more.

Why weren’t the wines better? Although this may be quite a challenging climate to grow the European wine grapes in – everything is so green due to abundant rain and humidity during the summer, which means a lot of spraying against downy mildew, powdery mildew and black rot – my wine gut tells me this is somewhere which could produce a slew of medium-bodied whites with wonderful aromas and freshness. The reason that this is being realized so erratically was easy to find in the vineyards, some of which (no names mentioned) were poorly cared for. In some places the volume of the crop as well as the quality had been reduced as a result; a bean counter’s nightmare!

What I did find was plenty of history. I have to say that one of the few things about Americans as a whole which I dislike is their tendency to complain about how little history they have. Even is you ignore the between 15,000 and 20,000 years of Native American history prior to the arrival of Columbus back in 1492, many parts of America are rich in White European history. For example, the Beckman Arms Inn (pictured above) in Rhinebeck dates back to 1766 and has been in continuous use as an inn since then. In the historic district of Berlin where my apartment is (I return to the city in a week’s time) there’s only one secular building of comparable age! In the city we only have a couple of restaurants and hotels with as much as a century of history. Of course, the city’s newness – Berlin, like New York, only became a major industrial metropolis during the last 19^th century – is one of its advantages, and recently it’s discovered how to take advantage of its special situation and be new in a way that’s simultaneously self-confident and self-critical (without the latter forget high quality regardless of the product!) The Hudson Valley’s wine industry needs to do this and to turn its small scale, compared with the New York State winegrowing regions of Long Island’s North Fork and the Finger Lakes, into a serious advantage.

From my base at the Hotel of Hope on East 7th Street I continue to explore New York Wine City (NYWC). You might think that since I began this process of discovery back in late November I would have found out all there is to know about this great metropolis of the fermented grape. There’s also long back story to the last months which is how I’ve been coming here since December 1988 (since when I’ve gained all the emotional associations its possible for a person to have with a place; R.I.P. Lamar Elmore and Louis Broman). But the fact is that I keep on finding out surprising things and making delightful discoveries (also last night, thank you Aldo Sohm and Andrew Bell), which make me feel that so far I’ve only scratched the surface. So, my New York Riesling Diary continues to be a Work in Progress, and may well remain so for the rest of my days, however many or few of them there may be. And nothing is more inspiring than this feeling that I’m right at the beginning of something as fascinating as this has been and is. Normally I’m very strong on specifics, the What, Who, Where, When and Why that is the basis of all good journalism, but this time I’m deliberately leaving all the details out to focus on the nature of my lucky situation.

I’m just about to throw myself into three months of unbroken toil to turn the pile of notes I’ve been scribbling since I arrived here into a book about the Global Riesling Phenomenon. Many of those notes are about other wines, and some of them concern things that only loosely related to wine. But my book has been growing out of all this profiting from this rich compost. I will be writing the book in almost exactly the same way that I write this blog, which is simply to put down my experiences and the thoughts they stimulate in the same way that I tell them to friends and acquaintances. Read my lips: this is my story told in my voice and it is Riesling Global!

PS I beg forgiveness for the fact that until early November posts here will be shorter and somewhat more infrequent in order that that pile of notes can be turned into a book manuscript, then into a concise volume, which contains the essence of my 30 years of deep immersion in Riesling.

Who dunnit?

There’s been some noise in the twittersphere lately about me being crazy, and I have to admit that at the least some pretty crazy stuff happens around me. The reporter in my soul then grabs hold of things like the above. Suddenly in the early hours of this morning during the third Long Night of German Wines in New York there was this knife in the floor of Restaurant Hearth on East 12th Street at First Avenue and the piece of floor it was sticking in had been marked off – as a dangerous place or as a holy site? OK, maybe you have to be crazy to snap something like this, then publicize it.

Either way it was quite a night, although one of the conclusions I drew was a disappointing one. The three young winegrowers from Rheinhessen – Christine Huff from the Fritz Ekkehard Huff estate, Mirjam Schneider of the Schneider estate and Eva Vollmer of the eponymous estate – were the stars of the show, just as I’d hoped they’d be.  But again and again our guests fired the same question at them: where can I buy these wines? The problem is that they jumped to the normal New York Wine City (NYWC) conclusion that if the wine is this good it must already be imported to NYWC. This way of thinking is understandable when you see the gigantic range of French and Italian wines available here, but those wine growing nations have had powerful lobbies in the city for a long, long time. In comparison, German wines have only recently begun to attract that kind of attention (again) and many importers of German wines are still selecting what they import as if the recent quality revolution in places like Rheinhessen had not really  happened. That’s sad also because American consumers are missing out. Calling all young / dynamic wine importers: this is one big chance for you and whoever sticks their neck out first will get to cherry pick the new generation of German winemakers. I think the expression is go for it!

As you can see from this picture, also taken in the early hours of this morning, here was quite a buzz at the Long Night of German Wine.  It was the three winemakers standard quality wines as much as their top bottlings which amazed. In this category, the 2012 Riesling *** from Mirjam Schneider was enormously ripe for its modest price, with an aroma of yellow plums and considerable power. Christine Huff’s 2012 Riesling “vom Rotliegenden” was a total contrast with its sleek, lithe body and aromas of rose hips and  herbs. Just to prove that Rheinhessen isn’t only about dry Riesling Eva Vollmer’s standard quality 2012 Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc) had a bouquet of freshly-picked green beans, was powerful and round, yet fresh and cool. The single-vineyard bottlings from the trio – the Rabenturm dry Riesling from Huff, the Edelmann dry Riesling and Silvaner from Schneider, and the ‘Kult’ wines from Vollmer – are all of a quality which ought to earn them plenty of listings in NYWC’s best restaurants.

Of course, the event got a little out of control at times, but frankly any evening which doesn’t get a little out of control in one way or another is lacking some life. I’m not sure why the soccer shirt (sorry, but knowing nothing about soccer I forget for which team it is) that Paul Grieco was wearing had a number 13 on the back – was it 13 German wine growing regions, or Riesling’s power to overcome evil magic? – but as you can see, someone found it as irresistible as the wines.

On that from there was general amazement about how well the dry and sweet Rieslings of the 2003 vintage which I brought from my private cellar showed. Sure, I had made a positive selection, but there were enough of them to prove that it’s no fluke when a 2003 German Riesling shows much better – more lively and elegant – than the reputation of the vintage would have you believe. However, even I was glad to drink a glass each of the dry 2011 “Schlank im Schrank” Riesling (from the Karlsmühle estate in the Ruwer) and the 2011 “Scheu im Heu” Scheurebe (from Winzerhof Stahl in Franken) at the end. These weirdly-named products – they translate literally as “Sleek in the Closet” and “Shy in the Hay’, but obviously this loses the musical quality of the names – are both house wines from the Weinstein wine bar in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. Weinstein have been my partners in the Long Night of German Wine project since it began in 1997. Since then we have been doing this to collect donations to the HOPE foundation in Cape Town/South Africa, which works to prevent the spread of HIV / AIDS and to care for sufferers and their orphaned children. Last night we topped Euro 100,000, or at the present exchange rate just short of $135,000 total donations. All of this was done with rather small events like last night’s. Thank you Hearth and everyone there who works there for pulling your weight last night!

Our event was one small part of the Summer of Riesling and we are proud to have been able to do our part for this wine “festival” which has time limits (the 94 days of summer), but knows no geographical limits. Riesling is a grape and a wine, but also a way of seeing the world and a spirit. Those things are way more difficult to pin down than the grape and the wine, but hopefully this blog manages to successfully convey them in a non-linear manner fitting to their own nature. Certainly the picture above seems to do that. I hope that my logo (below) does it too, for that would justify using it so often.

“Which organization are you with?” asked the dark-haired not-quite-so-young-any-more woman sitting next to me on the deck of the USS Jewel yesterday at 7:55pm. “Organization? It’s just me,” I naively replied. “Oh, I’m with the Jewish Singles,” she explained, and than I realized that she had accidentally jumped ship. “If you want the Jewish Love Boat, that’s the one next door,” I told her gesturing at the boat next to us at the pier where people were gyrating on the dance floor even before it had set off. She just made it off the Jewel and onto the Jewish Love Boat before we cast off and headed down the East River for the German Riesling Concert & Cruise! To see my movie about last year’s event click on the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhOm5OsOt0k&feature=youtu.be

This time I only took a still camera with me and in the cause of speed I’m reducing the text here to a series of longer picture captions. Above, of course, is pictured the Statue of Liberty, which I never saw in such great summer weather or such spectacular light. Everyone was agreed about that, but as you can see from the picture below, from the very beginning our spirits were high. Here are the stars of Thursday evening’s 3rd Long Night of German Wine NYC at Resaturant Hearth, from right to left, Christine Huff of the Fritz Ekkehard Huff estate in Nierstein-Schwabsburg, Mirjam Schneider of the Schneider estate of Mainz-Hechtsheim and Eva Vollmer of the eponymous estate in Mainz-Ebersheim, all in Rheinhessen. Click on the link below for more details of the event:

Long Night of German Wines invite 2013

By the time the Jewel had made it to the southern tip of Manhattan night was falling and the lights of city were doing a pretty convincing impersonation of a tourist postcard, as the below shows. I’ve attempted this shot a few times before, but it never looked so good before. If it wasn’t for a string of other shots like this which were all slightly out of focus I’d have started believing that I had talent as a photographer!

Of course, the cruise was all about German Riesling and a number stunning wines were poured. Given the temperatures up in the eighties I found the almost bone-dry 2012 Riesling trocken from Franz Künstler in Hochheim/Rheingau wonderfully refreshing. However, I could say the same thing for the 2012 Riesling Kabinett from Weiser-Künstler in Traben-Trarbach/Mosel, although this had a pronounced (and highly aromatic) sweetness. Riesling Kabinett of this filigree and playful kind is one of the styles in which the 2012 vintage wines really shine. Slightly less sweet, more savory, but similarly crisp and refreshing was the 2012 Riesling ‘Tradition’ from Robert Weil in Kiedrich/Rheingau.

Then I got carried away with dancing although I was already feeling a bit tired when the evening began. The band had played well right from the beginning, but when they suddenly threw in a Chuck Berry number the dance floor ignited. My picture captures the moment it started to fill up.

I write this kind of story not to document these events (although these stories also do that), but to convey to the widest possible audience the special spirit of them. Joyful and hedonistic they are, but there are almost never any drunks and almost nothing stupid happens that people regret the next morning. Many people take the wine seriously, but more importantly everyone enjoys it without any pressure to drink more than they want. You may be surprised to hear it, but I’m not entirely without sympathy for the anti-alcohol lobby (alcohol is a drug and alcoholics are drug addicts, as this blog has always made clear), but in situations like this their arguments fall almost totally flat. Conviviality of a special kind, of the Riesling kind, ruled the evening.

See you Thursday night at Hearth. Keep on Cruis’n !

Here are three of the four stars of the 3rd Long Night of German Wine NYC which kicks off at 11pm on Thursday evening (July 25th) at Hearth Restaurant on East 12th Street at First Avenue. They are, from left to right, Mirjam Schneider of the Schneider estate in Mainz-Hechtsheim, Christine Huff of the Ekkehard Huff estate in Nierstein-Schwabsburg and Eva Vollmer of the eponymous estate in Mainz-Ebersheim all in Rheinhessen. No other wine growing region in Germany has so successfully reinvented itself during the last decade as Rheinhessen thanks to the creativity and deduced hard work of young winegrowers like these. It used to be the homeland of Liebfraumilch (yawn!), but now I call it the Dream Factory of Dry German Wine. Groupings of young winegrowers like this are now the norm in Germany, because “we” is a better basis for building a better future than “I”. This is so both for practical reasons, for example, a group of three can do three times the number of experiments in vineyard and cellar per year than one, and because the combination of mutual support and peer criticism helps to develop talented winemakers. Each of this trio has already developed an entirely distinct wine style and has pushed quality up significantly although they’ve only been working on this things for about five years. My guess is that they are all headed for fame, even if they don’t yet have US importers. Who knows, maybe that will have changed by the weekend…

This is the other star of the evening: Riesling. Who could resist a wine as beautiful as this? Well some people still resist even trying it for dogmatic reasons, often saying that any white wine which isn’t a Chardonnay or a Sauvignon Blanc isn’t worth taking seriously. This is usually harmless nonsense, but sometimes it sounds like a form of wine racism. Of course, there will be nothing like that on Thursday night at Restaurant Hearth. Quite the opposite. Everywhere Riesling grows around Planet Wine (and there are many, many places where it thrives) it grows next to grapes of other varieties at least some of which also give exciting wines. Rheinhessen is no exception so there will be some white and red wines from other grapes to taste too.

This time my contribution is a selection of wines from the 2003 vintage, which early on was trashed for being “untypical”. Sure it was the hottest summer in Europe since decades, but then so was 1959 (a close match both for the climatic data and for the analytical stats for the wines), and that was the first European vintage to be widely reported in the American media. All those vintage charts tell you it was great too. The 1959 wines which were unbalanced or went wrong have long since been forgotten and today everyone remembers or dreams about the best. This is a rare chance to taste a range of German Rieslings of the 2003 vintage, dry and sweet, to see what happened to them. Why do I donate these valuable bottles from my cellar in Berlin to the event? Why does Paul Grieco of Hearth and his team make so much effort? Why are trio of young winemakers from Rheinhessen in New York? In order to have a great time and to collect donations for the HOPE foundation in Cape Town/South Africa, which does work to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and to deal with its effects in one of the worst hit places   on the planet. For further information about the event please click on the link below. If you can’t attend, but want to help, we will gladly accept donations. Please contact Hearth.

Long Night of German Wines invite 2013

Not only have I been on the road for a good two weeks, but I’ve also been away from Berlin for two full months, much of that time traveling at speed or with a dense schedule. So maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve experienced some kind of cool burn-out here in Monterey/CA. Mostly it was foggy, but today the sun shone on the sea with all its might and my mind drifted in the special way it does when I’m burnt out in this way. Time to look back and take stock of what the last months have brought. Firstly, although I’m not finished with my research of the New Rieslings of North America I’ve got a long way with this work and discovered some amazing wines I had no idea existed, most notably in British Columbia/Canada. I also met many winemakers with a longstanding commitment to the grape variety who had raised the bar very substantially since I last encountered them, like Ted Bennet of Navarro Vineyards in Mendocino/CA. To read more about this all you need to do is scroll down and retrace my steps as I circled this continent. Nothing I’ve done is in itself remarkable, and I’m sure that many of you know about many of the winemakers I’ve visited and the wines I’ve tasted. The sum of them does seem to be more than the parts though and finally makes me feel really confident about the section of my forthcoming book which report on the New Riesling of North American. Not only are there enough exciting wines to fill those pages, there are enough stories of daring and dedication to make this an exciting story. In many places those stories also add up to the rebuilding and reinterpretation of the Riesling tradition that was lost decades ago, whereas in others it’s a genuinely new and dynamic development. Everywhere this process still has some way to run before all the potential is realized and a peak is reached. Following developments like these is what has maintained my excitement for wine alive for more than 30 years. All things will change!

PS Don’t forget the Long Night of German Wine on Thursday, July 25th in New York. Click on the link below for more information:

Long Night of German Wines invite 2013

To be completely frank I’m not the kind of guy who leaps at every opportunity to sit in fancy restaurants. So many of them are pretentious, disappointing, and over-priced if you’re the one picking up the tab for the chef’s ego-trip at the end of the evening.  Yesterday at the ‘Auberge’ in Carmel/California I not experienced some of the most amazing food I’ve tasted in years, but some of the most exciting food and Riesling pairings I’ve ever had. I didn’t manage to get a shot of the chef Justin Cogley, partly because he’s actually a little shy. However, at the end of the evening the winegrower responsible for the Rieslings, Helmut Dönnhoff of the eponymous estate in Oberhausen/Nahe didn’t mind me pointing my camera at him and his wife Gabi (above).

To be completely frank I’m not a genius at describing these things, but Justin Cogley’s combination of braised peach, corn and a smear of turbot roe emulsion was already startling, and pairing it with Dönnhoff’s 1994 Riesling Spätlese from his monopoly Brücke site was sheer genius. At nearly twenty years of age this wine’s sweetness had receded far into the background (a normal result of extended aging) and was just enough to match that of the peach. Slightly less daring, but equally delicious turbot cooked on the bone with a wilted miniature turnip which had a hint of hotness reminiscent of horseradish (pictured below). It was paired with Dönnhoff’s 2003 Riesling Spätlese from the Hermannshöhle site was served, which I already described in my last posting (see immediately below), which is amazingly fresh for its age and amazingly elegant for the hottest vintage in Europe for decades. Helmut Dönnhoff described the balancing act in making Rieslings of this kind by saying, “acidity and sweetness must be dancing!” In this case I’d say it was definitely tango, but the flavor and texture of the fish were more than a match for this lasciviousness.

The night before I was at ‘The Slanted Door’ in San Francisco’s Ferry Building to meet Charles Phan (pictured below), the founder of what is now a restaurant and bar group employing 650 people. The Slanted Door is not only a very stylish and lively Vietnamese restaurant with great food in a gloriously multi-cultural city, it’s also one of the largest grossing restaurants in the US. That means many thousands of people from all over the country and all over the world at least see it’s great list of Rieslings every year. A new section devoted entirely to dry Rieslings is the next step in its evolution. There’s another side to this though, which is Charles Phan’s philosophy of, “no Rum ‘n’ Coke, no Cosmopolitan, no Chardonnay!” In fact, there’s no cola at all in the entire place.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t reject Chardonnay out of hand whatever some people will tell you, because next to the Bullshit Chardonnay wines there are some very elegant dry whites. When it comes to Cola I have more mixed feelings, because I’m very critical of those aspects of the business philosophy of the big companies dominating the market which ignores the health implications of high sugar consumption. It’s therefore important that there are high profile restaurants like the Slanted Door proving you can do things very differently and still be very successful. A lot of Riesling’s remaining difficulties are due to the fact that many restaurants and wine stores are frightened of doing things differently from the crowd of their colleagues and competitors. This is robbing thousands of people per day of their first (hopefully life-changing) taste of good Riesling. Just to show that this blog is anything but narrow-minded and it never says that you have to drink Riesling I have to tell you that when Charles Phan showed me his new bourbon bar, ‘Hard Water’ (just a few doors down from the Slanted Door) I ordered a glass of Pappy van Winkle’s bourbon. I was amazed by the originality of this totally American taste. While I savored it Charles Phan explained that he’s fascinated by all food and drinks behind which there’s a real story. Exactly!

Riesling Rendezvous has just ended and as you can see from the photo above of the winemaker partners in the Washington State Riesling project ‘Eroica’ and guiding spirits of the event Ernst Loosen of Dr. Loosen in Bernkastel/Mosel (left) and Bob Bertheau of Chateau Ste. Michelle in Woodinville/Washington State a lot of fun was had. There was also a lot of serious tasting and discussion. In particular, this morning’s overview tasting of medium-dry to sweet Rieslings  brought many surprises even the wines from well-known producers like Helmut Dönnhoff of the eponymous wine estate in Oberhausen/Nahe. In his case it was the 2003 Riesling Spätlese from the Hermannshöhle site which wowed us by being incredibly graceful and fresh for one of the hottest vintages on record. The medium-dry 2012 Abtsberg ‘Superior’ from Dr. Carl von Schubert’s Maximin Grünhaus estate in the Ruwer was a super-elegant and hyper subtle wine in style most people didn’t realized he even produced. Once again Andrew Headley of Framingham in Marlborough/New Zealand showed a Spätlese type wine, the 2012 “F”, which was up there with the best Mosel wines of this style. Then there was the stunning first vintage of ‘Eroica Gold’ (the 2012) from the pair of winemakers pictured  above, the first spot-on Auslese style Riesling I’ve tasted from Washington State. How a sweet wine from a semi-desert climate taste so delicate? For me meeting dozens of Riesling producers I’ve been exchanging my thoughts and impressions with for years or even decades was also a great experience. Thank you Ted Baseler, the President of Chateau Set. Michelle for taking Riesling so seriously, and for making that wine and this great event possible!

It was a good thing that I was swept along by all of this, because since I arrived here I ran into couple of problems including an allergic reaction (in my case the main symptom is abdominal cramps) that made it difficult to deal with the other issues. It makes me think that life is a lot like winemaking. There’s a standard theory as to how you should do it, and although some winemakers fiercely deride that theory there’s much to be said for it. But then there are moments when you definitely need to throw all the theory overboard and do exactly the things you normally wouldn’t. I’m an inherently cautious person who’s first instinct is to steer away from the storm, but suddenly I ended up in the middle of a horrible storm…