Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

OK, so the weather in Seattle is beautiful and the sun is shining brightly (doing its very best to make the billows smooth and bright), but the Riesling Rendezvous begins today and for Riesling producers from around Planet Wine this is the equivalent of Christmas Eve. I have just one more hour left for my prep and as usual I’m scrabbling to pull everything together at the last moment, but there’s no alternative since that’s the only way I can speak well in public. At least this afternoon in the grounds of Chateau Set. Michelle just outside the city I don’t need to speak, only taste some wines make notes and exchange impressions with colleagues and friends. That’s the easy part. Monday and Tuesday will be very intense, so please be patient for the next posting. I promise that when it comes it will be packed with serious surprises!

I must also tell you about the Long Night of German Wine 3 which takes place in the late evening of  Thursday, July 25th at Hearth Restaurant in New York City. It features a trio of young winemakers from the Rheinhessen region of Germany, which in recent years has become the Dream Factory of Dry White German Wine. They are, from left to right, Mirjam Schneider of Schneider estate in Mainz-Hechtsheim, Christine Huff from Weingut the Ekkehard Huff estate in Nierstein-Schwabsburg and Eva Volmer of the eponymous estate in Mainz-Ebersheim. From my cellar there will be a slew of German wines from the forgotten 2003 vintage (in my view a dead ringer for 1959) plus the amazing house wines from the Weinstein wine restaurant in Berlin. For more information click on the link below.

Long Night of German Wines invite 2013

My last day in Okanagan Valley/BC brought one of those serious surprises. From the producers I’d visited during the first days I’d got the impression that the Bladerunner Riesling’s of this region in Canada represented the Wild West of my favorite grape. At the producers I visited the acidity levels were high to off the scale, alcohol levels were low to moderate yet the wines tasted astonishingly big and bold for those numbers. Then it occurred to me that these producers were nearly all based (and growing their grapes) in the cooler northern end of the region. How did Riesling from the warmer south of the Okanagan Valley taste. There, close to the US border where most of the Merlot and Cabernet are grown, so theoretically the Rieslings should also have more ripeness and less acidity. Was that the case and if so did it taste good? More importantly, how on earth was I going to answer that question in my last half day in “The Valley”?

Then I got lucky. Lindsay Kelm of the BC Wine Institute had gathered together a slew of Rieslings from producers I couldn’t visit and many came from the south. Of these, the wines from Gehringer in Oliver proved conclusively that a richer, riper style of Riesling is not only possible Down South, but can taste surprisingly like a ‘Grosses Gewächs’ (GG), the new category of high-end single-vineyard wines from Germany. Amongst the wines from further north there were also some serious surprises, most notably the dry wines from 8th Generation. They married a sleek, cool climate wine style to less strident acidity than established top producers like Tantalus, that is they seemed to offer a serious alternative to that Bladerunner path. Then there was the 2011 ‘Farm Reserve’ Riesling from Lang Vineyards, which like the Gehringer wines had over 13% alcohol, but is lush and tropical like no other wine from that vintage.

But now I must dash to the opening of Riesling Rendezvous. Watch this space!

Every time I visit a new region I arrive with heavy baggage in the form of preconceptions about the way it ticks. My current visit to the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia/ Canada was no exception. In global popular imagination Canada is a land of igloos and polar bears, but from my time in the Niagara Peninsula/Ontario I was well aware that there were places where wine growing functions very well here. This and a bunch of photographs I’d seen before leaving had prepared me for a warm and sunny region, but the Rieslings I’d tasted (all light to medium-bodied with intense aromas and high acidity) had convinced that this region must have a cool side and moist side to it. It was therefore a shock to discover that it is actually a semi-desert where much of the precipitation falls as snow in winter. Then there were the beaches, quite possibly Canada’s only reliably warm and sunny beaches, which clearly have something to do with the real estate boom here. As chance would have it as I stepped off the plane unusually strong winds buffeted me and have continued to do so. Then there’s the way the lake looked the first night I was here (see above) which was about as far removed from any photo of the valley I’d seen as I could imagine. I’m still trying to make sense of all of this.

Then there are the wines, by which I mean the Rieslings and others (including the reds), which are all blessed with a generous acidity which ranges from bright to piercing in taste. Alcohol levels in the Rieslings are low to moderate, whereas the high-end reds 14% is as common as it is in many other regions that are officially “cool climate”. I still find that combination pretty confusing and difficult to explain. Even the Rieslings which taste dry to me had some residual sweetness, often qualifying as medium-dry on paper. Indeed,  some wines 2.5 to 3% / 25 to 30 grams per liter natural grape sweetness tasted almost dry, perhaps due not only to the remarkable acidity of the region, but also surely because of their low alcoholic content (10% or less) and perhaps other less obvious factors (low tannin content too). This may sound like a recipe for thin and mean wines, but those Bladerunner Wines I’m talking about actually tasted big and bold.

Pictured above is Alan Dickinson of Synchromesh Wines in Okanagan Falls who served me the most extraordinary Bladerunner Riesling I’ve tasted in a long time, his 2012 Storm Haven Vineyard. He gave up just about everything except wife, dog and car (an MG) to found his start up and has already pushed the envelope on this kind of wine a heck of a long way to great effect. However, it’s not only me who thinks that. The 2012 Storm Haven Vineyard Riesling sold out within 5 weeks, although it is definitely not the kind of dry wine which the Big Wide Market would prefer to have. He’s not alone in striking out in this direction as the 2012 ‘Platinum’ Riesling from Cedar Creek shows. The analytical numbers for that wine are even more extreme, that is further from anything which I’m familiar with. And even the striking and extremely consistent wines from the region’s established star producer, Tantalus, are not much closer to any norm I know.

All this adds up to a very remarkable region that is far from having realized its full Riesling potential, although the best wines are already very impressive and like nothing else you’ll taste on Planet Wine. And there’s no time for a detailed discussion of the equally interesting Pinot Noirs and a handful of other wines which seemed to redefine the possibilities of other wine categories. Although this is a playground for Vancouver it’s not easy to reach from Europe, and most of the production goes to Vancouver, so it will be a while before these wines get out of this Canadian province.

These cherries which I found today at the Granville Island market were my first sighting of the Okanagan Valley in unfermented form. The link between fruit-growing and wine- growing is something few non-winegrowers are aware of. Almost nothing is more destructive for the grape vine than frost just after its young shoots have emerged in the spring. This occurs simultaneously with apple blossom (and the blossoming of many other fruit trees is close to this date), and almost nothing is more destructive to apple-growing than frost during the bloom. Therefore, any region where apple-growing is a viable commercial undertaking is a good candidate for growing wine grape varieties suited to cool climate zones. This was something I learnt during my 2007 tour of Norway with German winegrowers who were checking out the potential for the grape vine there. Just a week before in Denmark I’d learnt that the flowering of the vine (though it depends upon the variety) is roughly simultaneous with that of the elderberry. To be frank I picked up this rather basic stuff way too late, so I’m happy to pass this gem of knowledge on to as many people as possible. I hope that it reaches you early enough!

Today’s final day of exploration in Vancouver has convinced me that the city could have been a healthy market for locally-produced wines during the twenty or so years before the collapse of the real estate market in 1913 and the beginning of World War I just a year later. That wine-growing in British Columbia did not develope at that point merely says that other new industries (the domestic and international demand for lumber and canned salmon at that time were clearly immense) were then more attractive and distracted those with the talent which could have founded a BC wine industry.

The opening of the Granville Island market (see the poster pictured left) in 1979 was a sign of growing interest in local produce and to my mind there’s always a close link between that and the demand for local wine. Sometimes the produce comes first, sometimes it’s the wine, but where fruit-growing flourishes the two almost inevitably go hand-in-hand. Just how far the Okanagan wine industry has got I will begin exploring tomorrow afternoon. Although I will – of course! – be focusing on Riesling, I shall cast my net as wide as possible. The fact is that in spite of the global Riesling revolution which is this website’s subject it is still, for example, easier to command healthy wine prices with high-end Pinot Noir red wines than it is with Riesling. Consumers are used to the idea that those wines have to coast something to be really good (lower yields than for Riesling of comparable quality are generally necessary and the wines often don’t reach the market until two years after harvest, another cost factor).   However, that’s also theory and it’s the practical reality which really interests me. Watch this space to find out more about the Practical Riesling Reality of Okanagan Valley!

Everywhere I eat and drink in Vancouver/BC dry Riesling from the Okanagan Valley is available as if this stopped being something requiring any discussion a very long time ago. When I asked I was told that it’s one of the wines Okanagan does the best, full stop. And the first wines I’ve drunk have been really good. The excellent dry Riesling from Tantalus in Kelowna, is even available in the bar at my hotel, the Moda at 900 Seymour Street. Yesterday evening I was very impressed by the 2012 Thorny Vines Riesling from new kids on the block Synchromesh, which was just on the medium dry side of dry, was bristling with aroma ranging form roses to lime and had a challenging acidity which reminded me of wines from cooler areas of the Nahe region of Germany. So what’s Yoda doing at the top?

Well, it may not look like it at first glance, but this city is a wonderful example of cross-cultural pollination. The picture of Yoda was drawn by an artist belonging to what Canadians call the First Nations (with capital letters!), that is the Native Canadians, but of course Yoda was originally a creation of Hollywood, which could hardly be more White American. Perhaps you think I’m making a joke, but the truth is that I’m not (even though I find the photo funny, not least because my own face reflected in the glass of the store window has become part of the image). Vancouver wouldn’t look the way it does today without the huge influx of Hong Kong Chinese money into the real estate sector since the 1980s. Now, seen from the right angle, it seriously resembles Hong Kong. You scoff at me? Well, fully one quarter of the city’s population comes from that part of China!

It is in this multi-cultural matrix that the generally dry Okanagan Rieslings function so well, not in some unofficially segregated WASP Zone. They are part of the great cosmopolitan melting pot that is contemporary Canada. Sure you have the same thing in New York where I left on this long and winding Riesling Trail, but there it doesn’t feel nearly as relaxed or comfortable as it does here. My guess is that the social mobility here is also higher than in the US. However, that’s something I shall have to look into, like so many other aspects of this place which looks so much like parts of the US, but is clearly very different. I’ve already been digging into the city’s multicultural cooking pot. This lunchtime I had an excellent Shawarma fish sandwich from the Fresh Local Wild food truck (a dish which originates in the Levant), tonight I’m going to an Indian restaurant, but Korean, Japanes, French, Italian and many, many other options were available too. And the warm, but not hot sunshine, together with the fresh breeze are making me very hungry and thirsty!

PS Stay tuned to this station for reports direct from Okanagan Valley where I arrive in just under 48 hours!

If it wasn’t for Canadian Bob Madill (pictured above) I wouldn’t have fully grasped how the Rieslings of the Finger Lakes/New York tick, or how the leading producers there reinvented those wines (primarily through improved viticultural methods) during the last years. The leap in quality here since my first visit back in 2005 is truly staggering, and fully comparable to that in Rheinhessen/Germany – the most dramatic and rapid turnaround of an entire region I so far saw in my home continent of Europe.

Bob also played two roles in that transformation, first at Sheldrake Point Vineyards on Cayuga Lake where he dramatically improved the dry Rieslings without being directly responsible either for the vineyards or the winemaking, and secondly as a kind of unofficial consultant to the wine industry of the region. Some of his colleagues sometimes found his continual enthusiasm, questioning and goading a bit nerve-wracking at times, but almost all of them who are genuinely committed to quality benefited rom those qualities to a greater or lesser degree. That’s quite a serious achievement!

One of the things this second Bob Madill was to organize a series of overview tastings of the region’s Rieslings for me beginning three years ago and concluding (for the moment) with the tasting yesterday evening at the excellent bistro of Red Newt Winery. Not only did this tasting show just how good  the Rieslings of the 2012 vintage from the established top producers are (particularly the Sheldrake Point Reserve and the Red Newt Sawmill Creek), it also demonstrated what exciting and totally distinctive wines some of the rising stars are. Here I’m thinking of the ‘Tanzen Dame’ wines from Bloomer Creek and Kris Matthewson’s wines for Bellwether (which is first and foremost a cider producer). With their rich textural quality and spicy aromas the former remind me of the wines of Heymann-Löwenstein in the Terrassenmosel and with their (reductive) funk and enormous vitality the latter seem like a reinterpretation of J.J. Prüm’s MIttelmosel wines. Lastly, the tasting also showed just how well some of the best wines of the overlooked 2008 (Fox Run) and 2009 (Heron Hill and Anthony Road) vintages have developed. That’s a quite a crop of new impressions for just one tasting!

I have to admit that today I’m feeling a little bit burnt out, but it was worth it to really get a handle on what’s happening in one the most important American Riesling producing regions. I am currently – circuitously – en route to Vancouver/BC from where I shall continue on to the Okanagan Valley/BC for my next Big Riesling Adventure. That is all new territory for me, so I can’t wait to get my boots on that unfamiliar ground!

PS My excitement about the discoveries to come won’t make me forget my last impression of the Finger Lakes (see above), a quintessential American landscape with which too many Americans are unfamiliar. Of course, one could say the same thing about the region’s Riesling wines.

I had some serious problems with my computer system, which meant that the photographs for this posting only just went online. That’s very disappointing considering the considerable effort I made to come up with good photographs here in the Finger Lakes (FLX) New York, but there you go. I think that it’s more important to report than not to report because of technical failure…

The first photograph (above) is of Frederick Frank of DR. Frank on Keuka Lake/FLX with whom I tasted some spectacular Rieslings on the fourth of July. Frederick Frank is one of the few American winemakers to make the full range of Rieslings from almost bone dry to honey sweet, from still to sparkling. And all of these wines are really good. Even the sparkling Riesling is in the first league of American white wines and has creamed off a slew of awards at wine competitions. As Frederick Frank told me,  with a following wind you can win a Gold Medal here or there, but if they start stacking up this really means something. It was also interesting to learn how – without vineyard designating his wines – he does distinguish between his vineyards on Kueka Lake, from which his Dry Riesling tends to come (in the 2012 vintage a fairly austere, but refined and subtle wine) and Seneca Lake, from which his Semi-Dry Riesling originates. Then there’s the ‘Celebre’ sparkling Riesling, which has a wonderful balance of fruit, acidity and discrete residual sweetness (Medium-Dry on the IRF taste profile).

Mark Wagner of Lamoroux Landing on Seneca Lake (pictured above) has obviously done a lot of work to produce three single-vineyard designate Rieslings – ‘Yellow Dog’, ‘Round Rock’ and ‘Red Oak’ – which are extremely distinctive. All of these wines are clearly Medium-Dry (also on the IRF taste profile), but the 2012s are all beautifully balanced and really refined. I tasted a vertical of ‘Red Oak’ going back to the first vintage – 2008 (you can’t go back further than that!) and they were  all very impressive wines. Young vines? Yes, but the wines didn’t show it at all! That small row of wines showed very well how the leading winemakers of the Finger Lakes have achieved a big leap forward during the last few years. The 2010, ’11 and ’12 had so much more finesse than the previous vintages. These are world class wines!

One of the problems for the Finger Lakes during the last years has been the small number of producers who are producing a serious amount of good Riesling with which they could attract attention to the region and it’s most important grape variety. Thankfully David Whiting of Red Newt Cellars has been working on this since the 2008 vintage with a wine called ‘Circle’. This wines comes from the same vineyards he draws the grapes for his single vineyard bottlings, so the grapes come from growers who really know what they’re doing. And you can taste that in the finished wine. Sometimes you can run into this wine for just $9.99 and for that price it is sensational value for money, particularly the 2012 vintage which is just coming onto the market. This is a medium-dry wine which has a great compatability with all manner of lighter, summer foods from salads to grilled meat.

What does all this mean? I think it means that the FLX have really made a big Leap forward and the reaction in the market seems to confirm this, because the wines have started appearing in places in NZwineC I thought I’d never see them. This means that they have already convinced a large number of sceptics. Sure these wines could and will become even better, but I think that the leading winemakers have cracked the FLX Riesling Code and are now in the business of refining their technique rather than trying to figure out where up and down are ( as it was a decade ago). Now I have to sign off, because a bunch of winemakers are about to walk in the door for a serious analytical tasting of their current wines, and they expect me to say something coherent. That doesn’t go without saying.

In England where I grew up and was raised we say, “the proof is in the pudding”, meaning that theories are fine, but the crucial test is how things function in the real world. Last night Bob Madill of Sheldrake Point Vineyards here on Cayuga Lake in Upstate New York  and I undertook such a “pudding” test took place on the dinner table. Bob pulled out of his cellar two mature vintages of Sheldrake Point’s ‘Reserve’ dry Riesling, 2003 (the first vintage) and 2006. The point was not to prove that these wines can keep for that length of time, rather to show that dry Rieslings from the Finger Lakes with a high natural acidity content which taste austere (but not unripe) as young wines can develop very positively in the bottle. The 2006 was always a sleek wine with a pronounced acidity, but it has gained a lot of elegance since I first tasted it in its youthful. The patina of mature aromas was delicate rather than dominant, in no way masking a lemony freshness that keeps the wine very lively. And it was that balance of fresh and mellow which made me linger long enough to find many subtle herbal and rooty (for example celery and parsley root) nuances in the wine. In my book that adds up to dry Riesling greatness, and I’ve tasted a bunch of dry Rieslings of this vintage from various part of Europe which were not as impressive as this wine.

In contrast, the 2003 was bone dry and had a slight bitterness in the back of the mouth. At first it seemed very mature, but, as so often happens with mature Rieslings, after leaving it some 20 minutes in the glass it became more lively (although this counter-inuitive, since contact with the air means oxidation and that ought to make the wine seem older/more tired). It was a good first shot at what the 2006 does so well, and has become the house style here. I can’t wait to taste the 2012 ‘Reserve’ dry Riesling again, which passed the “pudding” test with flying colors the first time I encountered it back in March. These are wines which show what this region can really do with dry Riesling, and as Bob Madill said last night, “we’re just scratching the surface”. More about the enormous potential of this region tomorrow.

Yesterday I was busy in NYC with the exuberant and joyful Gay Pride March, then the birthday celebrations of my friend Volker Donabaum (see below), but after reading the news early this morning there was no alternative but to postpone my next wine of the month until tomorrow and directly address the issue of the spying by the American NSA on the nation’s allies. You might wonder what this has to do with a wine blog devoted primarily to the Riesling grape, but in this situation I am firmly on Albert Einstein’s side. Shortly before his death in 1955 he wrote the following profound words in the draft of a speech to mark the 7. anniversary of Israeli independence: “In matters of Truth and Justice, there is no difference between large and small problems” / “Wenn es such um Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit handelt, gibt es night die Unterscheidung zwischen kleine und grove Probleme”.

Truth and Justice are the twin principals of this blog without which it simply couldn’t function. My commitment to them sometimes brings me into conflict with authority in various countries, because I adopt positions which are uncomfortable for them – Despicable Me! That they may listen into my communications and keep files on me therefore doesn’t surprise me at all. It comes with the territory. However, the fact that the NSA not only spied on the private telephone calls, emails and text messages of the citizens of Europe, but also spied on EU offices in Washington DC, at the United Nations here in New York and possibly in Brussels, plus diverse European embassies goes way beyond that. We are talking about the loyal friends and allies of the USA whose politicians and diplomats were spied upon, also using bugs!

It strikes me as essential that at this point I clearly state my fundamental position. I am a child of the Cold War, and I never doubted for a moment that I grew up on the right side of the Iron Curtain (even though England and the USA indirectly bears some responsibility fort the creation of that Iron Curtain). It was a great moment when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and when US and Russian nuclear weapons were “stood down” in 1991 a miraculous transformation of the world seemed complete. All this would not have been possible without the historical commitment of the US and its allies to freedom, democracy, truth and justice. I therefore write as a friend of the American people and the USA who believes in the principals enshrined in the American constitution and its amendments.

Since 1949 when the Federal Republic of Germany’s constitution was written with at least one eye firmly on the American role model Germany has been a “natural” ally of the USA. But what should German people think when the American Secretary of State John Kerry says that, “every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs of national security undertakes lots of activities to protect national security”. This means that the American Government regards the EU politicians, diplomats and civilian populations as potential/actual threats to national security! I’ve written before about the arrogance and paranoia which lie behind this world-view before (see Riesling Road Trip: Day 5). To this Kerry has added a staggering disingenuousness by claiming not to know the truth of the spying allegations (which would mean his complete incompetence!) That makes it very difficult to take anything he says seriously, and I promise you until recently I was a John Kerry fan.

I just took another look at www.nytimes.com before writing this posting and by chance right at the top was an ad for the new Mike Nichols movie starring Daniel Craig called BETRAYAL. This is exactly how the Germans feel now. I was pleased to see that on Sunday the paper published a thoughtful piece by Malte Spitz entitled, ‘Germans loved Obama. Now we don’t trust him’. In spite of it’s publication in the Right Place I fear that President Obama, John Kerry and their teams still fail to realize the simple truths about German society which Spitz’s article lays out so clearly. Let me quote the most important section, “In the past 80 years, Germans have felt the betrayal of neighbors who informed for the Gestapo and the fear that best friends might be informants for the Stasi. Homes were tapped. Millions were monitored.” This is the background to how Germans perceive the NSA’s various programs that spy on them, for it is the deep tap root of their often intense commitment to freedom and democracy (according to the open-ended motto Never Again!)

On June 19th this year Barack Obama held an eloquent speech in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in which he talked about freedom, democracy and justice, that is the core American values. He took off his jacket saying that this was OK, “amongst friends”. This now looks as disingenuous as John Kerry’s claim not to have known what was going on. No wonder columnist Jakob Augstein of www.spiegel.de (Germany’s best news site) just wrote of the German people, “we can’t rely on this America any longer”. Whatever the politicians on both sides do now there’s already been catastrophic loss of trust by the German people, and many other freedom-loving people around the world, in the Administration of Barack Obama. America now has no alternative, but to rebuild that trust from the ground up.

I write all this with a heavy heart, because the German-American and European-American relationships are fundamental to the promotion of our core values and to peace  in this hemisphere, if not the world. The damage done to these things may be as catastrophic as that which the Financial Crisis wrought upon the global economy. It not only meant the demise of certain too-big-to-fail banks with ripple-on effects that are still clearly visible, but also affected the food and drink on people’s tables. It may sound like a detail in this huge picture, but the wine market was also fundamentally affected.

As I enjoyed Volker Donabaum’s birthday party on the rooftop of 360 TriBeCa yesterday afternoon my thoughts were far away from the future of the ideals I hold most dear. As usual Volker (who works for NYwineC importer A.I. Selections) was more than generous and his high spirits were infectious. The atmosphere was as open and as peaceful as it’s possible to be; the best side of New York. Looking back, that was the result of everybody present more or less sharing the same democratic ideals and believing in the fundamental importance of free speech, etc. Those things don’t need to be stated to have an effect, for as long as the great majority believe in them they infuse all manner of situations with mutual respect, creating an arena where creativity and innovation flourish. For a long time they were the basis of America’s dynamism and wealth (although that may no longer be the case due to the profound economic change of recent years). I fear that we’ve reached a point where the imperative of “National Security”, which actually means Governmental Invulnerability at All Costs, may also threaten these things. Paranoia is a terrible poison which can kill creativity no less easily than freedom. From 360 TriBeCa we had a spectacular view of the almost completed Freedom Tower which the picture below rather inadequately conveys.

Freedom Tower. Those words remind me of 9/11, to which the developments I’m focusing on today all go back. Those events also touched me. A few days later whilst traveling on a train in Germany I found a list of all the known victims of 9/11 in ‘The Gaurdian’ newspaper, which at that point was basically a list of the people on the three airplanes. Because they were listed alphabetically I immediately noticed the first name was that of a good acquaintance, Christian Adams, who I knew through his excellent work for the German Wine Insitute (DWI). Seconds later there was a series of thudding noises from under the train and it ground to a halt. We all sat there in fear wondering what on earth had happened, what would happen, then an announcement came over the PA that someone had just thrown themselves under the train. Those were dark days. Sadly, these are too, because of what the “Good Guys” have turned themselves into since 9/11. Where is all the Change we can believe in?