Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

What do you do when you’re very passionate about Austrian wines, you want to expand the market for them in North America, but have almost no marketing budget. You do what Toni Silver (pictured above) of Monika Caha Selections did, which is to create cool new brands featuring the most widely-planted white and red grapes grown in Austria and make yourself the face of the brand. The above picture shows Toni Silver in the same pose in which her cartoon likeness appears on the label of the ‘Grooner’ brand of dry white Grüner Veltliner and the ‘Zvy-gelt’ brand of red Zweigelt (my favorite of the pair). These are fun-fun-fun-in-the-USA wines made by a surprisingly serious guy called Meinhard Forstreiter of the eponymous estate in the Kremstal region.

This is all going through my mind, because yesterday I met Toni Silver, Monika Caha, Meinhard Forstreiter and a bunch of other interesting people at New York importer Frederick Wildman’s tasting of Austrian, German and Alsace wines at Restaurant Aquavit on East 55^th Street. Back home in Austria Forstreiter is one of the nation’s most underappreciated winemakers, but the three contrasting Grüners he showed today demonstrated that he’s a talented winemaker of the minimalist, hands-off school. My favorite was the 2011 Grüner Veltliner Schiefer (the vineyard name) with its delicate nutty aroma and unusually sleek, fresh flavor profile for this grape. Though the wines were very different in style, the dry whites from Weingut Stadlmann of the Thermenregion were every bit as impressive. Here the most striking wine was the Riesling-like 2010 Zierfandler from the Mandel-Höh vineyard, with its bouquet of jackfruit (really!) and a very discrete yet intense flavor in which dried peach was intertwined with salty (i.e. real) minerality; a great wine with a long life ahead of it. They all have friendly prices, but the Austrian wine bargain of the day was the 2011 Gemischte Satz, or mixed planting (based on 20% Riesling and 20% Scheurebe) from Neumeister in Southeast Styria with its fruit cocktail aromas and very straight, pure, dry style.

LET ME AT ‘EM! Let me taste those 2011 Scharzhofberger Rieslings from Weingut Egon Müller-Scharzhof!! Let me through to those bottles!!! And yes, after a short wait, I did get through the crush around the table Egon Müller’s Rieslings from the Saar and Slovakia shared with those from Weingut Wittmann in Rheinhessen and it was well worth being patient. Anyone who finds most dry Rieslings too lean and acidic is strongly recommended the Egon Müller vinified 2011 Château Béla Riesling from Slovakia with its ripe mirabelle aroma and full, round body. In comparison, the 2011 Scharzhofberger Riesling Kabinett is an Egon Müller masterpiece of floral and white peach delicacy with white wedding filigree; the perfect wine for a sophisticated lady or cosmopolitan man about town. I hope that I qualify!

Let me now nail my flag to the mast, in case you haven’t already figured this out for yourselves. I believe in both the beauty of wine and personal pleasure, the latter following from the fact that beauty is (famously) in the eye of the beholder. These are Old Ideas, but as with all other ideas that keep coming back it’s always possible to give them a new twist. And right now I think that New York Wine City is giving these Old Ideas a radical new twist. That’s why I’m here. Dare I suggest that you…enjoy!

It’s almost too obvious to need pointing out, but New York Wine City (NYWC) is often a crazy place. Never more so than on a day like today when one big tasting (A.I. Selections) and another huge one (Michael Skurnik Wines) suck the entire wine and restaurant scene into confined downtown spaces. For a moment I wondered if the term “bull market” might apply to the sheer mass of highly energized people often gesticulating excitedly, but since prices aren’t rising except for a few very sought-after collectible/ investment wines I don’t think it really applies. Actually, I find this almost blinding intensity of interest in good wine a wonderful thing, even if I can only take a few hours of it at a go.

Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon, pictured above the Michael Skurnik Wines tasting, certainly seems to have more stamina for this form of divine NYWC madness than I do, but then he has a long history of “working the market” and has developed his own inimitable way of coping with that. I think he has a much bigger problem with the American wine media and feels that they have never really taken him seriously. Certainly all five of the wines under the “Le Cigare” brand (regular and reserve white and red plus Vin Gris rosé) he showed me were expertly made, strikingly individual and would undoubtedly blow a slew of supposedly cool 90+ wines off the table. However, the really good thing about NYWC today is that exactly this kind of comparison is becoming unnecessary as much of the wine scene follows trail blazers like Paul Grieco of the Terroir wine bars and Restaurant Hearth who have struck out in a completely different direction called personal pleasure.

Although Riesling is a major part of this new NYWC, but until recently it was a bit disappointing to see how few of the new German and Austrian Rieslings (or for that matter other wines from those countries) were making it over to the US. That’s why someone like Volker Donabaum of A.I. Selections is an important new development. Stephen Bitterolf of Vom Boden is another smart new importer  sticking his neck out and taking risks on wines some of the big well-established importers didn’t pick up during the last couple of years when they were still there for the grabbing. The Riesling ‘Proidl spright deutsch’, Proidl speaks German, from the Proidl estate in Senftenberg/Kremstal in Austria is a perfect example of this. Proidl’s other white wines – Riesling, Grüner Veltliner and Traminer – are powerful dry wines that still manage to have a certain elegance thanks to the stony gneiss soil and careful winemaking. In contrast, this wine has high natural sweetness and high acidity, making it seem less obviously Austrian and rather more like a Gold Cap German Auslese. Hence the name.

And the most exciting wine of the day? For me it was the 2011 Gottessfuß Riesling from Roman Niewodniczanski of the Van Volxem estate in Wiltingen/Saar at the A.I. Selections tasting. It was incredibly powerful, yet had wonderfully light touch and very complex fruit aromas (everything from perfectly ripe apricots to forest berries and mandarine). But actually that description is way too prosaic for this wine, which was a piece of Riesling Heaven in NYWC!

PS Don’t tell anybody, but I also found a couple of Chardonnays (at the Michael Skurnik Wines tasting) which I really loved. The dangerously fresh and vivid 2008 Stony Hill from Napa Valley was completely unloaded with oak and malolactic baggage, and the 2009 Ritchie Vineyard from David Ramey in Sonoma County. It had a beautiful lemon curd aroma, great ripeness and concentration, yet stung at the finish like an electric eel; the complete opposite of Bullshit California Chardonnay!

Once again I’ve managed to get myself in trouble by looking for the truth in wine, although this time it’s an aspect of wine that has nothing to do with the taste: wine prices and the profits they make both for the producers, and for those who trade in their products. The question that drives me in this research is where does wine stop being a beverage (however “sophisticated”) for which the winegrower works hard and from which she or he makes a more or less good living, and when does it become part of the world of luxury goods along with designer handbags and sports cars. What interests me is not prejudice or politics, but the hard economic truth in wine.

The trouble began when I started publicizing the first results of my investigation into what would be the highest possible average production costs for a dry white or red wine produced regularly from the same piece of land (where many factors are fixed) which has been inherited by the producer. I kept hearing a figure of about €6 / $8 per bottle as the maximum for high-end wines grown on steep slopes where cultivation is almost largely manual and crop levels are 30 hectoliters per hectare / two tons per acre or slightly less. Perhaps, by pushing the density of vine planted to the extreme (which may not necessarily be good for quality) and by cutting yields down even further (to levels which are very rare) one might come up with growing costs of as much as €12 / $15.50 per bottle. Let us then allow for two years of aging in 100% brand new barrels (don’t forget that after use they’ll be sold on, not thrown away) and fancy packaging. This takes us to a about €20 or $26 per bottle for something like Grand Cru Burgundy. Only by piling on the marketing, financing and other indirect costs can it go much higher than that.

I happen to know from an earlier research project that for the top red Bordeauxs production costs are significantly lower than the theoretical maximum figures I’ve just calculated. In March 2007 I visited Bordeaux as the guest of Millesima, a negociant who sells directly to the consumer, to take part in their overview tasting of the 2005 vintage. The wines had either just been bottled or were just about to be bottled. To me it tasted like another excellent vintage, comparable in quality to 1982 or 2000, but a tad more elegant than either of them. Immediately afterwards I was received at Château Haut-Brion where I tasted the 2005 red wines, which were just about to be bottled, and was very impressed. Best of all was the 2005 Haut-Brion itself, which then tasted much the way the Château’s website describes it, “creamy, big, powerful and fresh”. But today, we’re looking for the economic truth in wine, not for origin of the pleasant taste.

At the airport I looked at the price list for the 2005s which I’d been given at Millesima and discovered that the 2005 Château Haut-Brion would cost me more then €650 / $845 a bottle. Ouch! Then, I got in touch with my Bordeaux spy who had the most amazing contacts in the region. She knew roughly what the production costs for Haut-Brion were and when I told her to add a healthy amount for marketing, financing, etc. she still came up with a figure of under €20 / $26 per bottle. I insisted that we round it up to this figure to show good will. Then she told me that the lowest price at which Haut-Btion had sold this wine into the market was €240 / $312 per bottle. This leaves a minimum profit of  €220 / $286 per bottle, which is a profit margin of at least 1,100%. The production quantity of 109,000 bottles is well known, so it s possible to calculate a minimum profit for this vintage of this wine. It would appear to be well in excess of €24 million / $31 million. Perhaps there are enormous costs which I’m not aware of, but I find this hard to believe. Of course, Millesima and many other traders also made hundreds of Euros profit per bottle on this wine, and on others which are in the same league.

This is, of course, market forces and the way of the world. For me the question is not if it’s immoral, much less whether it should be allowed to happen. However, I think it’s better for us all if  we don’t pretend that the profits made on this kind of wine – call them high-end wines, collectible wines, investment wines or whatever – by the producers are in the tens of percentage points range as they are in so many other businesses, also in the t other business which is the wines to drink made and consumed in the real world. Let’s see this phenomenon for what it is, which is part of the luxury goods industry and bling.

I have to admit that going through these figures didn’t stimulate my thirst for Grand Cru Burgundy or Premier Grand Cru Classé Bordeaux. Instead I’d rather have a nice glass of Riesling with which the producer has earned himself a good living and enough money to invest in the further development of his company. That is my Planet Wine.

PS A couple of years later in Zürich I encountered the 2005 Château Haut-Brion again in a blind tasting. I had no idea it would be there, so I think you could call this “double blind”. The wine had a lot of dry tannin and was quite powerful, but very lean. The most obvious aroma was of green bell pepper, a character typical of unripe or (more likely in this case) half-ripe Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. I wasn’t the only taster to be seriously disappointed by this wine, but the sad thing in this case is that the taste doesn’t really matter.

Thanks to Birgitta Böckeler for the photograph!

I read the news, some of which is frightening, out on the street I see and hear people who are obviously suffering, and then I drink a glass of Riesling and I talk with people who enjoy Riesling, and I feel sure that in spite of whatever shit goes down everything will be alright. And knowing that purchasing that glass of Riesling – wherever it came from – didn’t bring involve the risk of financial ruin makes this thought even more comforting.

Those of you who think that tasting wine is some kind of holiday camp should examine the picture above of the Riesling Boot Camp I attended yesterday afternoon! Thanks to Bob Madill of Sheldrake Point winery in New York State’s  Finger Lakes (FLX) I’ve been following the region’s Rieslings very closely recently. Since the summer of 2010 Bob Madill’s  organized half a dozen comparative tastings of current Rieslings from this beautiful region which celebrated 50 years of Riesling wine production (at the Dr. Konstantin Frank winery) last year. The latest of these took place yesterday afternoon at the Hotel of Hope on East 7th Street in Manhattan’s East Village (pictured above) and focused on the 2012 vintage, most of which isn’t bottled. In spite of that fact the tasting left little doubt that 2012 is a great vintage for FLX Riesling.  However, it isn’t just a great vintage because nature smiled and the grapes were both ripe and clean, rather because nature smiled and many producers have thought and worked really hard to improve their wine growing and winemaking techniques. Whether dry (less austere than before), medium-dry (a growing segment!) or frankly sweet (ever more seldom), the 2012 Rieslings are the best balanced and most elegant wines I’ve yet tasted from the FLX.

The rate of progress since that first tasting of 2009s and 2008s has been brisk, and a good part of the credit must go to Bob Madill (pictured right at Restaurant Hearth after the tasting) for repeatedly nudging so many of his colleagues and asking them so many awkward questions about winemaking details. No doubt the critical and market success of the Dr. Konstantin Frank and Hermann J. Wiemer wineries has also played an important role, demonstrating with great clarity how the combination of high quality, fair prices and professional marketing can generate excitement for the region’s Rieslings. There has also been a growing openness for the FLX wines as a whole here in New York Wine City (NYWC). And these are just the most obvious factors which have conspired to create such a favorable situation for the reception of the 2012 FLX Rieslings.

Which wines stood out? Well, my sympathy for the underdog means that I first have to congratulate Lakewood Vineyards on the best wines I ever tasted from them. Their 2012 ‘3 Generations Dry’, regular ‘Dry’ and medium-sweet wines are a quantum leap up in concentration and sophistication, propelling them into the leading group of FLX Riesling producers. The leap for Bellwether is less dramatic, but they too have probably made their best wines to date and these were probably the most minerally wines in the tasting. I was expecting Dr. Konstantin Frank’s wines – ‘Dry’ and ‘Semi-Dry’ – to be impressively vivid and aromatic, elegant and racy, which they indeed were. Their blackcurrant note is something which you either like (it’s certainly attractive for me) or you don’t (it could remind you of Sauvignon Blanc).  Each of Red Newt’s five single vineyard designated wines were completely distinctive, the balance being spot on wether they had 6 grams/liter of residual sweetness – Tango Oaks Vineyard – or 60 grams/liter RS – the stunning Sawmill Creek ‘North Block’. In the latter style the ‘Late Harvest’ from Fox Run stood out for its fine honey character (from noble rot) and elegant harmony. The three medium-dry vineyard designated wines and the regular ‘Dry’ Riesling from Lamoreaux Landing (the last of these a steal at $13.99 on the shelf – when it gets there) combined power with elegance, and will surely develop beautifully for many years to come.

As Bob Madill pointed out, the packaging for Sheldrake Point’s experimental 2012 ‘Barrel Fermented’ dry Riesling is, “edgy”. I mean, I’ve seen some wine labels that looked like torn off pieces of paper before, but combining this with reused Grolsch lager bottles is really pushing the envelope out a long way! The wine (still a cask sample) tastes like no other FLX Riesling I so far encountered. Muscular and richly textural, it tastes remarkably supple considering its healthy acidity content due to its long maturation on the lees and only has the merest hint of oak (the barrel had been sued for Chardonnay since 2003). Although it was the most yeasty wine in the tasting and still quite cloudy, I felt I could confidently predict what will happen to the regular 2012 ‘Dry’ Riesling from Sheldrake Point. With its intense lime -lemon aromas and considerably concentration, this is surely the winery’s best showing to date. However, that’s a comment I can extend to almost all the FLX Rieslings I tasted yesterday and that extends all the way to the big Wagner winery. I can’t wait to taste the 2012 wines from Anthony Road, Ravines and Hermann J. Wiemer which were not included in the tasting. However, I feel sure that they would only have underlined that this is going to be a big year for the FLX!

PS – an important note to FLX winemakers

The wines I tasted were almost all tank samples, which means that it is still possible to do something to them before bottling. I strongly recommend that the following not be done: 1) knocking the natural carbon dioxide out of the wines, 2) chemical deacidification of wines with ripe flavors, 3) bottling with more than 45 mg/liter free sulfur dioxide under crop or more than 40 mg/liter free sulfur dioxide under screw caps. One or two dry wines in this tasting were perhaps a little too austere. The simplest method for dealing with this is blending to lift the RS be a few grams/liter.

I spent the whole day yesterday running around Manhattan/NYWC from one wine tasting to the next (four in all) and on paper not one of them had anything to do with Riesling. First up was a tasting of the wines from the huge Esporao winery of Alentejo/Portugal. I couldn’t stay for the reds, but that didn’t matter because I’d already tasted all of them with chief winemaker David Baverstock last month in Berlin. It was a stroke of luck that  Sandra Alves (above) was in NYWC representing the company, since she is the white winemaker and I only had time for the whites. Although a couple of the high-end whites from Esporao spend time in oak, most of their whites don’t. A perfect example of Sandra Alves’ work is the dry white 2011 ‘Duos Castas’, a blend of Semillon and the indigenous Viosinho grape (a native of the Douro Valley). It smelt of floral honey and orange blossom, tasting simultaneously quite richly textural and wonderfully fresh. All this was achieved only using stainless steel tanks and some stirring of the lees, just like many top dry Rieslings. Of course, due to the non-Riesling grape varieties the aromas are different, but even then they work in a way that is not fundamentally different from those of some dry Rieslings. Let’s say there is some kind of family resemblance.

I could say much the same about the dry 2011 Tokaji from Château Dereszla in Tokaj/Hungary which I encountered right afterwards at the Midtown offices of importers Cognac One. Although about 10% of this wine was fermented and matured in oak, the fruity aromas of the Furmint and Muscat grapes dominated the oak completely, and the balance of 13% natural alcohol with just over 6 grams/liter acidity with 6 grams/liter residual sweetness (i.e. both around 0.6%) was entirely familiar to me from modern dry German Rieslings. However, this is probably a more flexible food wine than most high-end dry 2011 German Rieslings. Analytically they might not have more acidity, but generally they taste slightly more acidic, which makes food pairing more challenging.

Next up was the German wine tasting at the Museum of Art & Design on Columbus Circle. This was a Riesling-free-zone due to the theme: Germany’s Pinot Trio. There I met Hans-Peter and Edeltraud Ziereisen from the eponymous winery in the extreme southwest of the Baden region (from many of their vineyards you can see both the Vosges Mountains of Alasce and Basel in Switzerland). Their 2010 Pinot Noirs have just been released and each of the four vineyard designates they showed tasted totally different, very much like Riesling from different vineyard sites but from the cellar of one top winegrower do. My favorite was the 2010 Rhini, which had a great black cherry and smoke bouquet, elegantly dry tannins and terrific concentration for a wine with just 12.3% natural alcohol.

My final stop was the Spring Wine Tasting of Garnet Wines & Liquors. There I tasted the amazing 2010 ‘Orthogneiss’ Muscadet du Serve & Maine from Domaine de L’Ecu in the Loire Valley, which was as steely and austerely minerally as an uncompromising dry Riesling from a very cool region. However, the wine was made from the Melon grape that also gave the ocean of thin run-of-the-mill Muscadets which got this appellation a bad name. I’m not a Sauvignon Blanc fan, but the 2010 Reuilly (a 100% Sauvignon Blanc also from the Loire Valley) from Domaine Dyckerhoff was also racy and minerally with only a hint of the green bell pepper aroma (technical name pyrazines) at the long finish. How does minerally actually taste? I describe it as a saltiness, most obvious in the aftertaste, but for more about this see the story directly below this post. These are sophisticated wines for $18.99 and $15.99 respectively, and if you like dry Riesling the chances are you’ll find them at least interesting, and possibly as exciting as I did.

I’d been in NYWC less than 24 hours and a minor storm about terroir (French for the taste of the place – a concept applicable to cheese no less than wine) blew up on twitter. A grossly over-simplified concept of terroir is still doing the rounds and some people are clinging to it as if it were a religious dogma, which is screwing serious debate on this subject. This ABC version of terroir says that because, for example, the roots of the Riesling vines on the Mosel penetrate deep into the slate bed rock they therefore absorb something like liquified slate and this gets pumped into the grapes, which is what gives Mosel Rieslings their special “slatey” character. There’s also a burgundian version of this fairy tale which says because the roots of the Pinot vines penetrate into the limestone bed rock of the Cote d’Or they therefore absorb something like liquified limestone and pump this into the grapes, giving red Burgundies their special mineraly character. Sadly all of this is just not true. There’s no scientific evidence at all that vines growing on a soil rich in calcium (e.g. limestone)  give wines which are richer in calcium than those growing on soils much less rich in calcium, and there’s no scientific evidence at all that vines growing on slate give wines richer in the main minerals of which the slate is composed (these vary depending upon the sedimentary material from which was later turned into slate by pressure and heat) than those growing on non-slate soils. One of the Hard Facts of Terroir is that the vine, regardless of the variety, absorbs minerals from the soil selectively according to its needs.

Certainly, many aspects of the soil’s composition, beginning with it’s water-retention, extending to alkalinity/acidity and microbial activity (which have a major affect on what nutrients are available to the vine), dramatically influence the wine that grows there. However, the idea that limestone literally gives red Burgundy a limestone taste is no less fallacious than the idea that slate directly infuses Mosel Riesling with a slatey taste. By the way, the main mineral in any wine is potassium, which may be present in quantities of up to or slightly exceeding 1000ppm (i.e. one tenth of a percent, or one gram per liter). A high potassium content gives wine a salty aftertaste, which is the only actual minerality you can taste, though wine experts often refer to certain other tastes as being “minerally”.  The next most important mineral in wine is usually calcium, of which there is not a tenth of the quantity as potassium. All the other minerals are present are mere traces compared with the potassium, which the vine pumps into the skins of the grapes during the ripening of the grapes. Sorry to let some of you terroir freaks down with a bump! The other thing about terroir is that it always begins with climatic factors and the way soil influences wine character is indirect and complex, and, perhaps for this reason, as yet rather poorly understood by wine scientists. So there’s still plenty of mystery!

Suddenly, inexplicably, finally, logically I’m back in New York Wine City (NYWC) and it feels like a dream I might abruptly awaken from, or that I’ve just awoken from a strange and gritty, colorful and comforting dream of Berlin…but I can’t tell which of those it is. Either way this time all my luggage arrived at JFK with me and when I reached the Hotel of Hope everything was perfectly prepared for my arrival, even though my “landlord” Jürgen Fränznick is back in Germany at the moment.

After unpacking I set off for a run along the azure blue East River in the brilliant sunshine – so much more brilliant than in Berlin at this time of year – and the creative juices were immediately flowing, pumping, gushing and cascading. Once again I feel like I have almost too much material for you, though some of it certainly needs a lot of work before it will make something resembling a coherent story (and I really believe that the best stories are always coherent, even if told from an eccentric perspective or in an unconventional form). Tonight I will stay at home cook some pasta and may even open a bottle of Riesling! I promise that this is just the quiet before the NYWC Riesling storm.

PS Many thanks to Birgitta Böckeler for the great picture above!

At noon today I bumped into Kerstin and Martin Tesch of the (in)famous Tesch estate in Langenlonsheim/Nahe at Hotel Kronenschlösschen in Hattenheim/Rheingau.  OK, strictly speaking “Berlin Riesling Diary” is not truthful, because today I’ve been in the Rheingau and the event I was part of today had absolutely nothing to do with Berlin. Every December together with food philosopher and restaurant critic Jürgen Dolasse I publish an article in the Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany’s equivalent of the New York Times) called “Unsere Lieblinge”, our favorites. Dolasse covers the restaurant scene and I do the wine side. Each year my fave raves are presented during the Rheingau Gourmet Festival at a lunch cooked by Jean Claude Bougueil of Restaurant Schiffchen in Düsseldorf. Yes, a great French chef working in Germany!

This year’s lunch was the best he’s cooked for this event so far. What was more amazing, his radical reinterpretation of Escoffier’s mille feuille of goose liver paté or his very straight down the line venison with salsify and cassis? I really can’t say. On the wine side for me the most startling experience was the dry 2007 Krone Riesling from Martin Tesch. Finally, after all the effusive, but rather embryonic young wines which picked up the prizes I had to give for specific wine categories (the winners always have to still be on the shelf, which inevitably pushes me in the direction of young wines) here was a wine which had lost its puppy fat and showing its cheek bones in a way I find at once adult and very sexy. I think it amply backed up my case for awarding Tesch the winegrower of the year prize, although that was not only for his wines, but also for the way he’s redefined the role of the winemaker in a direction which makes the second oldest profession compatible with the 21st century.

The other wine which was mature in that kind of very sexy way was the 2004 Vintage Brut champagne from Billecart-Salmon – finally a minerally champagne!!! – which was presented by Billecart’s German representative Eric Calzolari. I think the picture of him below gives a good idea of how much we all enjoyed this great champagne and the whole event. Now I have to get to bed in order to catch my early morning flight to New York Wine City (NYWC), from where I will report tomorrow! However, to be perfectly frank I don’t imagine that straight away I will be able to report about wines as unique as these!

PS which is the “best” wine in the world? That’s a question I often ask myself. Whatever comes into my mind when I’m mulling this over I always end with the same thought; everything depends upon your personal taste, that is on how you define “best”. But, one thing is clear for me, whichever wine I choose as my favorite in any situation it has to be unique. That is, it has to clearly stand out from the crowd of good wines (i.e. well made wines which are more or less interchangeable) no less than the crowd of bad wines (i.e. the wines which are technically correct, but utterly soulless).