Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

How many times did somebody tell me that painting had died? Any number of times, and although it sometimes looked like it might be true it never was. It always came back to life and was every bit as vital as before. For a while I was beginning to wonder if wine writing had died. However, I think the problem is a different one as Alice Feiring just pointed out to me. If she’s right then the most influential wine critic of the last generation, Robert Parker, was also highly influential in persuading millions of people that it’s a complete waste of time and endlessly boring to read about wine. He did so by reducing wine writing to a few numbers and long strings of adjectives. Yawn! Yawn! Somebody please open that window now and get some fresh air in here!

Of course, Bob meant well, was against the deadly let’s-dodge-the-issue school of British wine writing, and was uncompromising about doing it all his way. But from the point of view of writers like Feiring and I who see great possibilities in wine as a subject he had a totally negative influence upon the mass of our potential readers. Were it not for Parker and his imitators millions more people might be interested in reading about wine, just as they are interested to read about movies, fashion, gardening and cooking. Bob turned those people off wine and he did so by focusing his work down ever more narrowly.

Of course, he also found a different, much smaller, bunch of people who loved the predictable laser beam straightness of his approach and who were impressed by the gun-slinger swagger of his self-confidence. His fans were, however, numerous enough that for thirty years his ‘Wine Advocate’ made him a healthy income, and finally he sold the operation the other day for a very healthy price. But that’s the familiar side of this story and it doesn’t interest me at all. For me that’s all beside the point, which is the future of wine writing. I’m not the only one who believes in that future either.

Regular readers will already know that Alice Feiring is the New York based authoress of ‘The Battle for Wine and Love’ (Harcourt Books, Orlando/FL 2008) and ‘Naked Wine’ (Da Capo Press, Cambridge/MA, 2011). We finally met this morning at Bowery Coffee and I was bowled over by her passion for the subject and for the business of crafting text which makes it come alive. There’s no fundamental difference between us on those things, even if our taste in wines and our beliefs seriously diverge at some points.

We are both involved in a struggle to turn wine writing around in a radical way and prove that this is not some oddball theme of limited possibilities and of interest only to a narrow group of readers. For us the wideness of the subject is the reason for its potential to interest a very wide range of people, even if this is still seldom grasped. I’m also convinced that whatever practical difficulties we face at the moment is finally ripe for a totally new approach to writing about wine. The demise of the few-numbers-and-long- strings-of-adjectives school has been slow, but inexorable. Why did it take so long?

Well, if it had been writing about love, then a seriously mistaken approach could have got a vice-like grip on literature for a while, but so many writers are working in that field that such a destructive orthodoxy would have been overturned within a couple of years. The number of writers about wine is tiny by comparison, but what we can say is not small for that reason, no because wine is “just a beverage”. Thirst and taste, both literal and metaphorical, are huge matters capable of all manner of treatment in the written and electronic word. Wine writing lives!

So far I’ve said precious little about this cosy and mind-expanding place I’m staying in New York Wine City, or the astonishing process by which these stories make their way from the inner recesses of my brain into the wide expanses of the internet. In answer to this criticism I now give you the first part of an epic story that makes Hermann Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ look small, and even upstages the fast-approaching Fiscal Cliff (GOP Freak Show Part XVII).

Before we get started properly I have to point out that I’ve been here before. By that I don’t mean that I’ve visited New York City before, (I first visited the city back in December 1988), but this apartment on East 7^th Street in Manhattan’s East Village. At the end of July I was in New York for a week to shoot my first short film. Not only did the planned 5 to 6 minutes turn into 13 minutes and 57 breathtaking seconds, but that first short stay at the ‘Hotel of Hope’ turned into a long-term relationship.

‘Hotel of Hope’ is what my landlord Jürgen Fränznick,  a journalist for the German public TV channel ARD, calls this home for vagrant creative types like myself who need a centrally located place to stare blankly at the wall and workshop for their dreams. By the time I arrived in the city November 26^th STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL had been running for seven months, which might be a long time for the internet, but for Planet Wine is well short of one cycle from bud-break to bottling. In the case of Riesling that is 12 – 18 months. My experience as a writer is that a major project needs a full gestation period to reach fruition, which would mean that by the time I climb on the big silver bird to return to Berlin/Germany January 25^th then I should have given birth to…a beautiful girl!

In German – my second language, which once nearly became the official first language of the USA – the vine, grape, and berries that make up the cluster, are all feminine, only the resulting must and wine being masculine. Books are neuter and films are masculine, but a story is feminine, and I am in the storytelling business. Just as grapes must ferment to become wine so stories must ferment before they become a book or a film. The Hotel of Hope is the fermentation vessel for the STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL book and film projects. Not only have I been sorting content to determine which items are really essential and which are merely “interesting”, but I’ve also been experimenting with new and different forms of storytelling for wine subject as regular readers already know.

I’ve sometimes called wine writing part of the Third World of Journalism, so horrendously undeveloped is it, so limited the range of styles and forms available off the peg to the journalist; so poor its achievements to date. When I’ve woken at Hotel of Hope, drunk a cup of tea while listening to Jürgen analyze American and world events with his eye for the comic aspect of the mundane and murderous, then run along the East River I come back here to the Hotel of Hope and feel that the possibilities of wine journalism are infinite. And that’s worth the hefty rent I have to pay for this room with a view over East 7^th Street in order that Jürgen can continue to afford to rent this workshop for dreams.

At this point I have to thank the many people who I’ve become friends with in the city for their input, both conscious and unconscious, to my outlandish projects. Without this mass of raw material being pumped in I don’t think this wild ferment would have gained such a brisk pace or that such interesting aromas would have developed during the process. Some of them like Terroir Group designer Steven Solomon, portrayed below in the entry for Day 21, are well aware of their direct input in the shape of perfectly formed ideas that I simply inserted into the matrix of my plans. Others like Volker Donabaum Of A.I. Selections and Amy Troiano of American Flatbread know that they introduced me to people and places featured here, but probably don’t see the importance of what they did. Then there are people like Robin Schwartz of Garnet wines who nourished my thought process in more subtle but important ways. Without all of these diverse influences – their diversity strikes me as being typical for New York – I would still be struggling with the basics as I was a couple of months ago back in Berlin.

More about Berlin’s contribution to STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL another time…when I’ve had the time to figure out what the hell it was.

This elaborate apparatus has nothing to do with wine and everything to do with coffee. I found it in a high-brow coffee place in Williamsburg/New York today where they’re busy trying to turn coffee into the New Wine. As far as I’m concerned they’re welcome to do that, and anything else which comes into their heads as long as it doesn’t harm anyone, but why does everything have to be made much more complicated in order to look important? Here at STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL my entire effort is devoted to showing that wine, and specifically Riesling, is less complex than generally feared.

On the other hand the last thing I want to do is dumb wine, or Riesling, down. Instead my goal is to tell it how it is without either pretension, obfuscation or over-simplification. There’s a whole world of Rieslings out there and its wonderful that they taste as different as people look, sound, think and believe in this city. Ethnic and personal diversity finds its parallel in the enormous range of aroma and flavor of Riesling. This diversity is liberating and empowering, generating respect and compassion. Sure, we have differences of opinion and belief, but what we have in common is so much more important than that. Riesling reminds me of all that every time I drink it. It also encourages me to throw overboard prejudices and reject tired conventions which obscure the truth in wine.

The last few days were a bit short on postings because of the holidays and my continuing struggle to recover from the influenza-type virus which has been going around. Today I was in the American Museum for Natural History in New York for the exhibition ‘Our Global Kitchen’, which sadly tried to do a thousands things at once and got a bit lost as a result (though there was plenty of interesting stuff in it). Before going in I was in the fascinating gallery devoted to the Native Americans of the woodland Northeast. There I saw the above garment made by members of the Ojibwa tribe a couple of hundred years ago which seems to depict some kind of composite climbing plant including grape elements. I feel sure depict what we call Vitis riparia, a native vine which also grows around Lake Superior where the Ojibwa originate. The picture below show Vitis riparia growing on the Rosebud Reservation/South Dakota which is the modern homeland of the Sicangu Lakota Sioux tribe. Just to show that all of this is not of merely academic interest, Eldon Nygard’s Valiant Vineyards of Vermillion/South makes an impressive and highly original red wine from those grapes called ‘The Wild Grape’.

All this just goes to show that wine in America is about so much more than massive and pretentious Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons with three figure Parker scores and dollar price tags. Riesling is another important part of the complex reality of American wine, and has been since at least the 1860s. Numerous restaurant wine lists document the fact that immediately prior to prohibition Riesling was one of the most expensive California wines. Like many “noble” varietals it made a slow comeback after prohibition was repealed, then had the bad luck to be sweetened up with grape concentrate and turned into a “cash cow” during the Chardonnay boom of the 1980s. During the red wine boom that began when CBS ’60 Minutes’ broke the French Paradox back in November 1991. Riesling’s only sin back t then was being white, which is thankfully no longer a problem and the vineyard area planted with it is expanding in just about every state it grows in from New York to Oregon as people taste the wines and discover how good American Riesling can taste. For further information visit: www.drinkriesling.com

There was one important thought for wine drinkers and producers alike which I brought away from the ‘Our Global Kitchen’ exhibition. Currently global agriculture uses 80 million tons of chemical nitrogen fertilizer. The production of that fertilizer is highly energy-intensive and almost invariably consumes fossil fuels, thereby helping to drive global warming. Then there’s the run off which results from not all of the fertilizer landing in the crops, be they grapes, wheat or whatever. The remainder (more or less quickly dependent upon soil type) runs off the fields into the rivers from where it drains into places like the Gulf of Mexico. There it causes an explosion of algal growth which strips the seawater of oxygen creating a Dead Zone. See the following for more details of the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, one of the largest in the world:

http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/index.html

The wine industry’s share of global chemical fertilizer use is small, but it is really unnecessary for grape growing. Organic fertilizer can easily supply the vines’ meagre nitrogen needs. So what about a global initiative to eradicate its use in the wine industry? And why shouldn’t American Riesling producers grab the moral high ground by being the first to adopt this goal?

What is a close up of a cauliflower doing at the top of this posting? Well, today we’re heading back into the Feiring Line, because in her book ‚Naked Wine’ (Da Capo Press, Cambridge/MA, 2012) Alice Feiring raises an issue of fundamental importance to Riesling and all other wines.  I’m talking about the contentious question of the sulfur added by winemakers to nearly all wines. The freshness and stability of wine, including the great majority of organic and biodynamic wines, is dependent upon that sulfur. Its normally added in the form of sulfur dioxide (technical term: SO2), which dissolves in the wine where it acts as a preservative (technical term: antioxidant) and has a hygienic effect (technical term: bactericide). Put simply, what most of us regard as the fresh taste of clean wine would rarely, if ever, be possible without that sulfur dioxide.

“Natural” wines, or “naked” wines as Feiring prefers to call them, either have no added sulfur or almost none, and as she repeatedly points out that this makes them generally less stable and correct storage crucial. For her this negative is more than outweighed by the gains in taste she perceives, but many other professionals dispute. She points that some “natural”/ “naked” wines have an odd deep yellow or orange color (due to oxidation). However, she clearly considers such wines purer and more authentic than others.

Let me stress again how much I like the way Feiring writes. Most wine writing is leaden, either because the writer lacks the ability to bring the subject to life on the page, or because the format is so rigid that it forces the writer to try and walk with lead boots on. ‘Naked Wines’ shows what’s possible if the writer is talented, has a distinctive voice, and the format doesn’t drag the whole thing down to the banality of a shopping list.

Some of what Feiring writes disturbs me though. ‘Where and Who is in the Feiring Line?’ (see below), was all about what struck me as geographical prejudices (most strikingly against California and for France) in ‘Naked Wines’. Today the subject is sulfur in wine, which raises a fundamental question about the role of the winemaker, or “vigneron” to use Feirings term for winemakers who grow their own grapes. Is her/his role to protect wine from spoilage or should they let all natural process just blow because nature is holy? Don’t forget that microbial spoilage is also a natural processes. Stand by for a rocky ride through the Sulfur Zone!

On page 43 Feiring states that, “When I visited the Louis Pasteur Museum in Arbois I found myself transfixed by the gentle daffodil color of sulfur. So beautiful, so devilish.” Here it’s clear that she is talking about elemental sulfur, but sometimes during the following pages it’s very unclear whether “sulfur” refers to elemental sulfur, sulfur dioxide or other compounds containing sulfur. For example on page 44 she states, “Sulfur  needs to be handled with respect. First of all it’s terribly toxic.” The reason why this  lack of clarity is problematic is, that although some compounds like hydrogen sulfide (the smell of bad eggs, technical name: H2S) are terribly toxic, others are definitely not.

Also on page 43 Feiring’s states, “Sulfur is natural, and for that matter, so is arsenic and plutonium.” Plutonium only occurs naturally in trace quantities in uranium ore, but we’re talking about parts per trillion. Almost all the plutonium in the world was produced in nuclear reactors and separated from the spent fuel for nuclear weapons production, creating enormous amounts of nuclear waste on the way. I am a child of the Cold War and like untold millions of others grew up under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Uranium mining and ore processing, nuclear weapons production and testing killed thousands of people including many Americans. Around certain volcanoes you can pick up large chunks of elemental sulfur without any ill effect. Elemental sulfur is so harmless that high school kids play around with it in chemistry lessons. There’s an enormous difference between sulfur and plutonium and suggesting there isn’t is misleading. In this case it is tendencious, maybe also disingenuous.

The truth – I fear it is a painful truth for Feiring and the “natural” wine movement – is that sulfur is an essential element without which all life is impossible. Cystine and methionine are amino acids, members of the family of “building blocks” from which proteins are made, and both of them contain sulfur. So there’s a whole bunch of sulfur inside all of us. Nobody needs to dig under their skin to find the stuff though, because our skin itself also contains plenty of sulfur. Cystine is a crucial part of the protein keratin, the bond of two sulfur atoms at the center of the cystine molecule (technical name: disulfide bond) giving the outer layer of our skin its elasticity and strength. It is also an important component of our hair and Feiring has plenty of that if the photos of her on her website and the covers of her books are halfway up to date.

If she, or anyone else, is serious about avoiding sulfur in all its forms (which I don’t recommend unless you have allergy issues), then they need to start by cutting out proteins, which means meat, eggs, legumes and nuts. For example egg contains nearly 3000 parts per million of cysteine and peanuts contain slightly more than that. Both also contain a similar amounts of methionine. However, the trouble only starts there, because many fruits and vegetables also contain a lot of natural sulfur compounds, none more so than cauliflower (about 2000 parts per million!) closely followed by broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage, kale and kohlrabi.

All of them contain a compound called glucopanin. When we chew these vegetables an enzyme called myrosinase transforms glucopanin into sulforaphane. Recent research shows that under lab conditions sulforaphane inhibits the growth of breast cancer cells. I find that interesting because both my mother and my maternal grandmother had breast cancer. Maybe you also know someone who suffered from breast cancer? There may be other health benefits too. More research is needed to answer that question.

But we’re still not ready to leave the Sulfur Zone. Many of the funky aromas which the cool “natural” / “naked” wines Feiring enjoys have are the result of compounds which are aromatic because of the sulfur they contain. The mercaptans (correct technical name: thiols) are a prime example of this. They are also responsible for the characteristic natural aroma of grapefruit and for the smell of natural gas, which enables us to detect a gas leak (in this case the thiols are added). I enjoy grapefruit and like to cook with gas. Maybe you do too?

Now lets get down to the nuts and bolts of sulfur in Riesling and other wines. The first myth which needs debunking is that adding sulfur dioxide to wine is somehow modern, something new. Its use in German wine cellars was legalized at the Reichstag of 1497. I find it hard to imagine this could have happened without strong lobbying from the wine producers, many of who surely wanted official recognition for what was already normal practice in their cellars.

Today sulfur levels in conventional wines are lower than they were a generation ago and way lower than two or three generations ago. Despite what Feiring claims in her book (page 44), German wines are no exception to that rule. Most of the cool new generation German winemakers are very keen to achieve long living wines with the minimum of sulfur dioxide additions possible. Many of those who aren’t organic regularly bottle wines which would meet the recently tightened standards for their organic colleagues. However, the difference between a wine bottled with 90 parts per million sulfur dioxide and one with 120 is not significant for the health of the vast majority of consumers. So young German winemakers don’t make a big deal about it. They know that if you really wanted to kill yourself by drinking wine, then it would be the alcohol which would do the job not the sulfur dioxide!

For Riesling producers around Planet Wine sulfur dioxide is a necessary tool in the cellar both to keep their wines lively and to prevent undesirable microbes spoiling the wine (by starving them of the oxygen most of them need to grow). Not least amongst these are the acetic bacteria which turn wine into vinegar, a problem for some “natural” wines. Making great Riesling demands minimal handling of the wine, and this often means that the wines are slightly “reductive”, that is  the opposite of oxidized, when freshly bottled. Feiring may be a taster who mistakes the yeasty reductive aromas of these wines for sulfur dioxide. It is a surprisingly common mistake amongst professional tasters. That’s just another reason to ask when Feiring and many of her colleagues are finally going to get real about sulfur.

And here is a “comment” from Justin Christoph which really deserves to be considered an entirely self-contained work:

Rieslingicity One and Two
Another subterranean morning
Sommelier screaming at the wine wall
We have to shout above the din of rice beef balls
We can’t taste anything at all
The chef recants litanies of bored food and gourmet frustrations
But we know all her suicide recipes are fake

-With one sip, with wine flow
-You will know
-Rieslingicity
-A sleep trance, a dream dance
-A shard romance
-Rieslingicity

GM only stares into the numbers
There’s only so much more alcohol he can take
There’s only so much more wine he can buy
Many miles away something crawls from the slime
at the bottom of a dark Finger Lake

-Always connecting to people
-Linked to the invisible
-Almost imperceptible
-Terroir inexpressible
-Science insusceptible
-Logic so inflexible
-Causally connectable
-Yet no wine is invincible

Another NYC ugly morning
The factory belches tweets into the sky
He walks unhindered through the industry tasting today
He doesn’t drink to wonder why

-If we share this terroir
-Then we can dream
-Spiritus mundi
-If you act as you drink
-The missing link
-Rieslingicity

The wine reps pout and scheme like cheap tarts on a red light street
But all he ever thinks to do is spit
And every single meeting with his so-called superior
Is a humiliating kick by that git
Many miles away something crawls to the surface of dark Hawea Lake

-We know you, they know me
-Extrasensory
-Rieslingicity
-A star tweet, text no call
-It joins all
-Rieslingicity

Another tasting day has ended
Only the happy hour hell to face
Packed like lemmings into shiny Parker Points
Contestants in a suicidal race

-Mosel so deep, Rhein so wide
-You’re inside
-Rieslingicity
-Effect without cause
-Subatomic laws, scientific pause
-Rieslingicity

The Somm grips the bottle and stares alone into the distance
He knows that something somewhere has to break
He sees the familiar tasting note now looming on his laptop
The pain upstairs that makes his palate ache
Many miles away there’s a shadow on Zeltingen door
Casting the vineyard’s Terroir
On a dark Mosel lock
Many miles away…

New York wine writer Alice Feiring doesn’t seem to be interested in Riesling, so why am I writing about her today? Well, her work brings up something crucial about wine geography. That’s an vitat subject, because people think about wine in nations and regions, for example expressing preferences such as those for French over Italian, or Long Island to the Finger Lakes. A wine’s geographical origin often determines not only how “in”/ “cool” it is, but also how “right” or “wrong” it is. Those are value judgments, sometimes moral judgments whose implications go way beyond the wine in the glass.

For example, Burgundy stands head and shoulders above anywhere else on Planet Wine for many New Yorker wine drinkers and amongst the professionals who sell them their drug of preference. Space here is too limited to analyze exactly why this is the case. More important for us today is the fact that Burgundy continues to produce a slew of over-priced inferior wines, but that fact barely registers here in the city, because US importers are filtering them out rather well. Of course, some mediocre juice like the St. Aubin white from Louis Jadot recently served to me in a very swanky Park Avenue apartment still gets through. That kind of thing tends to be politely ignored though, because the Burgundians are often regarded as the Good Guys.

When I was beginning to explore the world of wine back in early-1980s London everything looked very different though, Burgundy often being referred to pejoratively as, “the Other Place”, i.e. not-Bordeaux. The wines were much less reliable than they are today, great reds then being as rare as white ravens However, even in this dark hour for Burgundy there were some mind-blowing reds like the wines of Henri Jayer. Nothing in the world of wine is carved in stone, instead everything is in continual flux, and the situation on the ground in any wine region at any time is never just black or white.

On to Alice Feiring, who’s books I just read. I particularly like the way she writes in ‘Naked Wine’ (2011, Da Capo, Cambridge/MA) where her voice is striking and clear; light years removed from the hopelessly convention-bound norm of wine writing.  Most of our colleagues have their inner eye fixed macro-lens-like upon the wine in the glass in front of them, so that it fills their entire field of view. That’s why they write as if the rest of the world didn’t really exist and had no effect upon the taste of the wine. In contrast, Feiring’s writing often has a wide-angle-lens perspective vividly conveying the people behind and around the wine. She seeks connections, follows leads and never fears saying what she thinks. Great!

BUT I have some serious issues with what she says. Her depiction of sulfur in winemaking is not only extreme, but sometimes highly misleading. This deserves a whole story to itself, so fundamental an issue is it, and I’ll be giving it that treatment soon. Today I’m concentrating on geography.

‘Naked Wine’ tells the story of how Feiring made a wine in California (from the Sagrantino grape which originally hails from Umbria/Italy). Her descriptions of the winemaking and her awakening to some of the positive sides of California are at once evocative and well observed. “Was there something deeper for me to discover here? Yes, I was sure there was,” she writes on page 14. However, in more than two hundred pages she hardly gets further than that tentative realization. Instead, she repeatedly suggests that California wines are nearly all over-extracted jammy monsters and doesn’t hint at the true diversity of California wines. Even when she mentions a major winery like Ridge whose wines never fitted that jammy monster cliché she doesn’t bother observing that fact, much less bother  describing them.

In the final chapter she tells us all about the “natural” wines of California, but not as one of many facets of a complex region. Instead she comes dangerously close to depicting the entire State (as large as Italy minus Sicily!) to a place where the Evil Empire of industrial wine production is pitted against a handful of “natural” wine rebels. She seems to suffer from a deep-seated prejudice that California was always the wrong place for winegrowing and very largely remains so. For Feiring that only begun to change when the first “natural” winemakers appeared on the scene and started turning a tiny corner of California into a utopian wine paradise. The problem I have with this is the implication that everyone else in the California wine industry is involved in the wrong business, and are by implication wrong people.

In contrast, for her France has always been the right place for wine, although she does find time for some rather imprecise criticism of the French wines she doesn’t find “natural” enough. For her the ultimate in France is, yes, you guessed it, New York’s favorite: Burgundy! On page 204 she describes the region as, “the Holy Land” without the slightest trace of irony. Holy DRC! Saint Aubert de Villaine! I’ve tasted some amazing wines from DRC, but also some very disappointing ones, which means they’re also part of the real world along with the rest of us.

Much of ‘Naked Wine’ describes Feiring’s research in France and Spain. (She takes the trouble to describe and criticize the latter nation in a much more nuanced manner than California).  Endless wine dinners follow tastings and vice versa, then there’s another visit to a vineyard which is always very beautiful.  I’ve got nothing against this, nor do I have a prejudice against ancient and rustic stone-built buildings in small, remote villages. To her credit Feiring insists that wine doesn’t demand a cute backdrop, however, these situations become very repetitive, finally descending to the level of an Old World cliché; one deeply rooted in the East Coast Mind.

California doesn’t have that kind of backdrop to offer, because the wine industry there is simply too young.  And that seems to be a fundamental obstacle for Feiring to appreciate the state’s winemakers and their achievements. “…only 150 years of experience…” she laments on the penultimate page of the book. It seems that for her the oldness of the Old World is simply without compare, particularly if it is in France or somewhere else “natural” winemakers are busy creating a wine paradise on earth. Sadly, she seems incapable of self-critically examining any of these positions.

Finally this elliptical orbit brings me back to Riesling and Germany, which get exceedingly scant attention in ‘Naked Wine’.  This comes during her description of a meeting of the French group of biodynamic winemakers who call themselves La Renaissance des Appellations.  For those who want to read that sentence in context (I strongly recommend it) you’ll find it at the bottom of page 77. Excised with my scalpel it reads, “all the wines from Germany were obviously yeasted and had so much sulfur I started to sneeze as though it were pollen season.”

Since at least a decade not adding yeast has been common practice amongst Germany’s ambitious winemakers, indeed it’s been a fashion, the resulting funky aromas often being referred to by the buzz word “sponti” (from spontaneous fermentation). Sulfur levels in the majority of German wines have fallen considerably as a result of the new generation winemakers with more sensitivity than their parents had. Biodynamic winegrowing is spreading fast in Germany and there are some interesting “natural” wine producers like Peter Jakob Kühn in the Rheingau. We don’t get a hint of this in ‘Naked Wine’ though, because Germany seems to be one of the wrongest places on Plant Wine and is therefore directly in the Feiring Line. As Dirty Harry famously said, “Go ahead, make my day!”

PS Part 2 on the subject of sulfur follows shortly. WATCH THIS SPACE!

Who tops the celebrity list in the Riesling Who’s Who of America? There’s no question in my mind, that it’s Paul Grieco, the self-proclaimed Riesling Overlord of the New York wine scene. When he won the James Beard Award for the best wine & spirits professional last year during the fifth Summer of Riesling at his Terroir wine bars and the second Summer of Riesling in bars, restaurants and wine stores coast to coast and beyond this clearly put him in pole position on that list. I’m just an occasional visitor with loud clothes in comparison.

The man in the picture above – as regular readers will already have spotted – is not the Overlord though, but designer Steven Solomon, the man in his shadow who has done so much to give the United States of Riesling a revolutionary look (and I think of 1776 when I use the R-Word). He also injected a huge pulse of energy, both creative and disruptive, slamming into the conventions which still weigh wine in America down making it look old-fashioned and exclusive. As Solomon says, “crisis gets juices flowing. Create a crisis…be a broken record.”

That look in his eyes is what he calls his “Stickermeister face”. Meister means master in German, and in combination with the word sticker implies a kind of anarchistic-shaman-artist who deliberately works in the small format of the sticker, tattoo, T-shirt and ring-binder folder. They are his voodoo dolls. Scrawled and smeared, layer over layer of clashing typefaces in  supercalifragilisticexpialidosious colors, bulging at the seams with Dutch angles and sinking Titanic inclines, thrown in your face and dumped on your carpet, is the distinctive I-am-who-I-am Solomon look which has defined Terroir since day one. Then when you look a bit longer you find that there’s also a Penguin book, black & white photography aesthetic coexisting with the “chaos” in what Chairman Grieco calls, “my sandbox.” That’s when it really gets interesting, because that’s how the Apollo / Dionysus tension  of Terroir becomes visible. I think you can see this in the below.

http://restauranthearth.com/terrior/terroir-archive-homes.html

For Solomon Terroir has been much more than a sandbox. He calls it, “our wine bar/think tank/batcave,” and means that it has been the place where he was able to take his own Post-Punk aesthetic and weld it to wine with almost no compromise. Looking at the covers of the first ring-binder wine lists (click on the link below to see them) he made for the East Village Terroir back in March 2008 yesterday I felt like I was stepping to a fully-formed alternative universe, though all were created before the Big Bang.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23805736@N04/sets/72157603908666302/

With them and his other work for Grieco he installed a huge white-lie-backstory in those 500 square feet which made the first Terroir wine bar feel way bigger than it looked from the outside like Dr. Who’s Tardis (in the BBC TV series) does. The day I first walked in on a steamy New York night in July 2010 it was this which hit me as much as the buzz and all those great Rieslings by the glass. OK he applied this approach to all the entire place and all the wines on the list, but it didn’t really do anything for Grand Cru burgundies with four figure dollar prices and it worked like magic for the Rieslings which were (and remain) a steal in comparison.

 This was possible because as Solomon wrote a while, “it is a design job and not painting, but the overlap of concepts is pretty strong. Maybe so strong that it’s a whole new context for everything I do.” However, that was then and this is now; now the design job has been pushed almost as far as it can go in this direction. The Terroir anti-corporate design stands head and shoulders above most corporate identity design in the US – so much of it is dead in the water and some of it was on day one – and the Terroir chain has reached an impressive size in a remarkably short time. It did so by focusing almost obsessively upon its core business and sticking laser-beam-straight to its communications strategy. The question now is where it goes from here and what the maximum chain size is that is compatible with this alternative posture. Solomon also seems to be asking himself where next. I can’t wait to see which way he jumps and am doing my best to create the next crisis for him.

To see more of Solomon’s work go to:

www.stevensolo.com

www.wineisterroir.com

PS there was just a great comment from Justin Christoph which I give here in full:

CAN’T STOP THE RIESLING / Red Slate Vulkan Peppers

Can’t stop addicted to the Riesling / Top rock he says I’m gonna drink big /

choose not a wine of imitation / distant cousin to the Elbling

defunkt the point scores that you pay for / this punk the terroir that you stay for /

in wine I want to be your best friend / East Vill wine is living on TriBeCa /

knock out finish you better come through / Riesling don’t die know the truth some do /

T-shirt your message on the pavement / button so bright I wonder what the wave meant/

white tannin is screaming in the jungle / Balance in the wine if you stumble /

go ask vineyard dust for any answers / come back strong Weißer Heunisch dancers

Chorus:

The wine I love / the tears I drop / to be part of / the wave can’t stop /

Terroir wonder if it’s all for you / the vines I love / the planes I hop /

to be part of / wave can’t stop / come and tell me when it’s time to

Sweetheart is bleeding in the icemen / so smart she’s leading me no oak zone /

music the great Riesling communicator / use two rocks to make it in the nature /

I’ll get mineral penetration /the Riesling of a generation /the birth of every other nation/

worth your weight the Goldtröpfchen / this tasting note’s going to be a close one /

smoke rings I know you’re going to blow one /Kraftwerk on a spaceship persevering /

use my tongue for everything but spitting / can’t stop the spirits when they need you /

Oak heads are happy when they feed you / Zilliken Butterfly is in the treetop /

Serringer Vogelsang TBA the meaning of bebop

Chorus:

Wait a minute I’m passing out / win or lose just like you /

far more shocking acidity / than anything I ever knew /

how ’bout you / 10 more Summer of Riesling reasons /

why I need a new wine just like you / far more trocken than any wine I ever knew /

Riesling on cue

Can’t stop addicted to the Riesling / Top rock he says I’m gonna drink big /

choose not a wine of imitation / distant cousin to the Rieslaner /

defunkt the point scores that you pay for / this punk the terroir that you stay for /

in wine I want to be your best friend / EVILL wine is living on TriBeCa /

knock out finish you better come through / Riesling don’t die know the truth some do /

T-shirt your message on the pavement / button so bright I wonder what the wave meant/

kick start the Acid generator / sweet talk Wine Queen don’t intimidate her /

Spatlese Trocken Palmberg St Aldegunder / can’t stop wine gods from engineering /

Yeast no need for any interfering / your image in oxford dictionary /

this wine is more than ordinary / can I get 2 maybe 3 of these /

Bremmer Calmont from space / Porta Nigra teach you of terrace /

can’t stop vines’ spirits when they need you / this Wine List is more than just a Read thru

Note: I just made a few important changes to this. The heavy cold I had when I wrote it dulled my mind slightly. Thankfully I’m feeling a lot better and clearer in my head today.

Maybe it’s all just my compulsive side, my personal obsession, but I don’t think so. Let me explain. A couple of days ago I pointed out that what makes Riesling unique amongst wines, is the way it spans the whole range from bone dry to honey-sweet, from featherweight to super-heavyweight and almost the entire aroma spectrum (just about every fruit, flower, herb and spice you can think of plus a lot else).  I forgot to mention that as delightful as young Rieslings are, the best of them are transformed by bottle aging into something even more fascinating, a process which often extends for decades, and can stretch to a century or more without the wine losing its appeal. And then there are the sparkling versions, which are so drastically under-appreciated…

If that was all Riesling is about, then this website along with the book and movie slowly developing out of it could easily be over-sized receptacles for the material available. However, there’s a lot more to the Riesling Phenomenon than this, beginning with the fact that the enormous flavor diversity of my favorite grape’s wines is not simply dazzling or confusing (depending upon your perspective), rather it communicates something. That is, it is simultaneously expressive of the somewhere (the exact place where the wine grew, i.e. terroir), sometime (the exact conditions during the growing season, i.e. vintage) and the someone (the person who cultivated the vines and made the wine, i.e. artistry) behind the wine. That is what Paul Grieco meant when he said, “there’s some serious shit going on in there” in my short Riesling movie.

According to some terroir freaks Riesling and all other wines are location, location, location, but the truth is that human artistry is always in there too (or the result would be vinegar), and often not only that of the present generation, but also those before them. By that I also mean practical things like who planted the vines (if they weren’t all planted by this generation, which is seldom the case). That adds up to location-vintage-artistry, and those hyphens are critical, because they indicate that these things can’t ever be entirely separated from one another. If you think that sounds mystical and are wondering if I’m beginning to lose my mind, then all I’m doing here is translating what Helmut Dönnhoff (pictured below) of the eponymous wine estate in Oberhausen/Nahe in Germany told me recently when I was shooting material for the third series of my German TV series ‘Weinwunder Deutschland’. So I have it on video!

This brings us to the crucial point. It was the expressiveness of Riesling, no less than the special features of the wines which would go into a conventional USP definition – highly aromatic, but not loud; excitingly refreshing and intense yet sleek – which ignited the fire that is the Global Riesling Phenomenon. Generally the wine scene first wants quality (often that means flavor concentration more than anything else) and secondly novelty (often that means fads and fashions) and diversity comes way behind that, but in this case things functioned differently. Thank God! We’re all agreed about the importance of bio-diversity, but what about vino-diversity? I have nothing per se against so-called “Parker Wines”, but I have something seriously against the homogenization of wine whatever direction that goes in. Without vino–diversity how could wine exert any lasting fascination or be worth discussing?

But you can take all this yet another step. For me Riesling is also a compelling role model for many other wines and a paradigm for wine in general. It is off course a totally different paradigm to those which Cabernet Sauvignon (red) and Chardonnay (white) offer. The interesting thing is that the words I instinctively reach for to describe the Riesling paradigm – transparency, honesty/authenticity, minerality, sensitivity/ elegance and drinkability – have been buzz words in the wine scene since the serious backlash to the “Parker Wines” set in the 1990s. Winemakers and winery marketing departments have slapped those descriptors on all kinds of wines, including a slew that never deserved them. Now that boomerang has turned around and landed back where it came from: Riesling. May the Force be with you!

PS More on all of  this subject when I get back out into the city again. New York has already helped me kick Riesling Global way further down the road. High on my to do list is defining those italicized descriptors in the previous paragraph.

Last night at Freeman’s restaurant in Freeman Alley on the Lower East Side (see www.freemansrestaurant.com) it suddenly struck me that so far I’ve avoided telling the story of how STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL came into existence. That’s a serious mistake, because it is as much the reason that I’m here in New York until the end of January as wanting to have fun. So here is the story of my moment of Global Riesling Revelation:

On the afternoon of Sunday, February 12^th in Queenstown/Central Otago in New Zealand I was struck by lightning. It was half way through a 49 day long round-the-world trip which a conference in Sydney had justified (thank you Frankland Estate of Western Australia for organizing it!) Cornelius Dönnhoff of the famous Dönnhoff wine estate in Germany’s Nahe region had also attended that conference and four days later we met up again at Queenstown airport to spend several days together tasting NZ wines. Like me he’d been to the Land of the White Cloud several times before – “the first time I was here I tried all the extreme sports,” he told me – and we both felt sure that we knew what NZ wine was all about.  How wrong we were!

We checked into our hotel and set off straight away for the tasting rooms of the local wineries, deciding on route to play at being normal tourists. I would justify my note-taking by saying that I was a wine geek; a role I’m rather good at playing. We also decided to stop at the very first winery we came to, which shall remain nameless since the wines there were all as correct as they were mediocre. In the tasting room we were first surprised to find a handful of Rieslings on offer – we both had a figure of about 400 hectares for the area planted with Riesling in NZ in our heads – then it hit us. Everywhere were posters and shelf-talkers promoting the Summer of Riesling. During our short stay we found them all over the place, also in Queenstown as the above picture shows. In Central Otago, one of the most remote regions on Planet Wine!

By this I don’t mean that the Summer of Riesling which Paul Grieco’s Terroir wine bars have been celebrating in New York since 2008 and which went Coast to Coast in 2011 or the Summer of Riesling in Sydney/Australia which is currently happening for the third time had reached NZ. The NZ Summer of Riesling not only had a very different approach (more educational) than either of them, but the promotional material Cornelius Dönnhoff and I saw also had a very different look. For example, the T-shirts were black with white logos; the colors of the national rugby team, the All Blacks. In the US and in Sydney/Australia the Summer of Riesling is mainly for restaurants and bars, whereas in NZ it is primarily for wine producers and wine merchants.

We quickly learnt the reason for this was the rapid growth of the area planted with Riesling in NZ to around 1,000 hectares. So the Summer of Riesling had not only gone viral, but also mutated to adapt to local conditions. I was in a state of delighted shock so the significance of all this didn’t hit me until I reached New York two weeks later (via San Francisco, Monterey and LA in California, Washington DC, then Middleburg and Richmond in Virginia). On the afternoon of Monday, February 27^th at a tasting of Rieslings from the Finger Lakes in New York State at Hearth Restaurant on 12^th Street at 1^st Avenue, it suddenly hit me: Riesling is now a global phenomenon and New York is the place I can best get a grip on it. 

As soon as I got home I commissioned the masthead at the top of this site, and began planning its complete overhaul. I was in a hurry, because I felt that I had been too slow to pick up on this. I am now in the process of turning this into both a book and a movie. Any help, advice or information you can give me is much appreciated. WATCH THIS SPACE!