Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

There it is, a typical Riesling landscape, also a typical German wine landscape with those famous steep vineyards and a river at their foot, or? The Bremmer Calmont vineyard in the Mosel Valley pictured above is probably the steepest in the world and almost only Riesling grows there. Although this is the kind of scene many people picture when they think of Riesling it is only one of the extremely diverse Riesling landscapes in Germany and around the world.

Coming to New York has reminded me that when you’re inside a culture, then it’s really invisible to you. Only when you step outside it, with at least one foot, do you become aware of your own culture’s peculiar preconceptions. Then the very different assumptions of the culture into which you have moved can also be glaringly obvious. For many people this is all very disconcerting and I think that’s one thing behind the typical tourists obsession with “seeing the sights”, by which I mean seeing the things they’ve already seen in brochures, books and on the screen. They are comforting, because they seem familiar when a lot of other things are seriously unfamiliar. By the way, during my first week in New York I felt no need to see the State of Liberty, nor Ground Zero or even Central Park. (My mother and sister are visiting the next few days so this will change).

Back in Germany where I lived the last twenty years almost nobody who knows anything about wine would say that Riesling is necessarily a German wine, because there’s a widespread awareness of the Rieslings from Alsace in France and Austria. Many wine lovers know that Riesling also grows in a bunch of other countries scattered around Planet Wine. Welded to this knowledge is the Germans’ deep-seated wariness of claiming to own anything except their own  personal possessions. This is, of course, a reaction to what happened in World War II when the Nazis claimed that great chunks of Europe belonged to Germany and felt they could therefore do whatever they wanted to the people who lived there (i.e. hard-core colonialism as practiced by other European nations elsewhere in the world during the 19^th and 20^th centuries).

In contrast, here in the US the idea that Riesling is per se a German wine is  widespread, and I quite often encounter the prejudice that Riesling is not only German, but that it is also inevitably sweet and that this sweetness is a sign of its inferiority (in contrast for example to the noble dryness of the Holy Wines of Burgundy).  If we’re honest with ourselves we all like to pigeonhole things and think in stereotypes to some degree. When it comes to wine many people have the correct gut feeling that geography influences the taste of wine, but then jump to the dubious conclusion that the wines of the world are best divided up by nationality. The desire for simplification in a world that is complex and therefore confusing is understandable, but when it comes to wine the result of country-shaped pigeonholes and one or two word description of their contents is often crude prejudices.

The other day when I thought back to what Jancis Robinson wrote about Riesling in her great new book ‘Wine Grapes’ I realized that I too had fallen into this trap. Mentally added up the figures for the area planted with Riesling in various European countries and it suddenly hit me that my assumption that the great majority of Rieslings in Europe grow in Germany was plain wrong. Part of the reason for my making this mistake is the difficulty of getting reliable up to date figures for the wine industries of certain countries. Jancis Robinson went to the trouble of doing so for all of Eastern Europe and her results (all figures for 2009) are well worth looking at.

In ‘Crazy Riesling Stats (2)’ I complained that I couldn’t find a reliable figure for the area of Riesling planted in the Ukraine. Well Jancis did and it’s 2,702 hectares, which is more than in the Rheingau/Germany or the whole of Austria! Then follows tiny wine-obsessed Moldova with 1,343 hectares and Hungary with 1,283 hectares. Unfortunately I don’t know any great Rieslings from Ukraine or Moldova, but the powerful yet lively dry Rajnai Rizling which József Szentesi is making are really exciting and distinctive. He’s quite a character as you can see below. The photograph was taken in Szentesi’s cellar on the southern edge of Budapest by Zoltan Heimann (many thanks) during our December 2010 tour of Hungary and Burgenland in Austria. This experience should have alerted me the fact that Eastern Europe has a significant Riesling production, but my mind was insisting on sticking with a set of familiar pigeonholes. Schmuck!

Reading in Jancis’ book that the Czeck replublic has 1,270 hectares of Rizlink Rynsky makes me determined to hunt down the good ones. I feel no different about Bulgaria with 1,170 hectares of Risling Croatia with 1,072 hectares of Rizling Rajinski. Slovakia has 998 hectares of Rzlink Rysky and at least one high-class (generally off-dry) Riesling from Kastiel Béla which is produced by the world-famous Saar Riesling producer Egon Müller. Then comes Russia where the Krasnodar region has 882 hectares of Riesling and Slovenia with 591 hetcares in the Slovenia part of Styria and 52 hectares elsewhere. By the way, those names are all correct synonyms for real Riesling!

According to Jancis Robinson’s ‘Wine Grapes there are at least 11,363 hectares of Riesling growing in Eastern Europe. If I then add the 3,382 hectares in France (nearly all in Alsace), the 1,874 hectares in Austria, the 624 hectares in Italy, the 159 hectares in Luxemburg and the 97 hectares in Spain (nearly all in Catalonia) this gives a total for Europe excluding Germany of 17,599 hectares. This is a shade too low, because there’s also small areas planted with Riesling in Switzerland, Portugal and the other Balkan countries. However, this is really not so far short of the 22,434 hectares growing in Germany. The truth is that by a small margin the majority of European Rieslings are German in origin, but on the other hand almost 45% of all European Rieslings are non-German. If we were to add to them the Riesling vineyards on the other continents, then Germany’s share would shrink to well below 50%.

The other half of the common American stereotype of Riesling is that in addition to being German it is sweet. Well, the latest statistics show that just shy of 70% of all German wines are either dry or just off-dry. That sweet prejudice strikes me as a projection of how things used to be upon a world that has long since moved on. Now’s a good time to catch up with reality and in this case the stats really help us to do that!

If I’m lucky then tomorrow when I reach the one week mark there will be a dull and inexplicable BOOM over the city which the people will hardy notice because of all the other nice, but which will make the birds in the parks ruffle their feathers. That will be me passing through the New York Barrier, which is something like a cross between the sound barrier and a deep energy low which I never stayed long enough in the city before to reach the other side of. If I make then thanks are also due to Suzanne Winter, unofficial Riesling Queen of New York, pictured above at the Big Bottles from Burgenland party at The Third Man the other night. There I also saw the self-styled Riesling Overlord of New York Paul Grieco for the first time since hitting the sidewalk last Monday night.

Tuesday, while still waiting for my luggage to arrive I ate what is probably the best frankfurter of my entire life at Landbrot, 185 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side (see www.landbrotbakery.com). The Neuschwansteiner pils from the Höss brewery in Bavaria was crisp with honey notes and exactly what I needed at that moment. Also so far unmentioned on this page is the crab and turnip feast at the home of Sylvia and David on the Upper East Side on Friday night. Here’s the wonderful crab half of that soirée. Needless to say the newspaper is the New York Times!

Yesterday evening I was at a pretty wild party which was also on the Upper East Side, but whose precise location it would be indiscreet of me to reveal. Suffice to say that the question was not whether to sip the wine, rather whether to swig the wine or not. At the end of the evening I ascended a staircase to a kind of luxurious eagle’s nest, pictured below, where I found myself in a beautiful cloud. Unfortunately when I descended to the earth in order to pick up my coat and go home a shocking incident occurred just before I got in the elevator which left me utterly speechless. However, the hostess dealt with the offending individual with an aplomb which left me awed. The only thing which I missed was a glass of Riesling.  But the next days will put that right, and how!

Justin Christoph just sent me a great comment to this which I reproduce in full:

You may find yourself drinking chardonnay at shake shack
And you may find yourself in an appellation in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the pages of a large wine list
You may find yourself in a beautiful wine bar, with a beautiful wine cellar
You may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

The drinking days go by, let the bloggers hold me down
The drinking days go by, terroir flowing underground
Into blue slate again, after the money’s gone
Drunk in a lifetime, riesling flowing underground

And you may ask yourself, “How do I tweet this?”
And you may ask yourself, “Where is that large wine list?”
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wine bar”
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wine cellar”

The drinking days go by, let three tier hold me down
The drinking days go by, terroir flowing underground
Into blue slate again, after the money’s gone
Drunk in a lifetime, riesling flowing underground

Same as it ever was, wrong as it ever was, right as it ever was
Write as it ever was, Type as it ever was, tweet as it ever was,
blog as it ever was, same as it ever was

Riesling dissolving and riesling removing
There is riesling at the bottom of the ocean
Under the terroir, carry riesling
Remove riesling from the bottom of the ocean
Minerals dissolving and minerals removing

The drinking days go by, let Robert Parker hold me down
The drinking days go by, riesling flowing underground
Into blue slate again, after the money’s gone
Drunk in a lifetime, riesling flowing underground
Into blue slate again, into the silent Mosel
Under the rocks and stones, there is riesling underground

You may ask yourself, “What is that beautiful wine?”
You may ask yourself, “Where does that wine route lead to?”
You may ask yourself, “Am I right, am I wrong?”
You may say to yourself, “Paul Grieco! What have you done?”

The drinking days go by, wine spectator hold me down
The drinking days go by, riesling flowing underground
Into blue slate again, into the silent mosel
Under the rocks and stones, there is riesling underground

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, look where my glass was

Terror isn’t holding us, terroir isn’t after us
Same as terroir was, same as terroir was
Same as it ever was, hey let’s all twist our thumbs
Here comes the terroir

The drinking days go by
The drinking days go by
Drunk in a lifetime
Only riesling holds me down
Drinking the days go bye

Finally here are the eagerly awaited results of the blind tasting of 12 dry Rieslings from the Rheinhessen region of Germany plus three ringers (same grape, same vintage, also dry) which took place on the evening of Wednesday, November 28^th at Trestle on Tenth. Thanks everyone who participated in this mind-expanding tasting and particularly to the 20 expert tasters who gave us their scores to calculate these results. Although many of you scored very cautiously and there was often disagreement about which were the best wines on the table, the lowest average score of 85.3 strikes me as confirmation of the high overall standard and fits in with the mood at the table after the tasting. Some comment is necessary as there has been some intense discussion amongst the jury since the 28th.

1^st place was the 2011 Hubacker Riesling GG („Grosses Gewächs“) from Keller in Flörsheim-Dalsheim/Rheinhessen with an average score of 90.45. Congratulations Klaus-Peter Keller, pictured above, his wife Julia and their entire team! Their wine managed to be extremely ripe, spicy and concentrated, yet retain a wonderful lightness of touch and near-perfect balance. It is one dangerously sexy Riesling and the jury were almost unanimous in their admiration. Interestingly the alcoholic content of Keller’s Hubacker is “only” 13%, which is at the low end of the range for the tasting.  With dinner the now perfectly mature 2002 vintage of this wine gave an idea of how the 2011 will develop. Pictured below is the Hubacker with the stone tower built by Klaus-Peter’s father.

2^nd place was the 2011 Heerkretz Riesling GG from Wagner-Stempel in Siefersheim/Rheinhessen with an average score of 88.8, a result which masks how controversial it was with individual scores ranging from 80 to 96 points. For some jury members, including me, this was a wine that combined exceptional ripeness (tropical fruit aromas) with a diamond brilliance and racy mineral finish. A few people at the table were irritated by what they felt was a sweet note, though I can assure them that the wine is not sweeter than most others in the tasting (typical around 0.5% residual, which easily qualifies as dry according to German, EU and US wine law). This wine grew on stony porphyry soil in a very steep high-altitude site, the kind of vineyard most people don’t associate with Rheinhessen!

3^rd place was the 2011 Kirschspiel Riesling GG from Groebe in Westhofen/Rheinhessen with an average score of 88.45. This was a rich, powerful and rather fleshy wine which everyone seemed to enjoy. Although it seemed quite open when poured it developed beautifuly as it warmed and aerated in the expansive bowl of the Zalto Bordeaux glass, growing in elegance. Fritz Groebe is not one of the young stars of the region, and has often been damned with faint praise by the German wine critics. Thank you New York for being more open-minded!

4^th place was the 2011 Riesling „Turm“ from Riffel in Bingen-Büdesheim/Rheinhessen with an average score of 88.2. In this wine Erik Riffel mastered the art of balancing 14% alcohol with a racy acidity. This wine from the quaritic slate soil of the Scharlachberg site struck me as very young, the nose still very closed-up. Placing this high is quite an achievement for the Riffels when you think that the first vintage of this wine was 2007. Astonishingly, this organic producer is still almost unknown outside Germany.

5^th place was a ringer, the 2011 Riesling EG („Erstes Gewächs“) from Schloss Johannisberg in Johannisberg/Rheingau with an average score of 88.15. With its fine peachy nose, restrained power and elegance this was the ringer which impressed most. Since Christian Witte started shaking things up here back in 2005 Germany’s most famous wine estate has made  a quantum leap in quality.

6^th place was the 2011 Morstein Riesling GG from Wittmann in Westhofen/ Rheinhessen, one of the “new classics” of the region with an average score of 88.1. The first vintage of this wine which Philipp Wittmann made was 1998 and tasting it for the first time was a mind-blowing experience for me. Still very young and slightly closed-up it had great concentration and high-tensile power on the palate leading to an enormously long mineral finish. After the blind tasting the 2005 vintage of this wine wowed everyone.

8th place were the 2011 Geyersberg Riesling from Dreissigacker in Bechtheim/Rheinhessen and the 2011 Hölle Riesling from Thörle in Saulheim both with averages of 87.7. These were both very big, powerful and textural wines that polarized the jury, some raving, others criticizing the wide-screen scale and weight of the wines. The wine from Dreissigacker was slightly fresher, that from Thörle more spicy and creamy.

10th place were the 2011 Hundertgulden Riesling from Hofmann in Appenheim/Rheinhessen and the 2011 Kirchenstück Riesling GG from Battenfeld-Spanier in Höhen-Sulzen both with average scores of 87.5 points. These wines are both from limestone soils, though of very different kinds. The Hofmann wine was very cool, elegant and understated, while the Battenfeld-Spanier wine was concentrated and strident with a salty minerality.

11^th place was the 2011 Leckerberg Riesling from Winter in Dittelsheim-Hessloch/Rheinhessen with an average score of 86.8. With its ripe pineapple and honey aromas this was another rich wine that some tasters found too weighty, while others praised exactly these qualities. In spite of  the wine still managed to beat the next ringer. It would be interesting to compare this, the Dreissigacker and Thörle wines blind with high-end white burgundy.

12^th place was 2011 Kellerberg Riesling “Smaragd” from F.X. Pichler in Oberloiben/Wachau with an average of 86.7. There was much praise for the extremely distinctive nose of this wine (I noted white chocolate) and it received several very high scores. However, there were more members of the jury who found it too alcoholic. This vintage of Austria’s most famous Riesling is still very young and will surely show better in a year or two.

13^th place and just a whisker behind it came the 2011 Riesling “Rabenturm” from Fritz Ekkehard Huff in Nierstein-Schwabsburg/Rheinhessen with an average score of 86.65. The first vintage of this wine was 2008 and winemaker  Christine Huff is still in her mid-twenties. This was quite a cool and racy wine with something yeasty, but for me also yellow peach and spice notes.

14^th place was the 2011 Dry Riesling from Hermann J. Wiemer in the Finger Lakes/New York with an average score of 85.95, which is pretty good result when you consider that this is the regular bottling of dry Riesling from Wiemer. Sadly we couldn’t obtain any of the superior vineyard designated bottlings at short notice.

15^th place was the 2011 Rothenberg Riesling GG from Gunderloch in Nackenheim/Rheinhessen with an average of 85.3. It certainly had the most pronounced acidity of any wine in the tasting, was also the most youthful and perhaps these things counted against it somewhat.  It and the wine from Huff, both of which come from vineyard sites with Rotliegends, or “red slate” – actually a form of layered iron-rich sandstone) soil attracted some of the same kind of criticism as the Wagner-Stempel. What for some jury members were youthful aromas from very ripe grapes were for others negatively “sweet”. Once again, these are not sweet wines. It is striking that the three wines from the most stony soils should all have been the cause of the same kind of taster irritation. The winemaking of these wines differed in many respects and in each case there are other wines in the tasting which were made rather similarly, so logically winemaking cannot be the explanation. Rather it is those “cool” stony terroirs!

In spite of this, reactions to the tasting from the jury members have been overwhelmingly positive, often ecstatic. Almost nobody present expected that a region still often associated with cheap ‘n’ sweet Liebfraumlich could produce such a diversity of high-end dry Rieslings. And I promise you with just 12 wines we were only able to show a small selection of what is out there in the Dream Factory of dry white wines. The New Rheinhessen have landed in New York!

Last night I unknowingly walked right into the as yet unopened new home of New York’s self-proclaimed “Schnitzel Mafia”, a bar called The Third Man in a very funky (read low-rent) location in Alphabet City. According to the story titled ‘NYC’s Austro-hungry Empire’ in the New York Post of November 20th the Schnitzel Mafia is a group of cool and creative Austrian expats revolving around restaurateur Edi Frauneder for whom The Third Man (which looks nothing like the movie of the same name) is just the latest and coolest project together with his business partner Wolfgang Ban. It is situated just half a block from his cult restaurant Edi and the Wolf on Avenue C.

Theoretically I was attending a “workshop” (read party) with the theme of Big Bottles from Burgenland. It began at 11pm (read New York’s wine witching hour) and by the time I walked into the room just after 11:30pm the joint was booming, pumping and heaving, as the photo of Ms Summer of Riesling Susanne Winter (left) with two friends shows. Guest of honor (read imported anti-fashion statement) was the Austrian Wine Queen Elisabeth Hirschbüchler, pictured  below.

Everyone was seeing and been seen, including my exhibitionist and voyeuristic self. It felt like we were all in the right place and were high up on some intangible list of the cool wine people of NYC. In this Riesling-free-zone I was really pleased to bump into Amy Troiano and Volker Donabaum who’d I’d met during the German Riesling Cruise on the East River back in July. Most of the crowd stood around, drank copiously, gesticulated and shouted at each other, but ‘Relax Don’t do It’ by Frankie goes to Hollywood cranked up all the way makes polite conversation really difficult. I also drank enough, then danced with Amy and Susanne until I faded shortly before 2 am.

There were actually also some wonderful wines, none more so than the 2006 Kirschgarten Blaufränkisch from Umathum which was deep, dark and complex but entirely free of self-important bombast.  In spite of fashion theoretically moving in the direction of less massive or pungently oaky reds Planet Wine is still overflowing with purple-black wines that taste to me more like a dry vintage port than anything else. Of the whites the 2011 Leithaberg Grüner Veltliner from the unknown Liegenfeld estate was the most satisfying with a style – restrained power, cool herbal aromas and a dangerous freshness that kept pulling me back to the glass – totally different from anything the Wachau, Kamptal or Kremstal regions of Lower Austria have to offer.

What conclusion do I draw? Well, now I not only have my suitcase, but yesterday the box of books and household stuff I posted from Berlin a couple of weeks back finally arrived. Last night my last doubts were dispelled and I really felt that I’d arrived.

OK sometimes I feel like I walked into someone else’s movie and can’t find the script, so I have to improvise, but even then it seems that something is really happening. And I feel really at home here in Jürgen Fränznick’s East Village apartment (seen above) where my brain has started buzzing with ideas. Pursuing them is the prime reason I’m here and the results will all land here soon. WATCH THIS SPACE!

This morning I’m seriously KO after the exertion of organizing yesterday evening’s tasting of dry Rieslings from the Rheinhessen region of Germany at Trestle on Tenth (thank you guys for the great support!) But when I think about talented young winegrowers in the region like 21 year old Tobias Knewitz of the Knewitz estate in Appenheim then it was all worth it. They are the future and for them yesterday’s result was excellent, even if we couldn’t show wines from all of them (because they’re simply too large in number!)

We will have to wait a day or two for the statistical analysis to provide us the detail, but what was absolutely clear was how everyone was at least surprised and some tasters were astonished by the quality of the 2011 dry Rieslings from Rheinhessen. Personal favorites varied greatly, some tasters going for the sleeker more racy wines, while others prefered the more opulent and textural wines.

The Zalto wine glasses we used (many thanks to Aldo Sohm for getting us such a huge number of them) were new to many participants and there was some comment about how such “light” dry whites (most of the wines had 13% to 13.5% natural alcohol and a couple were even higher!) not only didn’t get lost in such big bowls, but really blossomed in them. Mature wines like the 2005 Morstein GG from Philipp Wittmann of the Wittmann estate in Westhofen and the 2002 Kirchspiel GG from Klaus-Peter Keller of the Keller estate in Flörsheim-Dalsheim served with dinner after the blind tasting removed any doubts about the wines aging potential.

Sadly we couldn’t accommodate everyone who wanted to come for reasons of space and I have a problem with the image resizing software on my computer, so I can’t post my own photographs of the evening yet. However, I can give you the back story to the tasting as supplied to all the participants. Here it is:

                                   WELCOME TO THE DREAM FACTORY

Why Rheinhessen? As the stats for sales in German supermarkets show, during the last few years the position of Germany’s largest winegrowing region on the domestic market improved with astonishing rapidity. In fact, everything from the quality of the wines to the sociological context within which they’re produced and consumed turned inside out. On several occasions I’ve described this as the transformation from the faded Golden October of Liebfraumilch to the Dream Factory of dry white wines. Though this is certainly true, my formulation ignores the fact that many young German wine consumers are utterly unaware of the region’s cheap ‘n’ sweet past. For them there is only the cool, creative New Rheinhessen!

Exactly what and where is Rheinhessen? With around 26,500 hectares of vineyards planted with a wide range of red and white grape varieties the region is more than three times the size of the Mosel, eight and a half times the size of the Rheingau and way more diverse than either. It is often referred to in Germany as being Hügelland or hill country, though several areas are of it are far more dramatic than those words suggest. Rheinhesen is easy to find on the map of Germany, because X marks the spot, the X being formed by the intersection of the A61 and A63 freeways at Alzey in the heart of Rheinhessen southwest of Frankfurt. Proximity to the Frankfurt conurbation and the region’s easy accessibility from there certainly accelerated change in the region.  This is the point at which a wine region’s story is normally told in a series of “logical” steps – climate, geology, history, grape varieties, etc. – but the thing you really need to grasp about the new Rheinhessen is who the region now is. Nowhere else in Germany have the Jungwinzer, or young winegrowers, had such an enormous influence. Of course, young winegrowers have been around as long as wine growing and can be found everywhere that wine is grown, but at the turn of the century a radical new type emerged in Germany and the word took on an entirely new meaning.

This is best explained by contrasting them with their parents, particularly on the level of group behavior. Before the Jungwinzer appeared on the scene Rheinhessen winegrowers usually viewed each other with suspicion, envy and even mistrust. For this reason they generally kept themselves to themselves, so that colleagues often had no idea what was going on in the neighboring wine cellar just a few yards away. Paradoxically their wines frequently met in huge tanks where they were blended to create cheap generic wines in which all individuality of aroma and flavor was lost in collective anonymity.

For the Jungwinzer it goes without saying that winemaking is a creative profession with possibilities which go far beyond anything their parents dreamt of. For them it goes without saying that grasping those possibilities requires only the right ideas, and the free exchange of knowledge, experience and ideas with colleagues is the fastest way of reaching their goal. Their creed is that we are stronger than I can ever be, this is openness makes us all more successful.

Two Rhienhessen Jungwinzer, Klaus-Peter Keller of the Keller estate in Flörsheim-Dalsheim and Philipp Wittmann of the Wittmann estate in Westhofen, were several years ahead of the main pack. Already a decade ago Keller and Wittmann proved conclusively that if you knew what you were doing in the vineyard, i.e. dropped yields and did a lot of precise canopy management by hand, then “no name” locations in Rheinhessen can give wines that garner the highest praise and sell for healthy prices. This pulled many of their Jungwinzer colleagues on to a steep learning curve, and they in turn have pulled a yet younger generation like Jens Bettenheimer of the eponymous estate in Ingelheim pictured below on to that same upward curve after them.

From the beginning they were sure that this all needed to be celebrated. In spring 2002 Keller, Wittmann and more than a dozen of their Jungwinzer friends who regularly tasted together formed a group called Message in a Bottle. By the third Wein in den Mai, or wine into May, wine party staged by Message in a Bottle on the night of April 31^st to May 1^st 2004 the group had generated an extraordinary buzz in spite of almost zero marketing budget and shaky organization. That night came the moment I finally realized what was happening in the region. It was about 1:30 am when I left the dance floor and it hit me: for the Jungwinzer wine is part of pop culture! This attitude, no less than the leap in wine quality, was generating the buzz and continues to generate it.

That might sound like a smart marketing concept, but nearly all the promotion of the region (except that undertaken by the highly professional Rheinhessenwein regional promotion body) is guerilla marketing. And for the current 20 plus generation of Rheinhessen Jungwinzer it remains that way. They don’t hesitate before trying things which haven’t been done before like making Sauvignon Blanc-style dry whites from the Scheurebe grape, or doing things which haven’t been done for several generations like making high-end dry Rieslings in forgotten Dittelsheim and Siefersheim. Pop music offered a metaphor for innovation and reinterpretation, but where these were successful a careful analysis of what vine genetics, geology, climate, vineyard and cellar techniques make possible was also there. I think it’s fair to say that the rise of the New Rheinhessen is more about the practical application of wine science, than cool design or sharp PR.

Several people have told me that Generation Riesling was my invention, but when I first said those words I was repeating something I’d heard. For me they express the fact that parallel to the new generation of German winemakers there’s also a new generation of German wine drinkers, and they’re in almost complete agreement with the Jungwinzer that Riesling Rules. The Riesling Spirit of the new generation of wine drinkers is one of openness for the new, even when it is applied to wines light years removed from Riesling’s flavor profile. That might sound like a recipe for one stupid wine fashion after another, but it’s not. These new, predominantly young consumers are what Roger Cohen of the New York Times calls Flexi-Germans and are well aware of their role as co-producers, eagerly participating in the creative process. The wines of the New Rheinhessen, are the result of this conversation between consumers and Jungwinzer.

Riesling in the New Rheinhessen

When I first tasted Riesling wines from Rheinhessen back in the 1980s those from the Rheinfront, the slopes along the left bank of the Rhine at the eastern edge of the region centered on Nierstein and Nackenheim, seemed to form a category of their own in the positive sense. Like many others, I jumped to the assumption that the regions hill country had much heavier and more fertile soils than the Rotliegendes or “red slate” of Nierstein and Nackenheim (actually a type of sandstone), and therefore were ideal for growing sugar beat, but couldn’t produce exciting Rieslings. Thanks to the wines of the Rheinhessen Jungwinzer I now know that this is plain wrong.

They discovered that although a large part of Rheinhessen is covered in fertile loess (which can also give pleasantly fruity dry Rieslings) there’s a great diversity of other soil types ranging from sedimentary limestone to quartzitic slate and volcanic porphyry. That “red slate” isn’t limited to Nierstein and Nackenheim either, but is also be found in several other places in the region. Then there’s the effect of differing vineyard altitudes, from around 50 meters to just over 280 meters above sea level. That alone results in average temperatures differing by almost 2.5° Fahrenheit over the year (the higher the altitude the cooler it is), to which must be added the effect of varying wind exposure. The Jungwinzer proved that Rheinhessen has many excellent Riesling terroirs.

Thanks to the rather warm, dry climate and the resulting high grape ripeness the wines are rather full-bodied with moderate acidity levels, for which reason dry wines are the focus of interest for the Jungwinzer, (although some of the windy high altitude sites are good for the “classic” sweet style wines). In the new climatic situation created by global warming, of which Germany has been one of the main beneficiaries, alcohol levels for dry Rheinhessen Rieslings range from 11 – 11.5% for the simpler quality wines picked at more generous crop-levels up to 13 – 13.5% or slightly more for the late-picked wines from low-yielding vineyards in the top sites.

The last years saw the development of an unofficial classification system for Riesling as well as dry  wines from other grape varieties: regular Gutsweine (“Estate Riesling”) which only give the names of the producer and the grape variety on the label; more sophisticated Ortsweine (“Village Wines”) which additionally bear the name of the commune in whose vineyards the wine grew; high-end Lagenweine (“Grand Crus”) single-vineyard wines with the name of the Lage, or site, declared.  (Those from members of the VDP are also designated Große Gewächs). This system may look like a new-fangled imitation of Burgundy, but a century ago this was very much how the wines of Rheinhessen were marketed.

Winemaking techniques have also changed, incorporating many ideas from before the advent of modern cellar technology. After desteming the grapes for the new high-end dry Rieslings they undergo a Maischestandzeit or period of skin contact lasting between 4 and 48 hours. This extracts aromas, minerals and phenolic substances (tannins) from the skins and definitely makes for bigger wines. Fermentation is often Spontangärung with “wild” or ambient yeast, and after slow fermentation comes extended Hefekontakt or sur-lie ageing. The creaminess this leads to integrates the acidity and tannins, leading to a bolder and richer wine than that associated with the region in recent decades. The result is wines with considerable power and ageing potential that are often still a little closed/reductive at one year of age. You need to be a little bit patient of you want to get the kind of extraordinary terroir experience which wines like the Heerkretz GG of Daniel Wagner of the Wagner-Stempel estate in Siefersheim – pictured below with a geological map of his remote and beautiful area of Rheinhessen – have to offer, but it’s worth the wait !

The New Rheinhessen strictly by numbers

In 1990 Riesling made up just 7.3% of the vineyard area of Rhinhessen, since when it has more than doubled to 14.9% or 3,952 hectares. That is less than the area planted with Riesling in the Mosel or the Pfalz, but far ahead of the Rheingau. Parallel to this the vineyard areas devoted to the Pinot family of grapes grew enormously during the same period. Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc) is up from 137 to 1,008 hectares or 3.8%, Grauburgunder (Pinot Gris) from 331 to 1,228 hectares or 4.6% and Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir) from 420 to 1,387 hectares or 5.2%. Of the traditional mainstay grape varieties of the region Silvaner lost a little ground, falling from 3,488 to 2,451 hectares or 9.3% while the red Portugieser crept up from 1,371 to 1,530 hectares or 5.8% during the same period. All the Neuzüchtungen or new grape varieties lost ground since 1990, many of them dramatically; they’re heyday is long since passed. Look back to 1905 and the region was just 14.052 hectares in size. The dominant grape variety was then Silvaner with fully 64.1%, followed by Riesling with 15.6% of the vineyard area, remarkably close to today’s figure.

Of course, you’re wondering what three young German winegrowers holding glasses of red wine are doing adorning episode two of my New York Riesling Diary. Well tonight at 6pm at Trestle on Tenth (Tenth Avenue and 24th Street) the American Association of Wine Economists and I are hosting a very special tasting of dry Rieslings from Germany’s largest wine growing region Rheinhessen. It’s young winemakers like Mirjam Schneider of the Schneider estate in Mainz, Christine Huff from the Fritz Ekkehard Huff estate in Nierstein-Schwabsburg and Eva Vollmer also of Mainz who have transformed Rheinhessen from the faded Golden October of Liebfraumilch to the Dream Factory of dry white wines in the space of a few years. Tonight’s tasting will feature a wine from Christine Huff in the blind tasting of 2011 dry Rieslings that is the heart of the event. Sadly though Mirjam Schneider and Eva Vollmer also make some excellent dry Rieslings we couldn’t them and dozens of their Jungwinzer (young winegrower) colleagues purely for reasons of time and space. After the blind tasting of current releases will follow some amazing mature wines, but I don’t want to take the suspense away for those who’ve signed up for this exclusive by invitation only event.

At 10 a.m. I heaved a great sigh of relief after my suitcase arrived two days and six hours after I checked it in at the BA counter in Berlin. One item of clothing, part of my jogging kit, was gone and my dressing gown had a small tear, but I was really glad to finally have all my stuff and no longer feel like a refugee in borrowed clothing. Of course, nobody is the clothes they are wearing, or even the clothes they aren’t wearing, but though it may be only sentimentality putting on certain items of apparel changes the way I move and think. I didn’t want to be without that this evening.

Immediately after unpacking my stuff I went for a long run out along the East River. In the riverside park I saw the first evidence of Sandy’s impact upon the city: a huge pile of chopped up tree trunks. Later at the junction of Avenue C and 14th Street I searched in vain for signs of the electricity substation which exploded blacking out Southern Manhattan. It was great to get out and move through the city, to feel its energy lifting my step and a little tingle of electric anticipation of tonight’s tasting…

Finally I made it to New York for two months of intensive Riesling meditation and group therapy. I’m writing this seated at the window of my room in the Jürgen Fränznick’s apartment in the East Village watching the rain trying to decide if it wants to turn into snow. It’s quite a change after the last months of hectic activity shooting the third series of my German TV show ‘Weinwunder Deutschland’ (Wine Wonder Germany) and trying to finish a whole slew of articles in between periods of on location filming.

Day Zero in NYC began badly just before 6pm yesterday at baggage carousel Nr. 1 of Terminal 7 at JFK when I discovered that my box (essential supplies Rieslings and other wines) had made the fairly tight connection from Berlin at London Heathrow, but my suitcase had not.  J.F. was extremely kind and loaned me the underwear, socks and T-shirt I’m currently wearing, then served me a simple, but delicious dinner including Kishka, a Ukrainian blood sausage containing buckwheat, from the East Village Meat Market (thank you Mr. Baczynsky!). Then we hit Terroir on East 12th Street for a few shots of inspiring wine. This morning I woke up to the following view out of my Room with a View.

It could all be so much worse. Back in 2002 in Western Australia I had to wear my wife’s underwear for almost a week because my suitcase got lost at some Far Eastern airport, and when I fell into a white hole in Toronto (the worst snow to hit the city since 1944) back in 2007 I didn’t get my suitcase back for 18 days! However, the fact is that until my suitcase turns up here there’s no way I can look like the above photo, since the only items of clothing for this outfit which I have are the boots and cufflinks, and that’s a look I’m not prepared to risk even in this supposedly very liberal environment.

I’m hoping very much to be able wear the suit and shirt pictured, both from Vivienne Westwood, at the American Association of Wine Economist’s (AAWE) tasting of dry Rieslings from Rheinhessen which takes place at 6pm Wednesday night at Trestle on Tenth. I selected the wines for this event which is organized by Karl Storchmann of the AAWE. This all goes back to an evening this May at Hearth Restaurant when I poured some of the new wines for him. Later I mailed him some sales stats for the region’s wines in German supermarkets and he agreed with me that the speed with which prices had risen within just three years was really spectacular. That combination made it inevitable that we’d work together to stage a tasting that would introduce the New York wine scene to what’s happening in Rheinhessen.

New York, like every major metropolis, believes that all the good and exciting wines of the world are obtainable there, the flip side of this being the creeping assumption that anything which is not obtainable there is per se neither a good or exciting wine. This ignores the influence of importers, retailers and restaurateurs all of whom have some kind of agenda these acting as filters. Of course, every importer and retailer has to have to have an idea, better still a vision, but the problem for Riesling is that these ideas and visions are often way behind current reality. One reason for that is how fast Riesling Reality has been changing during the last few year. And that’s why I had to bring that box of wine with me – to bypass the filters.

Many thanks to Florian Bolk in Berlin for the photograph of me above!

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

Click on the above link to see the film about Riesling I shot this summer and fall in New York, Berlin and the Rheingau. I may be no Stanley Kubrick, no Quentin Tarantino or Frederico Fellini, but with the help of editor Klaus Lüttmer in Berlin I managed to reate 14 minutes that give an idea of what the global Riesling phenomenon is all about. Particular thanks are due to Paul Grieco of Terroir & Hearth in New York (pictured above) the ex-German wine queen Annika Strebel (don’t worry, nobody will think you were naked), Michigan Riesling star winemaker Sean O’Keefe (invisible, but without that closing shot it would more boring), and the amazing Lez Zeppelin (girlz will be girlz!). By the way, my editor Klaus Lüttmer (sene below) also makes a great Frühburgunder red wine in East Germany’s Saale-Unstrut region, but more about that another time. ENJOY!