Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

Happy 50^th Riesling Birthday New York!

Riesling is a surprisingly new immigrant to the Eastern United States, not least because the successful cultivation of the wine grape Vitis vinifera there was a dismal failure for several centuries following the establishment of the first European colonies on the East Coast of North America during the first half of the 17^th century. Wine was far from being the only crop which failed the early European Americans, but they overcame some of those problems rather quickly. For example, tobacco was growing successfully in Jamestown/Virginia within a decade of the colony’s foundation in 1607 and was already big business another decade later. Irrelevant to our world? When I was a child in 1960s Britain my paternal grandfather smoked a brand of Tobacco called ‘Golden Virgina’.

The fact that wine kept on failing in the East meant that during 18^th century and early 19^th century in New York, Boston or Washington DC wine always meant a product which had crossed the Atlantic Ocean. This etched itself deeply into the East Coast Mind and is, I suggest, the origin of the still widespread prejudice there that when it comes to wine imported is a priori better than domestic. Physicians classify its most fawningly francophile form as terminal Musigny Über Alles Syndrome (MÜAS) for which there is sadly no known cure. You can spot MÜAS sufferers in fancy Manhattan restaurants by the way they talk way too loud about the fancy Burgundy wines they just ordered and by the way their faces suddenly turn very pale when they get the check. [Note: Musigny is a Grand Cru Burgundy with high three to four figure prices in fancy Manhattan restaurants.]

Even in New York State where Riesling seems rather well established to me the first Riesling was harvested only in 1962 at Dr. Konstantin Frank’s winery on Keuka Lake. First we have to start by saying a Happy 50^th Riesling Birthday to the Finger Lakes and New York State. I also have to congratulate Frederick Frank (pictured below standing on a pile of the slate removed from the soil in one of his best Riesling vineyards to ease tractor  cultivation) for not only remaining true to his family roots, but continuing to explore the possibilities of Riesling in his region.

Then we have to think how 50 years doesn’t look like a very long time to many people when it comes to wine. For example, the first halfway modern-type reds in Bordeaux were produced around 1650 at Château Haut Brion and the first varietal planting of Riesling in Germany (and the world) was probably at Schloss Johannisberg/Rheingau in 1720-21. Given the traditional East Coast wine prejudice and the attendant perception of wine as a traditional product needing that history to give it the aura of cultivation, then the comparatively new Rieslings from the Finger Lakes and elsewhere in the East could easily look faddish. In this context, 50 years could be the bare minimum necessary to  be taken halfway seriously by some people.

I fear that this way of thinking impacts more or less negatively on the image and marketing of all the Rieslings which I tasted together with winemaker Sean O’Keefe of Chateau Grand Traverse on the Old Mission Peninsula/Michigan and Rosemary Gray, one of the best professional tasters I know in New York City, on the second day of our overview tasting of drier style American Rieslings at Restaurant Hearth, July 26^th.

The fact that most of the leading American wine critics still give these wines scant attention and most of the European critics are barely aware of their existence makes theirs a steep uphill struggle for recognition. That made it all the more interesting for me to taste a wide range of them in a single session, then to compare them with the best from the previous day’s tasting of wines from the Western half of the Untied States of Riesling.

Right at the beginning the 2011 ‘Stone Cellar’ Riesling from Galen Glen in Pennsylvania made us all sit up and pay attention. It’s peach-apricot and floral aromas were attractive and rather subtle, the flavor full and juicy, but with a lovely fresh acidity at the finish. As Rosemary said, “pretty serious” and as Sean added ironically, “no hybrids, no dogs on the label, and no blue bottle”. In fact, wines with wine from hybrid varietals blended in was never a problem, but we found a whiff of Muscat several times and felt that it dumbed the wine down every time. Galen Glen also grow the Austrian varieties Grüner Veltliner and Zweigelt and that fact made me want to visit an operation which is clearly pushing the envelope in this state.

Having visited three times since the fall of 2005 and followed the development of the Riesling wines of Michigan it was no surprise to me that once again this state made a strong positive impression. 2011 was a normal vintage there, but the 2011 ‘Arcturos’ Riesling from Black Star Farms was probably the best dry white this winery has ever produced. Sleek, racy and elegant it had cool apple and floral aromas and a racy finish in which the hint of natural sweetness did not stick out at all; a wine that will surely improve with aging. The 2011 ‘2L Vineyard’ Riesling from 2 Lads was slightly sweeter, but as Sean said, it was a “sappy-juicy wine,” “but with enough structure,” as Rosemary observed.

Bowers Harbor Vineyard has been one of the top Riesling producers in Michigan for some years even though they have no cellar and several local winemakers make their wines. The 2010 ‘Block II’ Riesling may have one of the most unromantic vineyard designations on Planet Wine, but it had a complex floral bouquet which was still very youthful for its age (with some yeasty aromas). Sean also noted an “apple and pear skin” notes. Full and succulent with a very attractive balance of very ripe acidity and just a hint of sweetness; serious stuff with real aging potential.

Chateau Grand Traverse is the largest Riesling producer East of the Mississippi, but Sean’s Rieslings are all made without enzymes or bentonite fining, fermenting a portion with ambient yeast. Though made from fruit off young vines his 2011 ‘Whole Cluster’ was a very complex wine with apple, floral and clove aromas. It had terrific vitality and tension on the palate and was drier than previous vintages. Rosemary immediately spotted “winter spices” on the nose of Sean’s 2011 ‘Lot 49’ which was significantly fuller-bodied and slightly riper than the ‘Whole Cluster’. The long elegant finish was full of spice. The lusher 2010 vintage of the same wine which made such a huge impression at the blind tasting of global dry Rieslings during the Frankland Estate event in Sydney back in February impressed again with a ripeness that was closer to a top Wachau wine than anything else I’ve tasted from North America.

Totally different was the 2010 ‘Terminal Moraine Vineyard’ dry Riesling from Left Foot Charley, aka winemaker Bryan Ulbrich (who also made the ‘Block II’ from Bowers Harbor Vineyard), whose winery is in the converted laundry of a ex-lunatic asylum in Traverse City. The yeasty nose reminded me of Champagne, but on the palate it reminded me more of a dryish Mosel wine with quite a steely acidity. His innovation of referring to the Old Mission Peninsula on the label as the OMP also struck me as a smart marketing move. Hell, Riesling needs buzzwords.

Then the label of the 2011 ‘Thumper’ dry Riesling from Motovino featuring a motorcycle engine made us all sit up and wonder what the hell was going on. But why shouldn’t a motorcycle store make its own Riesling from the Leelanau Peninsula/Michigan? If anyone thinks Michigan is a boring place because it’s home to the automobile industry, then they obviously need to think again. The wine was fairly dry with attractive apple and citrus flavors. Also from the Leelanau came the 2011 Riesling from Shady Lane Cellars with its ripe apple and honeysuckle notes and juicy interplay of fruit, fresh acidity and a hint of residual sweetness was reminiscent of an off-dry German Spätlese of some sophistication.  Winemaker Adam Satchwell has finally cracked this style!

The first vintage of the ‘Golden Bunches’ Riesling from Ferrante Winery in the Grand River Valley of Ohio I tasted was the 2005 and that was already good, but the 2011 vintage is in another league. This is another youthful wine that needs some time to open up, but then a very pure white peach aroma to developed, and on the palate it was rich with quite some textural complexity and a long elegant dry finish. If the only reason people didn’t want to take any notice of you was because you came from Ohio how would you feel? That’s how Nicholas and Anna Ferrante must sometimes feel, although they are making one of America’s top white Rieslings.

New York State was represented almost exclusively with wines of the 2011 vintage and as Rosemary noted that summer, “even when it didn’t rain we had the hurricane”. The influence of all the rain showed somewhat in all the wines, but most strongly in those from Long Island. On the positive side, the 2011 Dry Riesling from Dr. Konstantin Frank was another classic from this producer with vibrant red apple and blackcurrant aromas, sleek, racy and filigree. The 2011 Dry Riesling from Sheldrake Point was rather closed-up, but quite a bit firmer and more powerful than the Dr. Frank wine; serious stuff for a difficult vintage. As Rosemary said, “I’d really like to try this in a few years from now.” The 2010 ‘Art Series’ Dry Riesling from Anthony Road showed how complex Finger Lakes wines can be, Rosemary noting an attractive “floral quality” and Sean, “a lot of flavors and textures”. With just a whisker more unfermented sweetness this wine, and some others in the tasting, would have shown even better. Balance in Riesling is more important than anything else as the best wines of this fascinating tasting showed. They proved that American Riesling has come of age.

It is interesting to look at the ancestry of some of the winemakers involved. For example, Sean O’Keefe hasn’t a drop of German blood in him. Instead, he’s Irish-Norwegian and got interested in things German, because his father Ed O’Keefe used German consultants when he founded Chateau Grand Traverse back in the early 1970s. One of the 2 Lads of Michigan, Cornel Olivier, is South African. Konstantin Frank, the founder of Dr. Frank in the Finger Lakes was Urkanian. Of course, Ferrante and Satchwell aren’t German names either. The point I’m making is that the melting pot of America is also a wine cask where people and things originating in many diverse cultures ferment together to give something new and exciting. Riesling is part of German-American culture that is as available to winemakers and drinkers of non-German ancestry as pizza or Irish bars are to Americans of all ancestries. The only problem is that awareness of this has been very low and sometimes stating this fact seemed politically incorrect for no good reason at all. Tthankfully this is now all changing very fast.

Anyone still doubting how important a part of American identity devrives from the nation’s German immigrants is recommended to have a look at the following graphic based on US Census data:

http://visualizingeconomics.com/2008/09/14/us-ancestry-2000/#.UCIZ8Rw9pnQ

The Wild Riesling West!

The statistics make it indisputable, even if the media seem blind to the fact that Riesling is rising on the West Coast of America. This trend has a lot to do with the critical and commercial success of one wine: ‘Eroica’ from the Dr. Loosen (of Bernkastel/Mosel) and Chateau Ste. Michelle joint venture in Washington State. First produced in the 1999 vintage ‘Eroica’ rapidly began changing the perception of American Riesling in the US. The reason for this is easy to taste. The 2010 ‘Eroica’ is bursting with white peach and fresh herbal aromas, tastes ripe and succulent, but also racy and dry enough to work with food ranging from poached salmon to hot dogs or Thai red curries. You can definitely taste the input of a top Mosel Riesling winemaker who’s looking for purity and elegance, but the wine has an American boldness, and that white peach aroma is classic for high quality Washington State Rieslings. This and the serious quantity of the wine being sold – they won’t say how much it is, but it’s several hundred thousand bottles per year – has made it the benchmark against which all ambitious American Rieslings are now judged.

It wasn’t on the table when I sat down in Restaurant Hearth on Manhattan’s East 12^th Street at First Avenue on Wednesday, July 25^th to taste a slew of dry wines from the Western half of the United States of Riesling, but it didn’t need to be; ‘Eroica’ is etched into my memory. With me was the tasting’s organizer, Sean O’Keefe of Chateau Grand Traverse on the Old Mission Peninsula/Michigan (whose own wines made it onto the tasting table the next day when we tasted dry Rieslings of the Eastern half of the US) and Rosemary Gray, one of the best professional tasters in the city.

We all agreed that it was a crazy roller-coaster ride, with wines in a mind-boggling diversity of styles, so that’s how I’m presenting it instead of trying to impose some kind of artificial 100-points-scale order on the creative chaos of the Wild Riesling West.

First up, I had no idea that someone called Guy Drew was making Riesling in West Cortez/Colorado. I had to use Google Earth to find out where the hell that is! His 2009 ‘Russel Vineyard’ Riesling wasn’t the star of the tasting, but it had a good harmony of fresh acidity and ripe lemon aroma proving beyond doubt that Colorado has a Riesling future. The younger vintages from Guy Drew were a bit closed-up, which Rosemary noted meant they little aroma; a problem that would recur quite a few times during the tasting.

California Riesling is now as impossible to pin down in a one line description as California Chardonnay or Zinfandel, with some of the styles completely off my mental radar screen, most obviously that of Tatomer in Santa Barbara. Their rich 2008 ‘Kick-on Ranch’ Riesling weighted in at a hefty 13.9% alcohol and had a really creamy texture that spoke to Sean and I of long lees contact; a good way of preventing that kind of alcohol from making the wine taste warm, or worse still, hot. However, it was about as far away from a sleek, crisp Riesling as you can get, though the peachy aroma of our favorite grape was abvious. It reminded Sean somewhat of a barrel-fermented Chardonnay, but without the oak aromas and Rosemary found it pretty strange. Tatomer’s 2010 ‘Sisquoc’ Riesling was somewhat fresher and less monumental, but still had that creaminess. Personally, I’m pleased for every extension of the already immense Riesling flavor spectrum and Graham Tatomer has certainly done that.

The contrast to the lean, bone-dry style of Clairborne-Churchill couldn’t have been greater. I guess I have more daily contact with this kind of Riesling than Sean and Rosemary, but I could certainly see why they found the 2010s from this producer too austere (the 2011 dry Riesling was significantly riper). Maybe that’s also the reason I was so excited by the 2010 Riesling from Navarro Vineyards in Anderson Valley, which struck me as being intensely, maybe too intensely, minerally. For Rosemary this wine was too closed-up and remained so when retasted the next day.

I was just wondering what something between these extremes would taste like when the delicious 2011 ‘Skyline Riesling’ from Thomas Fogarty grabbed me by the throat. A cocktail of fruit aromas and a minty freshness lead to a rich and juicy palate with a beautifully clean dry finish made this one irresistible. Forget all those macho high-alcohol, over-oaked Chardonnays which are the nuclear-armed aircraft carriers of the Californian wine navy!

As we moved on to the wines from Oregon Sean made a sweeping statement that I’m still chewing on, “now we’re going to the Promised Land of American Riesling.” Seen from a die-hard Riesling-Acid-Hound’s perspective the four wines we tasted from Harry Peterson-Nedry’s Chehalem winery were masterpieces of purity. However, freshly-opened and poured straight into the glass they were all more or less closed-up, and we agreed that the sulfur on the 2010 Dry Riesling ‘Reserve’ was too obvious in the nose. With this intensity of acidity and screw caps that level of sulfur simply isn’t necessary to keep the wine fresh, (though it might be appropriate for some of those aircraft carrier Chardonnays!) The 2011 ‘Corral Creek’ Riesling from Chehalem came closest to bringing off a Mosel-like balancing act on a razor’s edge of acidity, because the white fruit aromas were more open than on the other wines we tasted.

Some of the Oregon wines seemed to be aping Australian Rieslings, none more so than those from Australian Brian Croser’s Tunkalilla winery. The problem with going down this path is that the climate in Oregon is totally unlike that of anywhere in South Australia and therefore the Australian methods lead to a very different result from back in OZ. As Rosemary said after tasting several wines of this type, “I feel like everything is trying too hard and losing charm,” by doing so.

Much more appealing was the simultaneously succulent and racy 2011 ‘Nicolas Estate’ Dry Riesling from Anam Cara Cellars with its floral notes. They were also evident in the attractive and vibrant 2011 Estate Riesling from Foris Winery in the Rogue River Valley with its generous apple aromas. However, these were good wine rather than messages from the Promised Land of American Riesling.

I knew that Rosemary was from Idaho and that Idaho has been growing Riesling for decades so we would have been delighted to report that the state is making mind-blowing dry Rieslings. Instead, the 2011 ‘Estate Grown’ Riesling from Sawtooth was well made, but too sweet too fit in with the rest of the wines in the tasting.

So it was, by chance, that the last wines of the day provided both the high point of the four hours tasting and proved that Washington State can produce world-class dry Rieslings. Even the regular 2011 Dry Riesling from Pacific Rim winery was full of citrus and peach flavors, at once juicy and elegant; for Sean it was a “stunner” in this price category. But it was over-shadowed by Pacific Rim’s much more powerful 2010 ‘Solstice Vineyard’ Riesling from Yakima Valley with its opulent peachy bouquet and complex textural qualities. As Rosemary observed, “it’s not the Australian style, and it’s not the European style,” which in my book means that winemaker Nicolas Quille of Pacific Rim has developed his own style.

That was decisively confirmed by the 2010 ‘Wallula Vineyard’ Riesling with it’s incredibly complex herbal and fruit aromas – “Rosemary and passion fruit,” noted Sean – followed by a literally breathtaking harmony, the bright acidity electrifying the spicy finish and giving it as much excitement as you can hope for here on Planet Wine. It was wild enough for me!

Nicolas Quille, who was born in Lyon/France, studied winemaking in Dijon/Burgundy, then moved to the West Coast in 1997 and Randal Grahm’s Bonny Doon winery in 2004 is a perfect example of what the cultural melting pot of America makes possible when things with Germanic roots – in this case Riesling – are not deemed off-limits for reasons which lost any validity decades ago. A full-length version of his story will follow. Watch this space!

What is this off-the-wall image which has already appeared a number of times on STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL, and what exactly does it mean? I’ve frequently been thrown that Q and it certainly demands an A, but to do that properly requires a Q & A session digging into the purposes of this website, the story of how I got involved in Riesling, and much else besides.

First of all, let me give a quick answer on the origin of the  image. It was my attempt to visualize the RIESLING SPIRIT which is common to all Riesling lovers. At the centre is a Tiebtian Buddhist image of the union of Samantabhadra and Samantabhadri (note similarity of the names are – two sides of the same coin!) representing the complete overcoming of karma and achivement of full enlightenment. I’m a Buddhist, but I’m not a follower of Tibetan Buddhism and I chose the image, because I had a gut feeling that by combining it with a flute-shaped bottle so often used for Riesling wines right around Planet Wine that bottle would become The Magic Flute. It was realized in a manner far more spectacular than I’d dared to imagine by Alexandra Weiss (see www.weisswieschwarz.de) of Bad Dürkheim/Germany, who also designed the STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL logo. In this case world-wide copyright resides joint with her and I, and we ask you not to abuse this.

Now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of what the Riesling Spirit is. Looked at soberly Riesling is the 20^th most widely-planted grape variety on Planet Wine and yields a great diversity of white wines ranging from bone dry to honey-sweet, from feather-light to heavy as gold, which people either find exciting or confusing. It has a recorded history going back to 1435 in Rüsselsheim close to Frankfurt/Germany and was first described in 1552 by Hieronymus Bock in the latin edition of his ‘Kreutterbuch’, or herbal. Riesling became a globetrotter during the first half of the 19^th century making its way to the West Coast of North America and to Southeastern Australia, and probably a bunch of other places I’m not yet aware of. It is now cultivated in „cool climate“ regions on all five wine continents and is also very cool in the other sense, being the object of a new global cult which this website documents.

I understand how many people yearn for hard facts, but it’s really difficult to put an exact figure on the global acreage/hectarage of Riesling, since some winegrowing countries cannot supply reliable figures, others lack up-to-date stats. Ukraine is an example of the former group, 30 years ago claiming to have 62,000 acres / c.25,000 hectares of Riesling, which is more than Germany! I can’t even tell you if that figure was true back then, and I certainly can’t find any half-way contemporary figures to compare with it. Does anyone out there know if the Ukraine has gathered statistics for winegrowing since the release of Niravana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? Then you have places like the USA where each state is doing things differently, with California producing annual statitics, but places like Michigan and New York do so only every 4-5 years, so there’s no national figure based on data collection as level as a football field. See the Riesling Think Pieces Nr. 3 & Nr. 4 below for the best I could do so far.

Of course, numbers can only hint at the true nature of the Riesling Spirit, which is fundamentally inclusive. Firstly there’s the diversity of the wines, not only of type, but also in aroma and flavor. Then there’s the fact that round the world Riesling grows alongside other grape varieties as varied as Pinot Grigio, Grüner Veltliner, Pinot Noir and Syrah/Shiraz. For these reasons, and because enjoying Riesling encourages open-mindedness, Riesling lovers also tend to enjoy many other wines apart from those of their favorite grape, and to have better sex than anyone else on Planet Wine. However much we enjoy those other wines though, we keep on coming back to the fermented juice of the Riesling grape, because there’s nothing else quite like it, and it does things for us which no other wines does in quite the same way. RIESLING SPIRIT is undeniably joyful, but doesn’t ignore all the shit going down in our world. It’s certainly playful, but also there’s a serious intent lurking in there somewhere too. That’s why a Buddhist image which also tries to express something that can’t be fully grasped with words seems appropriate.

Sometimes it’s easier to explain something by saying what it is not. Fundamentaly I have nothing against Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay, but often these wines are so self-important, so vain and so exclusive in the sense of wanting to exclude others from their presence (as well as the sense of only being available to a “select” few). On top of this they often wear so much damned make up it’s hard to recognize the face behind it at all, and the problem is there’s no way to remove that make up either! One element of this is the oak aromas with which so many of these wines are slathered , which may come from barrels made from 200-250 year old oak trees, or may come from oak chips. „Oaking“ is a process by which, through the reaction of the wine with the oak, the wine is fundamentaly changed. Sometimes this works wonderfully and the oak doesn’t stick out like dog balls, but those are exceptions. Often I enjoy less expensive well-made Cabernets and Chardonnays much more than high-end wines, because they are usually less oaky, less self-important, less vain and leave some space for me, you and other wines. Hell, air to breathe is somehow important! However, sometimes those less and less expensive imposing Cabs and Chards are so sweet; the felony Riesling is so frequently accused of! This ha often been added in the form of grape concentrate, for many Cabernet winemakers the goo of choice is something eating the appetizing name of “mega-purple”, which also peps up the color. 

At it’s worst the demand of certain high-end wines (which shall remain nameless – you know which ones I’m thinking of!) and their hard-core of supporters (who shall remain nameless – they know who they are!) for exceptional status above all other wines and wine lovers is plain ugly. I consider it a form of vinous „racism“, and for a long time the prime victim of this was Riesling. However, other wine which tasted like Riesling were also herded into this group, along with any wines with Germanic sounding names and those sold in a flute-type bottles which made them look like Rieslings. For those demanding exceptional status, both for themselves and their Trophy Wines, Riesling was wrong simply because it was white and Germanic, i.e. it was the vinous equivalent of the „Evil Hun“. All their arguments against Riesling were just rationalisations of their fundamental Anti-Germanic prejudice. More on that subject at a later date.

Even if the wine was called Clos Ste. Hune and was made by the French-speaking Trimbach family in Alsace/France or came from Kueka Lake in Upstate New York State and was made by the descendants of Dr. Konstantin Frank, a Ukranian imigrant, they were still somehow vaguely suspicious. I speak from personal experience during the 1980s when Riesling was down and out, and members of the exceptionalist group also looked at me strangely because I was fascinated by Riesling.

However, the RIESLING SPIRIT only gained in strength through standing up to this discrimination, and the fact that there is still some active opposition, both to those of us gripped by the Riesling spirit and to our favorite wines, continues to strengthen us. Without this I would never have come to the conclusion that the classic Riesling bottle, when filled with good Riesling, becomes The Magic Flute.

Of course, the struggle against all forms of genuine racisim was and is far more important than our own little struggle, but we identify with all underdogs whatever the reason that they have been pushed into that role. It was possible to experience the RIESLING SPIRIT full-throttle at the German Wine Cruise and Concert in New York City – the high point of the 31 DAYS OF RIESLING, indeed of the entire SUMMER OF RIESLING – on the evening of Tuesday, July 24^th.  Lez Zeppelin (yes, that name is spelt correctly) – an all female Led Zeppelin cover band stunned and amazed, left no heart untouched, though all reactions were not positive…just like Riesling. Video of this will follow after it has been cut.

PS Thank you Suzanne Winter for making the cruise & concert happen !

Welcome back to the Great Riesling Numbers Game! Every few days the next load of stats arrives and make my jaw drop again. On the eastern side of North America the largest area planted with Riesling seems to be in the Canadian province of Ontario:

Ontario now: 1,648 acres / 667 hectares

Thanks for the reliable figure go to colleague Tony Aspler in Toronto. Sadly, nobody in Ontario could tell me what the area planted with Riesling was a decade ago, though the generally feeling was that there had been very significant growth. When it comes to stats Canada is the Black Box of Riesling! The only place I could find a national figure for Rieslings in Canada was in  Christina Fischer and Ingo Swoboda book ‘Riesling’ published by Hallwag back in 2005. It gives the total vineyard area of the country as 22,240 acres / 9,000 hectares, and the area planted with Riesling as 1,087 acres / 440 hectares, or roughly 5% of the total. However, that oh so round 9,000 looks horribly suspicious to me, as if someone in a position of authority might have been embarrassed by a journalist’s question that he couldn’t answer properly, and in order to save face pulled a figure out of the air without saying that that’s what he did. If my gut feeling about that is right, then it’s a classic case of sub-prime stats!

Winemaker Anthony Carone of Carone Winery in Lanoraie/Quebec (see www.carone.ca) could find no reliable figure for the Riesling vineyard area in Quebec, adding that, “I would have to guess, about or below [25 acres /]10 hectares total.” The tone of his comments gave me the impression that Riesling does not play a significant role there, maybe because in this French-speaking province it’s perceived as a Germanic grape and therefore not really welcome. But maybe I’m wrong on that.

In contrast, Information privately gathered by Gina Haverstock, the winemaker of Gaspereau Vineyard close to Wolfville/NS (see www.gaspereauwine.com), indicates that something significant is beginning to happen in Nova Scotia. She puts the Riesling area in the state at 10 acres / 4 hectares divided between 9 different producers, commenting, “I also think that since there has been success in growing and making wine with Riesling over the last 10 years or so that there is indeed a growing enthusiasm for planting it in NS.” I can’t wait to taste the samples which she’s ending me: watch this space!

Jim Trezise, President of the New York Wine & Grape Foundation, was frustrated that he also couldn’t give me an exact current figure for the acreage of Riesling, since stats are only recorded in New York State about once every five years. He felt sure the area planted with Riesling in New York state is “at least 700 acres” area and that it continues to expand rapidly, “we know that Riesling is the main thing being planted” he said. A cautious approach to his figures gives the following picture.

New York State now: 700 acres / 283 hectares

New York a decade ago: 340 acres / 138 hectares

Growth: 106%

Even if Trezise has underestimated the current position of Riesling in his state that is very significant growth. He also gave me another valuable piece of information; I was the first journalist to ask those questions! Long Island Merlot has clearly achieved critical mass in terms of image  – sticking with the metaphor, let’s hope there’s no chain reaction leading to a devastating Merlot explosion! – and the media have therefore (at least sometimes) asked some serious questions. New York State Riesling’s biggest problem is that it very little of it grows a short drive from the Hamptons on Long Island. Instead, most of it grows a long way away from the Big Apple on the other side of the state around the Finger Lakes. They’re incredibly beautiful, and I promise you when you  go there the first time if the weather is OK your jaw will drop a long way at some point! I wish that the Finger Lakes producers were better at promoting themselves, because New York City still doesn’t want to take them seriously. This has lead to a viscous circle of media indifference and lack of awareness within both the wine scene and amongst consumers. A major story dissecting New York State’s Rieslings is in the early stages of construction in the workshop. There will be a lot of sawing and hammering before it is finished, but it will be worth the wait!

Michigan has had somewhat similar problems to New York State in gaining wider acceptance, but – to be honest – in recent years the leading Michigan Riesling winemakers seem to have been more successful in turning their difficult position around. This is an issue of increased quality and a clearer sense of the right style (rarely bone dry, but seldom forthrightly sweet either), which is a whole story unto itself. And I promise it will follow later here on Riesling Global. The figures I received from Sean O’Keefe of Château Grand Traverse on the Old Mission Peninsula close to Traverse City – my nominee  for the next President of the United States of Riesling – (see www.cgtwines.com) are the very first I’ve ever seen for this state, though I visited three times. The photo at the top shows the home Riesling vineyard of Chateau Grand Traverse during my first visit in October 2005.

Michigan now: 575 acres / 233 hectares

Michigan a decade ago: 204 acres / 83 hectares

Growth: 182%

That last figure is truly spectacular, the highest that I’ve so far encountered, but still consistent with steady and realistic growth rather than voodoo economics.

Over on the other side of Planet Wine in New Zealand the last years have seen changes so dramatic that it’s difficult to find words adequate to describe them. The financial crisis lead to the dramatic bursting of the Sauvignon Blanc bubble, which is hardly surprising when you consider that in 1999 a “mere” 4,961 acres / 2,008 hectares were planted with Sauvignon Blanc (SB), but a decade later there were 34,564 acres / 13,988 hectares of SB in New Zealand. That’s just shy of 600% “growth”, which I’d call hyper-inflation. The reality was even worse though, because of the high yields taken in most of the SB vineyards. This meant that though 47.7% of all vineyards in New Zealand were planted with SB perhaps as much as two thirds of all New Zealand wines were SBs! Of course, this kind of expansion is totally unsustainable. On top of this, as in the case of all bubbles, during the inflationary phase this development was idealized not only by the interested parties, but also many others who should have known better. This obscured many other developments, such as the steady rise of New Zealand Riesling.

New Zealand now: 2,453 acres / 993 hectares

New Zealand a decade ago: 1,067 acres / 432 hectares

Growth: 130%

Now let’s throw a glance back at Europe. The figures for Germany and France (basically Alsace) look pretty stable, but in the case ofAustria this is not the case.

Austria now: 4,603 acres / 1,863 hectares

Austria a decade ago: 4,060 acres / 1,643 hectares

Growth: 13%

But this figure is somewhat misleading, suggests a German-type stability, which is not the case. If we turn the clock back just one more decade and look at the figure for 1990 we find there were then just 2,750 acres / 1,113 hectares of Riesling in Austrian. This means there was almost 48% growth in the Riesling vineyard area there during the last decade of the 20^th century. I’d call that major expansion.

Who thinks of Italy for Riesling? The bilingual Italian province of Südtirol / Alto Adige, is a mountainous area where Riesling grows on steep slopes and terraces at altitudes up to around 2,400 feet / 800 meters above sea level. Not only is this Riesling landscape spectacular, but the stats are too. Thank you Othmar Kiem for this figure.

Südtirol/Alto Adige now: 128 acres / 52 hectares

Maybe that isn’t so much in absolute terms, but just look at the growth. I couldn’t find a figure for the area planted with Riesling in Südtirol/Alto Adige a decade ago, but I did find one for 2005, which was 75 acres / 30 hectares. That means growth of 73% in just six years, most of it in the Vinschgau and Eisacktal Appellations, which are rugged Alpine Valleys. For several years the town of Naturns in the Vinschgau has staged a Riesling festival every year in October to publicize this development, and not without good reason. It Italy there are also significant Riesling plantings in Trentino, Friuli, Lombardei. and a smaller area in Piemont. However, I have so far failed to find stats for them. But I promise to track them down however hard it is!

This is still very much a provisional report, a work-in-progress and a state of shock I continue to find myself in, because – to be honest – I never really believed that it could or would happen. Looking back this strikes me now as a sign of stupidity and weakness, but just now I feel breathless, because it is all way above any expectations I ever had. The story which the Riesling stats has to tell really is crazy in the best sense of the word!

PS Thank you again Karl Storchmann. Without you I’d have never have got this far!

It’s time to stop and think hard about Riesling, also Riesling in California where I took this photo early one October 2005 morning on my way to work the crush at the Riesling-free Scherrer Winery in Graton/Sonoma. Changing sides or trading place helps you see things differently, and getting to know economist Karl Storchmann of New York University forced me to rethink my attitude to statistics. Now I see that there is an art both to gathering good stats, and to analysing those gathered by others. So, without expecting very much, I started looking for Riesling stats from around Planet Wine to see what they could tell me and very soon I was reeling from shock. The global situation has changed profoundly during the last decade, and nowhere more than in the United States of Riesling! However, several of my North American sources told me that no journalist had even asked these questions before, nor had anyone bothered to assemble a statistical overview before!

One of the first things I found was a table of statistics for Riesling global in the annual German statistics, (see: www.deutscheweine.de). It gave the following information, to which I have added the acreages, which were calculated by multiplying the hectare figures by 2.471 (the number of acres to a hectare). It looked pretty convincing at first glance, even if the USA was placed fifth though it had the fourth highest figure, then I started digging deeper and realized how outdated and (unintentionaly) misleading it was.

1. Germany 55,847 acres / 22,601 hectares

2. Australia 11,399 acres / 4,613 hectares

3. France 8,680 acres / 3,513 hectares

4. Austria 4,603 acres / 1,863 hectares

5. USA 4,620 acres / 1,870 hectares

6. New Zealand 2,266 acres / 917 hectares

7. Chile 754 acres / 305 hectares

8. South Africa 531 acres / 215 hectares

9. Luxemburg 403 acres / 163 hectares

10. Argentina 279 acres / 113 hectares

11. Switzerland 30 acres / 12 hectares

Global Total 89,413 acres / 36,185 hectares

It seemed to me that Washington State was the logical place to start, since I felt sure it must have the largest acreage of any state in the Riesling Union and I quickly found the following stats:

Washington State now: 5,307 acres / 2,148 hectares

Washington State a decade ago: 2,648 acres / 1,072 hectares

Growth: 100%

One of the significant factors here is that Washington State is home to the world’s biggest Riesling producer, Chateau Ste. Michelle. If we add all their labels up including their Eroica joint venture with Ernst Loosen their production averages more than 13 million bottles per year. However, they are certainly not alone. For example, the Pacific Rim winery, which began life back in 1992 as a Riesling brand of the Bonny Doon winery of Santa Cruz/California is now up to about 2 million bottles per year, almost all of it Riesling.Last year Grahm sold Pacific Rim to Banfi in New York, which was widely reported, but I didn’t find anything in the press that dug more than one inch below that bald fact.

So I moved on to California, which is surely not widely associated with Riesling either in the wine scene or amongst the wider drinking public. What I found shook me to the core. The growth of the Riesling vineyard area in California far outpaces Washington State, and the wine media – including me – failled to spot that!

California now: 3,831 acres / 1,550 hectares

California a decade ago: 1,510 acres / 611 hectares

Growth: 153%

Here the contrast with Syrah is interesting. I thought that California Syrah was a cult amongst collectors and a real crowd pleaser too, i.e. everything Riesling is not in California. OK, sometimes those California Syrah are too moumental in scale for my taste, but with a slew of Parker points and gobs of whatever metaphysical thing it is they confer on wines, who gives a fuck about my opinion? I thought that’s the equivalent of an AAA creidt-rating and gaurantees a buzz in the broader market, but obviously there’s a similar kind of dislocation between ratings and reality here as there was with the sub-prime derivatives. All my trade contacts tell me that California Syrah is a stubbornly hard sell in the US, excepting for a few brands with a long-standing commitment to the varietal.

On the other hand, I imagined that Riesling was never going to have more than a small toehold in Calfironia, not least because those same trade contacts kept telling the wines were saddled with the image of being sweet and bland, which seems to be an evil omen for any California wine. Peversly those big California Chardonnay brands which actually taste sweet and bland have a dry image, because the producers always talked and walked dry. However, this explanation for Riesling’s position in the state obviously now belongs in the waste paper basket of history and new research is called for, by which I mean market research, and Stuart Pigott clearly has to hit the California Riesling trail.

Oregon is a completely different story and this is not the place to discuss when (it was after the NASDAQ), how and why and the Great Oregon Pinot Bubble burst. The fact is that there has been a slow, but steady drift to Riesling during the last decade, a development that has also been ignored, because the wine media still has a crush on Orgeon Pinot Noir. In fact, some of them also seem to be wet-dreaming about it in order to make this a 24/7 love-in.

Oregon now: 800 acres / 324 hectares

Oregon a decade ago: 605 acres / 245 hectares

Growth: 31%

This is the moment to ignore the small detail of a national frontier and look over the 49^th Parallel at British Columbia. I first got really excitied about Okanagan Valley Riesling five years ago when I first tasted the “Bladerunner” dry Riesling from Tantalus. However, I have to admit that until a few days ago I had no idea how much of it there was. Riesling is the 10^th most important grape variety in BC and there’s quite a lot of it planted there.

British Columbia now: 439 acres / 178 hectares

Sadly, BC couldn’t supply me with a decade ago stat, so I can’t say what the growth is, though I suspect that it is higher than in Oregon and perhaps at the same level as Washington State. However, what I can do is to say that taken as whole the West Coast of North America now has a total of 10,400 acres / 4,200 hectares of Riesling! That total, together with the growth which lies behind it, strikes me as a very significant development. I suggest it means that Riesling has ceased to be an underground wine on the West Coast and is now a major varietal in the market place and in the minds of very many consumers.

Why haven’t we heard and read more about that? Well, it’s “only” Riesling and Riesling is percieved as being static, because the area planted with Riesling in its German homeland is rather static, and Germany still defines Riesling in the minds of many in wine media and the wine scene. As the great Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan said, “People never want to look at the present; people live in the rearview mirror because it’s safer, they’ve been there before, they feel comfort. Anybody who looks at the present is a threat, a nuissance in the extremist degree.”

PS Thanks Karl Storchmann for getting me to look at the Riesling present!

PPS Part 2 follows in a few days and will be equally crazy!

MAYBE I’M AMAZED? Justin Christoph just sent me another comment on the beginning of the Summer of Riesling 2012:

http://youtu.be/KlEhMR59Gdc

I could be dry, I could be sweet
I could be loess, I could be slate

Your time has come ferment on your skin
The cost so high for new oak, the gain so low
Walk through the Mosel
The wine review is a lie
May Riesling rise with you

I could be dry, I could be sweet
I could be loess, I could be slate
They put hot alcohol to my head
‘Cos of the things I drank, then said
And made thus terroir go away
Mosel winzer in every way
Acidity is an energy

I could be dry, I could be sweet
I could be loess, I could be slate