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!
