On the Riesling Trail: Day 13 – Dancing Lessons with Helmut Dönnhoff and Hard Water with Charles Phan

To be completely frank I’m not the kind of guy who leaps at every opportunity to sit in fancy restaurants. So many of them are pretentious, disappointing, and over-priced if you’re the one picking up the tab for the chef’s ego-trip at the end of the evening.  Yesterday at the ‘Auberge’ in Carmel/California I not experienced some of the most amazing food I’ve tasted in years, but some of the most exciting food and Riesling pairings I’ve ever had. I didn’t manage to get a shot of the chef Justin Cogley, partly because he’s actually a little shy. However, at the end of the evening the winegrower responsible for the Rieslings, Helmut Dönnhoff of the eponymous estate in Oberhausen/Nahe didn’t mind me pointing my camera at him and his wife Gabi (above).

To be completely frank I’m not a genius at describing these things, but Justin Cogley’s combination of braised peach, corn and a smear of turbot roe emulsion was already startling, and pairing it with Dönnhoff’s 1994 Riesling Spätlese from his monopoly Brücke site was sheer genius. At nearly twenty years of age this wine’s sweetness had receded far into the background (a normal result of extended aging) and was just enough to match that of the peach. Slightly less daring, but equally delicious turbot cooked on the bone with a wilted miniature turnip which had a hint of hotness reminiscent of horseradish (pictured below). It was paired with Dönnhoff’s 2003 Riesling Spätlese from the Hermannshöhle site was served, which I already described in my last posting (see immediately below), which is amazingly fresh for its age and amazingly elegant for the hottest vintage in Europe for decades. Helmut Dönnhoff described the balancing act in making Rieslings of this kind by saying, “acidity and sweetness must be dancing!” In this case I’d say it was definitely tango, but the flavor and texture of the fish were more than a match for this lasciviousness.

The night before I was at ‘The Slanted Door’ in San Francisco’s Ferry Building to meet Charles Phan (pictured below), the founder of what is now a restaurant and bar group employing 650 people. The Slanted Door is not only a very stylish and lively Vietnamese restaurant with great food in a gloriously multi-cultural city, it’s also one of the largest grossing restaurants in the US. That means many thousands of people from all over the country and all over the world at least see it’s great list of Rieslings every year. A new section devoted entirely to dry Rieslings is the next step in its evolution. There’s another side to this though, which is Charles Phan’s philosophy of, “no Rum ‘n’ Coke, no Cosmopolitan, no Chardonnay!” In fact, there’s no cola at all in the entire place.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t reject Chardonnay out of hand whatever some people will tell you, because next to the Bullshit Chardonnay wines there are some very elegant dry whites. When it comes to Cola I have more mixed feelings, because I’m very critical of those aspects of the business philosophy of the big companies dominating the market which ignores the health implications of high sugar consumption. It’s therefore important that there are high profile restaurants like the Slanted Door proving you can do things very differently and still be very successful. A lot of Riesling’s remaining difficulties are due to the fact that many restaurants and wine stores are frightened of doing things differently from the crowd of their colleagues and competitors. This is robbing thousands of people per day of their first (hopefully life-changing) taste of good Riesling. Just to show that this blog is anything but narrow-minded and it never says that you have to drink Riesling I have to tell you that when Charles Phan showed me his new bourbon bar, ‘Hard Water’ (just a few doors down from the Slanted Door) I ordered a glass of Pappy van Winkle’s bourbon. I was amazed by the originality of this totally American taste. While I savored it Charles Phan explained that he’s fascinated by all food and drinks behind which there’s a real story. Exactly!