View 2013 Champagne Catalog - Michael Skurnik Wines

“I’ll speak not as a wine grower, but as a wine drinker now; when I drink a
wine, worked by people who spent three times longer in their vineyards, who
always followed their grapes, who suffered the same climactic conditions as
their vines, I dream. I dream, and it gives me pleasure, because I know there
is a story, work, patience, passion, and the unique beliefs of the wine grower.”
- Alexander Chartogne
“...The borderline between enough and too much is a crucial aspect of the wine
drinking experience. Today it is not at all uncommon for wines to make a pretty
plausible and superficially attractive impression in the first moment—sweet and
fruity aromas, then a soft, round taste—but after only a glass it starts tasting
like unbearably gooey kitsch. The wine has not changed, rather the drinker has
realized that the liquid in his glass is all make-up and silicone, possibly lacking
any real body beneath these cosmetics. I call this taste fluffy white bunny because
this type of wine appeals to our BABY-TASTE. Unlike adult-taste which is
culturally-determined and therefore a serious obstacle to trans-cultural wine
brands—the undeclared goal of the handful of huge companies who today
dominate global wine sales—baby-taste is the same the world over. The truth
is though that hardly any wines naturally have a fluffy-white-bunny taste.
Nearly all of them acquire this in the cellar where the technical possibilities
for the manipulation of wine are now almost unlimited. Only computergenerated
virtual reality is more completely malleable, which means that in
these corporations’ industrial production facilities the taste of vine biodiversity,
of place and of regional wine traditions all become part of the COLLATERAL
DAMAGE in the global wine sales war ...There are other descriptors for this
NOWHERE-PLANET-WINE taste which is determined by marketing plans
and quarterly figures. Reinhard Lowenstein of Heymann-Lowenstein in
Winningen/Mosel calls it Plastico-Fantastico-Viagra, making clear how the
enormous success of this wine style is based upon artificially stimulated desire...”
- Stuart Pigott