German Catalog 2006 USE THIS ONE.qxp - Michael Skurnik Wines

gang! We got to the end of the 100-yard row of vines, and
this is what we all saw: four distinct, absolutely different
soil types in the space of a two-minute stroll. There was
grey slate, pale yellow loess, silvery-tan porphyry and
deep rusty melaphyre. I turned to the group. “You hear a
lot of crap about what makes complexity in wines. Some
people would like you to think that winemakers give complexity
to their wines. Look at what you’ve just seen here.
THAT, and THAT ALONE is complexity.”
I know of nowhere else in the world of wine where
grapes grow on such an intricate confluence of geological
currents. No grape except Riesling could do justice to such
soil.
Each year I try to hike to the top of the Lemberg, the
highest hill in the region. It does me good: the birds, the
fresh spermy smell of early spring and the view. At this
time of year, the vineyards are bare of leaf, and it is
telling and fascinating to look at the various colors of soil
Felsenberg
forming miasmic currents on the exposed ground.
Almost all the great Nahe vineyards can be seen below,
among the noblest homes for Riesling anywhere on
earth, spread out like a necklace of diamonds:
Kupfergrube, Hermannshöhle, Hermannsberg, Brücke. I
peer through the spring sunshine, remembering the first
time I ever saw this astonishing view, when I suddenly
had an eerie sense of something being shown to me. I was
a million miles from marketing. Looking into a remote
hollow on a distant limb of the world, grateful in my
utmost heart for the beauty that lives in the land, but also
somehow lost.
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View of vineyards from the Lemberg
In my dream I wished I could bring you here with
me, and we could sit out for a few hours in the afternoon
light and look down on those miraculous vineyards and
listen to the birds. Let that time gestate in our hearts, so
that when we taste the wines later on we taste them with
that heart, relaxed, dilated and ready. And then I think of
those wines, arranged in sterile rows on a table somewhere,
while I pace nearby and worry about how they’ll
“show.” And for a moment it becomes impossible to be
both people at once, the hot-shot wine guy and the plainand-simple
me who sits on the hill, pensive, calm and
grateful.
I happen to believe that wine means something. And
much of what wine means was visible to me then, and
every time since. I also buy wine in part because of what
it means, which is a more vital question than its simple
exterior flavor. Yet if we wish to make a living buying
and selling wine, we often confront a perplexing ques-
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Kupfergrube
Hermannsberg
Brücke
tion: who are we to be? We all let meaning into our lives
in some way; we thirst for meaning unawares. When you
cheer like a banshee for the home team, you’re feeding a
need for meaning; on the face of it, what does it matter
who wins the game? We create meaning because we need
to have it in our lives. Wine is one of the things which
happens to feed that need in me, and Nahe wine does so
in a particularly suggestive, caressing way. “There are
mysteries here of the most exquisite sweetness; I will
show them to you,” it seems to say.
Enter Helmut Dönnhoff.
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