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

It’s best if I don’t think about the wines until they’re
in the glass. I try to subdue any pleasure of anticipation.
I just want the wines to come to me. I want the awe to
live in them, and come to me; I don’t want to bring it. I
tasted the wines twice one year, about two weeks apart,
as I made a second visit with Kevin Pike. The latter runthrough
was a brisk affair—we hadn’t much time—and
it lubricated a somewhat delicate conversation which
engaged most of my attention. I found it fascinating to
scroll through these wines, which I love like none other,
with only a sideways glance. In one particular moment I
was groping to say something subtle in my inadequate
German, concentrating entirely on finding words I didn’t
know, and suddenly the wine in my glass found a seam
and soaked through it, and I realized I was near tears. It
was shockingly beautiful. I was closed to the world, and
the world opened me. And what of this? it seemed to say.
I like to hike in high mountains, it is huge and stirring,
but this was different, this was anything but overwhelming.
This was quiet, it was the underside of a leaf,
it was hoar frost on a branch, the kind eye of an old dog,
a small thing standing simply in my sight as if by accident,
and I was alight with it. And what of this? And I
wondered, what of it? Yes it is beautiful, but what of it?
It is always here.
My wife is someone who likes to remember her
dreams and consider their meaning. I find this lovely, but
do not share it. It seems ordinary enough that our subconscious
hums and buzzes all the time, and that we only
see it when our waking consciousness gets out of the way,
just as we only see stars in a dark sky. I thought of this
suddenly. It is always here. Yes, just as the stars are always
there, even when we can’t see them. Just as the dreams
are always there even when we don’t dream them.
This is a long way to venture out from a single sip of
wine. But any single sip of wine can show us the whole
world, can show us the reality we usually ignore, the
thing that is always there, and which we see through
angel-eyes. Wine can remind us to pause, notice and
appreciate. It is always here. Beauty is always here. This
strange, sad, beautiful world is always here in all its
gravity and gorgeousness, ready to unfold us. Colin
Wilson once said “What if we aren’t risen apes, but
instead fallen angels?”
Think about when you make up after a quarrel.
Think of the moment you realize I love her, she is beautiful,
why are we fighting? You are suddenly inside the
deeper truth, the one which abides below all your politics
and power struggles, the truth that is always there.
Sometimes a great wine will deliver all of wine—all of
beauty—to you, and for a moment you are inside the
slower, deeper truth, and you know that all your fussing,
over adjectives and associations and quantification of
your pleasure and dissecting of flavor is all a bagatelle, a
waste of time. A waste of wine.
I envision Helmut reading these words and thinking
“Hey, don’t hold me responsible for this!” I imagine any
instruction he might wish to impart would boil down to
not losing the forest for the trees. Which is true enough,
yet on we go.
From the top of the Lemberg you look out not merely
on vineyards, hills, rivers; you don’t even look out on
“scenery.” You look out on landscape, that thing which is
larger than scenery or the parts of scenery. Just as the
idea of “forest” is different in essence from the fact of
trees. And when you see landscape you are quite sure it
means something, though you can’t say just what. Great
wines arise from landscape as much as from vineyards.
Great wines arise as much from civilization as they do
from people or cultures.
And so we might define great wine as wine which is
incandescent
with reality, that
is somehow larger
and more eternal
than its mere
ostensible self,
and which
speaks to that
thing in each of
us. But don’t go
looking for it. Be
calm and prepared,
and it will
find you.
My favorite
of all those aching drawings of Käthe Kollwitz is called
“Prisoners Listening To Music.” In it the damned, the
wretched, are looking wonderingly at a cloister inside
themselves they didn’t know was there. The experience of
beauty reminds us we are at least partly angels. We must
be, if, when they visit us, we understand them. Dönnhoff’s
wines are quiet and searching, and you hear them from an
interior world monastic and still.
Helmut Dönnhoff knows his wines are good. He
doesn’t strut about it but he isn’t aw-shucks either. I once
asked him if he agreed his goal was to make wines of
crystaline texture and precise articulation. “I don’t disagree,”
he replied. Then how do you get there? I had to
know. There is, in effect, no “how,” was his answer. Wine
results from the confluence of a multitude of small choices,
which alter as circumstances mandate. There’s no
recipe. There is ever-more reliance on instinct. Dönnhoff
is very respectful of spontaneous instinctive recognition,
and has become wary of the intellect’s appetite to deconstruct.
One year he spoke with David Schildknecht and
said this telling thing:
“I am always asking people who have no technical
expertise to assess the taste of my wines. The postman,
for instance. I ask him, ‘Would you just please taste these
three wines and tell me which you prefer.’ ‘Oh, it’s really
too early in the morning . . .’ he protests, but I pull him
in and sit him down anyway. And then he says something
quite amazing and insightful that suddenly opens
your eyes to the wine. And here is the decisive point:
there are a lot of us who know too much about wine to be
able to taste.”
Precisely.
Dönnhoff sees his work as craft; such art as may
exist in wine comes from nature. “All the real work of the
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