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

NAHE WINES
100
vintage happens before the pressing,” he says. “What
you do afterwards is repair.” He approaches wine
respectfully but not reverentially.
As a vintner he takes his duties completely seriously
and applies himself calmly and fastidiously to his
work. The result is a community of wines as transparent
and filigree as spider webs, but the wonder for Helmut
lies not in the strange fact of such a thing’s existence, but
in the beauty of the workmanship. He wants to make
wine that is pure and serene in flavor.
My friend Robert Houde has a great way to convey
this idea: “People have to get over the idea that intensity
always means volume,” he says. Thank you Robert!
Think of some yahoo blabbing away behind you in a
movie theater. Beyond all patience, you turn to this clod
and whisper, “Would you please SHUT UP?” You haven’t
raised your voice above a whisper, but you have spoken
with seething intensity. Wine does this too. It is always
asking me to shut up.
I loved something Helmut said once: “DAS
GANZE DING MUSS KLINGEN!” That is, the whole
thing must harmonize; it isn’t enough if this part or that
part is interesting or arresting, the whole picture has to
be balanced. Helmut is unaware of it, but he offered
quite a gleaming gift of instruction with that simple little
sentence. We’d all be better wine drinkers—and happier
livers of LIFE—if we could somehow remember:
the whole thing must harmonize.
Dönnhoff ferments with yeast cultures he creates
himself from his own wines, the better to give him the
highest common denominator of controlled, slow fermentation
without having to resort to commercial yeast.
The wines are aged in cask until bottling, but no longer
than six months. If the wine isn’t bottle-ready after six
months it is racked into stainless steel. Low-acid wines
are racked immediately after fermentation; wines with
healthy high acid may sit on the lees as long as a month.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
Some Notes On The Vineyards:
“Winemaking alone cannot bring quality, it can only
retain the available quality,” he says, adding: “You can,
however, quickly make bad wine from good fruit if
you’re not attentive in the cellar. We try to make wine of
maximal quality with minimal technology.” He knows
the smallest nuances of flavor are heightened if you pick
for acidity as well as ripeness. “It is the concentration of
all the flavors of the grape, especially the mineral extract,
that gives the wine its real taste and structure,” he says.
“If you have a barrel that’s not so nice, that is the way that
wine is. Standing on your head with technology will not
make it better, and will strip its character.”
This year it was just me and Karen Odessa; no colleagues.
It was snowing and sleeting and low and miserable.
After small-talk we surveyed the vintage. I already
knew it was a great Nahe year, and others had told me
that Helmut was (rarely!) “willing to be pleased” with his
collection. He said “It was one of those years when thunderstorms
were decisive. You had certain vineyards
which seem to have pleased God, and others that seem to
have ticked Him off.” Was it clean, I asked? “The botrytis
itself was clean, but a certain amount of it was always
there; you couldn’t get over 95º without it.” And so we
began to taste.
My sense is that Helmut’s `05s are less sizeable than
others’, less hewn-from-iron. Many of them were pretty
lithe and curvy. Yet what strikes me most is their astonishing
tactile density, a minerality that leaves all thought
of metaphor in the dust: it is so tellingly present you
think the wines were strained through the entire periodic
table of elements. With their rapture of fruit, this
makes for some soul-rending glasses of wine! Yet I was
most of all provoked to laugh, and why shouldn’t laughter
be a soul’s response to astonishment?
This is a thing I find very hard to say. Yet I am moved
to try. With Dönnhoff I rarely if ever sense the wines are
in any way crafted. That implies a guiding intelligence
such as, for instance, I find (and love) at Diel. Dönnhoff’s
In essence the BRÜCKE is a minerally wine; it shows a more masculine profile, it’s more fibrous and nutty
than many other Nahe wines, but just at the moment you think you’re tasting everything in it, it comes at you with
even more nuance, yet another facet of flavor. If new-world-oaky-creamslut wines are like basic addition and subtraction,
these wines are like integral calculus—except that any ragamuffin palate (even mine!) can grok them.
NIEDERHÄUSER HERMANNSHÖLE is one of those vineyards that gives utterly miraculous wine. You shake
your head in delighted perplexity that fermented grape juice can attain such flavors. It is a steep hillside, not very
large (8.5 hectares), with ideal exposition and a soil whose complexity is mirrored in its wines. Walk fifty yards
through the vineyard and you see a mish-mash of soils, as though this were a geological junction, an Arc de
Triomphe of slate, porphyry, melaphyre and conglomerates—sometimes all jumbled together. The only possible
drawback is drought in the drier years. Its favorable exposure makes Eiswein almost impossible.
Dönnhoff is currently producing the very best wines from HERMANNSHÖLE, and you need look no further
to see one of the wine-world’s great confluences of a great vineyard and a great proprietor. I don’t care what a hotshot
palate you have, the complexities of these wines will tax it to its outermost limits. The fundamental aromas
and flavors are a mingling of sharply sweet cherry, sometimes black cherry, and currant-cassis, but there is a hint
of anise too, something spriggy, and an undertow of stoniness from the slate. Botrytis brings tropical fruit notes.
I would go so far as to claim that NO SINGLE WINE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD IS AS COMPLEX AS
DÖNNHOFF’S BEST FROM HERMANNSHÖHLE.