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

find it becomes more vivid now, and you slowly cease to
care about the brain-game of dissecting. Who cares
what’s on the lab report? Peter Jost put it well.
“Describing a wine by its analysis is like describing a
beautiful woman by her X-ray films.”
I think this is why we love old wines as we do. It isn’t
only that they’re lasted so long; in fact I doubt we truly
realize the existential truth of the old vintage on the label.
What does “1949” signify? It’s absurd, unless we were
alive then and remembered. Sometimes even then.
Great old wine is evocative, this we know. It has to
have been meaningful wine to start with, nothing industrial
or “manufactured,” a wine of identity and connection
to earth and family. But mere evocation would seem
innocuous enough; maybe it could float you into a
dreamy mood or make you lambent and warm. But this
is more. Great old wine seems to have distilled reality. All
of reality, not only itself: old rooms, echoes of the cooking
of many meals, smells of worn clothes, the prevailing
atmosphere of the time it was made. And like a distillate,
it is almost too concentrated to apprehend. Thus we are
at once granted entry into a world and a place of soul we
never get to see, and it’s so sudden and unexpected that
we are disarmed and laid bare.
I used to work with a guy named Anthony Austin. If
you knew Anthony I’ll bet you remember him; he is a
very dear man, as well as the only man I have ever seen
land a plug of spat-out-wine into the bucket while being
technically unconscious. Poor guy was wiped out with jetlag,
but he hit the bucket. Anyway, Anthony didn’t say a
lot, and was hardly what we’d call “emotive”, but one
year we were tasting at Christoffel, and Hans-Leo
brought out a bottle of his `76 TBA for us. This is an especially
sleek and silvery citizen of this sometimes-blowsy
vintage, and I was so lost in it I barely registered my surroundings.
But when I looked up I saw Anthony’s eyes
were wet. I wanted to hug him. I knew that feeling, the
way it steals over you. It doesn’t build, it suddenly takes
you over. And you wonder How did it know where to find
me? How could I have not known (or forgotten) it was there?
What made me think I could live without it?
Sometimes I want to call this the “Oh so that’s what
it’s about” moment, because it feels both entirely natural
and also unequivocal. A couple months ago I sat on the
warm terrace of Nepenthe (that most sublime of restaurants)
in Big Sur, enjoying a moment of solitude and a
badly-needed morning tea. The Pacific was 800 feet
below me and as still as a mirror on the windless day.
Whales spouted, big-winged birds floated, and the beauty
was almost a rebuke: Don’t you dare think you can do
without this, Buster. I felt like I was who I was meant to
be, and that feeling always seems to be stunning. But the
best thing of all is you don’t have to contrive some big
vast rapture in order to know this moment: It can live,
and lives very easily, in a single sip of wine.
One year when I traveled with a group of customers
to Schmitt-Wagner, he brought out a treasure remarkable
even by his standards, an Auslese from the great 1937
vintage. I had tasted the wine once before (this is a generous
man) and I waited for what I knew would come. As
the wine was poured the group inhaled audibly at the
color, and I saw many faces grow meditative as they
sniffed those first mysterious fragrances. But when you
expect to be moved you’re too self-conscious and you
can’t be moved. That was me. My guests had walked
through that little tear in the curtain out into the other
world. I was happy for them.
Someone asked Herr Schmitt, “Did you make this
wine?” “Oh my goodness no, I was just a child,” he
answered. Then he grew pensive and said “But I do
remember being a boy of six, picking the grapes alongside
my grandma,” and then I lost it. I was looking at his
hands just then, as it happened, the hands of a vigorous
old gentleman still ruddy from a life in the open air, and
I suddenly saw the child’s little hands inside them. And
saw the child trotting
along at his grandma’s
side, happy to be
included in the general
activity, proud to be
useful, there among the
vines. And now it was
sixty-four years later.
The wine in our glasses
was enthralling enough
to us, but to our host it was the pure blood of memory,
bound to the filaments of his earliest joys, with affection
and usefulness. This is a man of Wine, I realized. This is
what it means to be a man of wine.
This `37 called to us from across a passageway to a
world we barely know. But to Bruno Schmitt it called
across each of those sixty-four years from small sweet
memories. I was so lost in my vision of the boy that I registered
the 70-year old face of the man to my left with a
small shock. He had passed his life in wine, I thought. He
didn’t choose it because he thought it was gracious or
sexy or romantic. He chose it (if it were indeed what we
would call a “choice”) because it needed to be done and
it pleased him to do it.
Wines made by such people glow with the value of
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