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

seems to have been born unable to speak except in rhetoric.
What a character this was.
His property may have been the last surviving example
of an estate that combined viticulture and agriculture.
It seemed to have frozen in time somewhere just after the
War. Other growers would speak in pure bewilderment of
Schneider’s antediluvian techniques: “It’s like an open air
museum of how wine was made fifty years ago,” one
grower said to me. No growers’ association meeting was
complete without Hans Schneider. “If I looked around and
didn’t see him, I’d try to leave undetected,” one guy told
me. “The meetings were dull without him.”
The young are indeed grabbing the reins now, but
there is a legacy they carry even as they change and modernize
it. I wonder if we Americans can really understand
such a thing. So many of our basic human contexts—senses
of time, of history, of continuity, family and
community—lay in tatters. And we ourselves have
shredded these things so we could get at other things we
imagine we want. Can we actually see someone’s wines
as representatives of a family legacy? Can we understand
how wines become members of the family? It is
sometimes obscure even for me, and I want to believe it.
So I think of Schneiders, and how they render their
wines, those strange songs of the earth who share the
house with the family. There’s our world, all a-rush and
full of clamor. Schneiders have a computer in the house
now, and a satellite dish on their roof, and an email
address. For all I know they watch more CNN than I do.
I’m not into making them adorable peasants. I am just
struggling to isolate a slippery little creature, that they
seem fundamentally anchored and that we do not. And
wine is part of what anchors them, or part of what they’re
anchored to, or perhaps these are the same thing. And so
it seems strange to dissect the wines as though they had
no context in human life. It can’t be done.
Thankfully the wines are lovely. I’d never have
returned otherwise. But they are lovely in just such a
way, such a particularly Schneidery way. They shouldn’t
be served too cold, as it mutes the astonishing perfume
that’s their raison d’être. Also, theirs is a self-contained
world; the wines aren’t planned, nor are intended to be
placed, in gigantic tastings with seventy-five other wines.
Schneider is a perfect example of the impossibility of isolating
wines from the people who make them. Yet every
drinker doesn’t have the chance to go there and sit in the
parlor and soak up the vibes, and so the wine must have
something of value purely per se. Which harks back,
again, to those aromas and flavors. If you can somehow
drink a few of these at cellar temperature in circumstances
permissive of reflection, I guarantee you’ll never
be more enthralled by any other wines. Even wines I
might agree are “better.” They are intensely poetic wines,
but not necessarily lyric wines. They are elemental in
some way; they have no time for frills or flourishes. They
just exhale the earth.
“Colorful” stories aside, these can be the most haunting-
schneider at a glance:
ly, intricately perfumed wines I have ever tasted. They
are modernizing but still a fair way from modern; great wine-y depth in the best of them.
This differs from site to site. The wines are less mealy
how the wines taste:
and more vigorous than they once were, more contemporary
now. But you’d be well advised not to even try isolating any single consistent
denominator from a village with 52 different soil types (!) That said, it’s clear these hail
from great land.
GJS-069L 2005 Niederhäuser Riesling Kabinett, 1.0 Liter
This is THE sleeper-wine in this portfolio, like getting a by-the-glass priced big-format
of Criots, Chevalier and Batard-Montrachet! So let’s see; which collection of Grand Crus
make up this vintage’s Liter . . . ah, it’s merely Kirschheck, Klamm, and Kertz (hoo boy, a
K-K-K wine; we should put white sheets and hoods on the bottles…oh ouch). But the
wine shows, ah, grand wizardry . . . ? Well it does. There are extra fine aromas (three
Grand Crus!), cherry-blossom and boucherie; the palate is just superb, with endless elegance
and charm, wonderful backbone and length.
SOS: 2 (now to 8 years)
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NAHE WINES