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

emember, not ALL wine fulfills such a noble purpose as
you describe. I believe it is important to always distinguish
between industrial wine — wine as “product” — and agricultural
wines, which are the earth’s emissaries of meaning.
Maybe even more important, I believe we need to alert
readers to beware of wine as “lifestyle accoutrement” or as
a badge signifying “gracious living” because, as you so
well know, millions of people drink and love wine who
don’t know or care about living “graciously” as defined by
the glossy magazines. Wine has nothing to do with finding
oneself gorgeous; it has everything to do with finding the
WORLD beautiful, and feeling that little happy shock
that it’s inside you to feel, and that it matters.
Other goodies in my bag-o-truths are that agricultural
wines are always more interesting than industrial
wines. That doggedness in the vineyard and
humility in the cellar are vital to the making of wines
of consequence. That wine is a context containing
soil-borne flavors — their LANGUAGE — spoken with
various ACCENTS according to
which cellar-work a given grower
prefers. That removing any PART of
this context from wine does injury to
its being (and if we do love wine,
why deliberately injure it?) . . . .
Europeans are more aware than we
Yanks that people actually existed
before us, they’re aware of the real size
of their place in the cosmos. They listen
to the soil and work to do its bidding.
They know that the Riesling vine is the
poet of their corner of the earth. They
want to hear the poem. They want us to
hear it. And so they work to bring the
words clearly onto the page. And they
are aware they do not, themselves,
CREATE those words. The text is created
somewhere else, below the ground.
The growers themselves are seldom
aware of their roles as protectors of an
ancient verity. They just do what they do. But the net
result of what they do, FOR CIVILIZATION, is to protect
and nurture individuality against a rip tide of uniformity,
to protect humility in the face of an arrogance that presumes
we have dominion over nature, and to protect
humanity, the connection of the worker to the work.
Their wines aren’t Things, but rather Beings: the grower
knows them, knows each plot of land, each vine in many
instances, knows how the grapes looked and tasted when they
were picked, knows everything that went into the growing
season, knows how the must behaved before and during
fermentation, and knows in some inchoate way the connection
between the land and the wine because he is
steeped within the nexus of that connection all the time.
He has absorbed it into his basic experience of reality, it is
no longer an abstract idea he thinks about. It is simply how
things are.
“Whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn’t a fish!”
But you can only know this by paying attention.
And you can’t pay attention if you aren’t close in. Only
the artisanal grower has access to “the murmurings of
the earth” (in Matt Kramer’s phrase) and only his wines
permit us to listen in.
Marcel Deiss gave a wonderful quote to Andrew
Jefford for The New France:
What is a man? A man is the network of all
his genes; that’s his “possible.” Beyond
that, though, a man is all he’s learned. Every
day he lived, he learned. He suffered; he
became enthusiastic; he fell in love; he
became disappointed. When I meet someone,
what do I want? I want what he has
lived (his vécu), his humanity; I don’t want
his genetic material. Why, when I taste a
wine, do you want me to taste its genotype
and not its vécu? A vin de terroir is how a
vine communicated everything that it has
learned beyond its genotype. And this
apprenticeship is the cultivation of depth.
And you think I’m metaphysical?
But why should we care about all
this? Isn’t it enough that wine tastes
good? Hmmm. Well, why should we
care about the loving, tender and passionate
feelings that arise during lovemaking;
isn’t it enough that sex feels
good? We should care because it exists.
And because the capacity inside us to
respond also exists.
But we needn’t care if we don’t feel
like it. Wine will meet you wherever
you are. If you only want some of what
it has to give, that’s what it will give
you. Yet I believe we are creatures in
search of meaning. We crave it, each in
our ways according to our temperaments,
but we emphatically do NOT
wish to live without it.
What is wine trying to tell us about
the earth? What is it in wine that transmits the message?
(Andre Ostertag has a great line: “With Riesling, all the
stones of the world find their unique voice.”) Why does
the earth want us to hear its message? Why was wine
chosen to convey the message? Now I’m not of a particularly
speculative bent myself; I don’t worry about these
kinds of questions. Yet I presume upon a world in which
they are LEGITIMATE questions, and I do think that wine
is a conveyor of meaning. Certainly not all wine, maybe
not even much wine, but a few wines, those that express
a spirit of place and which are uncompromisingly, distinctly,
themselves. “Made” wines — wines intended as
Products, wines fashioned according to commercial formulas,
wines made in very large wineries, wines made by
technocrats, wines made without reference to a grape’s
natural habitat and/or without consideration of a sense of
place — such wines have a kind of half-life; they are without
soul. They might taste good; they often do. They show
great. They can show the ASS off your palate — but they
are meaningless. Wine-like substances. Junk-wine.
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