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

Many of the hippies of the sixties turned into the very
people they despised, but Walter, who was never a hippie,
embodies all the virtues they espoused. Giving,
trusting, sharing, no games, nothing to hide, sometimes
even a little naïve, but actually, remarkably, Good. It is
good, the collegial trust he shows me; it has helped me
grow professionally and personally. It is good he invites
me in to the wines, doesn’t do the take-it-or-leave-it thing
(no disrespect intended to those who do; each is entitled
to his own approach) and fosters a mood of easy comradeship.
In short, he treats me as a friend. And I am
touched and gratified. Finally it doesn’t matter how
much wine you sold, which pack you belonged to, or
whether yours was the fashionable position on the issues
of the day. What matters are the faiths you kept, and how
you treated other people. By those measures, Walter is
leading a good life.
So imagine my surprise when I descended into
Walter’s cellar and found he’d outfitted all his tanks with
chilling units. He has joined the new wave of German
growers who’d rather stop fermentation than use dosage.
Obviously that’s entirely OK by me, though I do miss the
blending work and do not agree with the anti-dosage crusaders.
But Walter told me “It’s always been my dream to
be able to do this; it makes the wines more pure.” A few
years ago a guy named Paul Weber made what he said
would be an innocuous TV-film about me and my
doings, but which he was asked to sexy-up a bit, so he
turned it into an ideological war between the pro and
anti dosage camps, and Walter was (as was I) on the
unfashionable side of the issue. (Idiots! It shouldn’t even
be an issue.) Walter says he wasn’t spurred on by the
film, but I know it annoyed him; correctly so.
In any case 2005 is his first vintage using the technology,
and whether coincidental or not, his entire cellar
wouldn’t ferment to completion: he doesn’t have a dry
wine! This is inconvenient for him, though meaningless
to me, though there’s an irony in that `05’s softness might
have favored drier renderings. But, we’ll never know.
Walter was working in a wine shop in Munich for an
impossibly haughty Bavarian snot, and I was browsing
in the store one day in May 1978, and the snot was
Holding Forth and said something so magnificently
dreadful that I caught Walter’s eye, and between us there
flashed a bolt of recognition.
I approached him and we talked about wine. The
rest is history.
There are things in one’s life to which one appeals
when solace is needed. When you’re in the thickets and
you look to life and ask “Hey, remind me what makes me
happy”, not the things you have to think about, but the
ones that spontaneously console you. I can’t think about
Walter and Margit Strub and not feel better — even if I
was feeling fine to begin with!
In the old days I’d get off the plane, drive the 25 minutes
to Nierstein, down a pot of tea and start tasting
Walter’s wines. Then I got older and needed more recovery
time. I tasted them the next day. Now I wait a few
days; these are serious wines and I want to bring to them
the highest quality of attention I can summon. And final-
ly, I want to taste them twice. In fact 2005 is what one
might call a courteous vintage at Strub, giving direct
fruit-forward wines that make you feel welcome. I don’t
know their analyses — he says acids aren’t especially high
— but when we were done we had a range of finely balanced
wines without having broken a sweat. Walter’s
past few vintages (especially his `03s) seemed at times
almost studiedly tart, and we wanted to show some
Walter Strub RHEINHESSEN WINES
charm again. He absolutely hates botrytis and sprays as
late as the law allows against it. This can retard ripening,
and the wines can seem clipped. And sometimes your
humongous orders (which Strubs help consolidate and
load) were so time-consuming he bottled the wines later
than he’d have liked. So we decided it was time to do the
dee-LISH thang again.
On the wall above my desk I have a photograph of
an old woman binding and pruning. She’s wearing some
sort of macadam, as it’s cold outside. Her pocket is
bulging with all the clippings she’s produced. Her hand
grasps the stalk with vigor and insight, as if it had eyes of
its own and could see inside the vine. One little stalk is
rakishly dangling from the corner of her mouth. Her fine
old eyes have seen more than we can imagine; her face is
furrowed with the winds of centuries. I keep her there
where I can see her because I need to see the basis for this
work I do. It’s all well and good for me to compliment my
friend on his “achievement,” but I’ll bet it feels less like an
“achievement” to him than a decathlon which he only finished
panting and gasping.
Walter’s is a restless and questing nature. He wants
to see how everything would turn out. He’s a pilgrim in
the cellar. “The worst thing for a cellar is routine and tunnel-vision,”
he says, though certain patterns become evident
over time. “I am always the first to start picking and
the last to finish.” He says. Walter’s wine is rarely the
ripest in Nierstein, and I think it’s because he wants to
pick clean fruit above all, and will let go of a few degrees
Oechsle if the resulting wine will have the clarity and elegance
he seeks.
He doesn’t get a ton of fruit — just 50 hectoliters per
hectare on average over the past five years. His cellar is
all stainless steel now. He began whole-cluster pressing
in 1993 and liked the results (though he has – typically –
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