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

the presence of spirit-of-place, then it’s there because we
glean it, because we are not separate from the things we
experience.
I want to emphasize that point. The soul records,
but does not transcribe. Because we are a part of
nature, what happens to us also happens in nature. This
is self-evident. From this point one ventures into cosmology
or does not, according to one’s preferences. I
prefer to believe spirit-of-place registers in our soul
because nature wants it to. Because everything that happens
in nature is part of a design, which we humans
discern. You may believe or disbelieve in the purposiveness
of that design. Myself, I feel if one chooses to
presume there is no purpose, then what is there left to
think about? It’s all senseless and random, la di da,
what’s on TV? Assuming it is not mere chance is at the
very least an opening for more thinking.
How do we know when WINE is expressing spirit-of-place?
We need some-thing tangible to grasp.
Here it is: When something flourishes, it tells us it is at
home. It says this is where I belong; I am happy here. I
believe we taste “flourish” when a grape variety speaks
with remarkable articulation, complexity and harmony
in its wines. We know immediately. And the very best
grapes are those persnickety about where they call
home. Riesling seems content in Germany, Alsace,
Austria. It can “exist” elsewhere but not flourish. It
likes a long, cool growing season and poor soils dense
in mineral. Then it can rear back and wail!
But the same grape will be mute on “foreign” soil.
Try planting Riesling where it’s too warm or the soil’s
too rich, and it becomes a blatant, fruit-salady wine
which most people correctly write off as dull and cloying.
Has Chenin Blanc ever made great wine outside
Anjou or Touraine? Nebbiolo doesn’t seem to flourish
outside Piemonte. I’d even argue that Chardonnay is
strictly at home in Chablis and Champagne, since these
are the only places where its inherent flavors are complex
and interesting; it does easily without the pancake-makeup
of oak or other manipulations.
When a vine is at home it settles in and starts to
transmit. We “hear” these transmissions as flavors. A
naturally articulate grape like Riesling sends a clear
message of the soil. And so we see the lovely phenomenon
of detailed and distinct flavors coming from contiguous
plots of land. Vineyard flavors are consistent,
specific, and repeated year after year, varied only by
the weather in which that year’s grapes ripened.
If you’re a vintner with parcels in these sites, you
know them as if they were your children. You don’t
have to wait for the wine to see their distinctions; you
can taste them in the must. You can taste them in the
grapes.
You wouldn’t have to sermonize to these people
about spirit-of-place. They are steeped within that spirit
as a condition of life. Their inchoate assumption that
Place contains Spirit is part of that spirit.
Let’s step back at little. The Mosel, that limpid little
river, flows through a gorge it has created, amidst
impossibly steep mountainsides. Its people are conservative
and they approach the sweaty work on the steep
slopes with humility and good cheer. They are people
of the North, accustomed to a bracing and taut way of
life. Is it an accident that their wines, too, are bracing
and taut? Show me someone who is determined to
prove otherwise, and I’ll show you someone who has
never been there.
I’ll go further. I believe the Catholic culture of the
Mosel produces wines themselves catholically mystic.
You see it in the wines when they are mature; sublime,
uncanny flavors which seem to arise from a source notof-this-earth.
I need wines which tell me in no uncertain terms:
“I hail from THIS place and this place alone, not from
any other place, only here, where I am at home.”
Because such wines take us to those places. If we are
already there, they cement the reality of our being
there. We need to know where we are. If we do not, we
are: lost.
I don’t have time to waste on processed wines that
taste like they could have come from anywhere,
because in fact they come from nowhere and have no
place to take me. We crave spirit of place because we
need to be reassured we belong in the universe. And we
want our bearings. We want to know where home is.
We can deny or ignore this longing, but we will grow
old wondering at the ceaseless scraping nail of anxiety
that never lets us feel whole. Or we can claim this world
of places.
And when we do, we claim the love that lives in
hills and vines, in trees and birds and smells, in buildings
and ovens and human eyes, of everything in our
world that makes itself at home and calls on us to do
the same. The value of wine, beyond the sensual joy it
gives us, lies in the things it tells us, not only its own
hills and rivers, but the road home.
151