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

8
Making the Case For German Wines
“Given our enduring attachment to sweet
foods, it seems perverse that sugar in wine
should so often be judged according to fashion,
not flavor. After all, there is no question that
sugar and wine can be highly compatible; wine
is not like meat or mushrooms in this respect.
Moreover, we remain wedded to other forms of
sweet drink, even in circumstances where
dessert wine would never be considered: we
think nothing of serving orange juice with a
cooked breakfast or Coke with a burger, yet at
more than 100g of sugar per liter (TT: in fact a
whopping 116 g.l. in Coke), both these ubiquitous
beverages are as sweet as Sauternes and
three times sweeter than the Riesling Kabinett
most likely to raise the sardonic eyebrow of the
fashion fascist.”
- Alex Hunt, from “The Foundations of Structure
and Texture,” World of Fine Wine, Issue #9
One night returning home to my hotel, I turned off
the car and got out, and heard something I hadn’t heard
in many years. Three nightingales were singing their
dark and eerily beautiful song. Suddenly the world went
silent, and it was the beginning of time. I walked in the
hotel’s garden and listened to the three tiny birds until it
was too cold to stay out longer. Inside, I opened my windows
— they were still singing there in the middle of the
night — and snuggled under the comforter, and let them
sing me to sleep.
And now I’m writing about making the case for
German wines. As if they need me to do so; nature makes
the case for German wines constantly, with every lark,
thrush or nightingale, every snap and crunch of apple,
every swooningly fragrant linden tree in full blossom,
everything that makes us pause when we are visited by
the electric hum of the world. German wine is a small
bird that sings in the darkness, a seemingly minute
thing that can tingle your pores, and haunt you your
entire life.
We who love German Riesling love it with abiding
delight and passion, but we who sell it have confronted a
variety of challenges over the years. Happily these are
starting to melt away. The mainstream is still out of
reach, luckily, but nearly all of you tell me it’s possible to
sell German wine again.
Fashion warps and woofs just like hemlines rising
and falling, but I’d like to establish some durable and
cogent argument for these uniquely lovely wines. Because
I want them to survive. Even now, German wine isn’t what
most people think it is. It isn’t even what many Germans
seem to think it is. Of course I am uniquely gifted with
knowing precisely what it is, thanks very much. And I
have only the teensiest little delusions of grandeur . . . .
Riesling isn’t what most people think it is. Riesling is in
essence not fruity but rather mineral. Fruit, when present, is
woven and stitched into a mineral skeleto-nervous system.
It is not the other way around, as many people presume.
Guys like me who like mineral (others call us “rockheads”,
a term I’m quite willing to embrace!) often
assume you know exactly what we mean. But maybe you
don’t. I’ll try to clarify.
The first thing to know is that some version of this
metaphorical idea comes to most wine drinkers spontaneously
at some point or other. I remember back in 1988
when I first tasted with Bob Parker and Bob said about
one wine This tastes like crushed rocks, and in those days
he often used the term “wet stones” to depict what we
call minerality. It is a flavor of considerable expression —
it is quite distinctly there in the wine — but it isn’t fruit.
Stones at Weingart in the Mittelrhein.
Nor is it acidity, nor does it relate to acidity. There’s a prevailing
critique that we rockheads use “mineral” to
excuse underripe wines, but this is manifestly false.
There are many wines of gushingly lavish flavor but
whose flavor isn’t delivered on waves of fruitiness, but
rather on mineral.
There are wines you could swear had rocks passed
through them, or which sat on a bed of rocks at the bottom
of the tank or cask. Other “mineral” wines show a
more inferential, pebbly profile, while still others seem as