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

152
pfalz wines
In the pretty walled town of Freinsheim my favorite German chef Dieter Luther has a restaurant
and a few charming rooms. I’ve been staying and dining there for many years now. Luther’s
a very droll guy; when you tell him your meal was fabulous he practically laughs at you, like Oh
come on now, gimme a break. He’s a wine-guy too and he often asks me how my days go and how
the wines are.
His list is naturally heavy into Pfalz wines, and he’s both a creature of his times and a businessman
serving a clientele, so all the wines are, , Trocken. This year he said something
that stunned me. He was “unhappy”, he said, with modern Pfalz wines. Really? Yes, because
they had become too sweet. “Too sweet?” I asked, astonished. Yes, too sweet he said; he didn’t
like all these supposedly dry wines with six-seven-eight grams of residual sugar. Say WHAT?!?!
If there’s the slightest sensible thing about the whole Trocken fetish it’s that most of the Rieslings
tickle the legal limit of 9 grams of (believe me, untasteable) residual sugar.
I left that conversation more depressed than even a
Luther meal could relieve. The Pfalz, once my favorite
region, once a hyper-oxygenated anything-goes playground
of wine’s manifold possibilities, has become suffocated
by a pathological aversion to as much as a grain
of sugar. I get the sense if these pathetic dupes could
somehow get into negative numbers (“My wine is so dry
it has MINUS-5 grams of sugar!”) they still wouldn’t be
satisfied. Perhaps they should simply evaporate their
wines and suck on the ash.
Pfalz vineyard view
Far from the wonderfully human playfulness of
twenty years ago, the Pfalz these days feels positively
robotic. It is sad sad sad. All this potential, laid to waste;
an Eden of the Unexamined Palate.
I used to think that notions like “kilocalories of sunlight”
were specious, but now I’m starting to wonder. I
suspect there is indeed a difference between the sun-
warmth in Alsace and that of the Pfalz, an hour or two
North. Because most Alsace Riesling basically works,
even at its most dry. One might have small aesthetic cavils
with this wine or that, but the formula is sound. It is
just the opposite in the Pfalz. There are successful, even
superb dry Rieslings there, but the essential basis is seriously
flawed. That is, unless you like (or think you like)
shrill, meager, sharp and bitter wines.
The Pfalz is besieged with local tourism from the big
cities Mannheim, Ludwigshafen, Frankenthal and
Heidelberg. Summer weekends are wall-to-wall swirl &
hurl. For some reason (perhaps chemical emissions from
the heavy industry near Frankenthal?) these fine
denizens of taste have embraced masochism as their aesthetic
template. The poor growers, who have to sell their
wines, after all, have not only to comply, but also to
appear enthusiastic, and to embrace a guiding philosophy
of dryness. It goes emphatically against common sense,
but livings must be made.
I don’t know why the wines don’t work. I drink
plenty of honestly dry Riesling from Austria and Alsace.
Indeed, I like dry Riesling. I’m not sure why a wine with
13% alcohol would taste thin and fruitless; I only know
that most of them do. I have tried and tried to like them.
It’s tiresome and frustrating to kvetch.
Another lamentable tendency in my beloved and
endangered Pfalz is to plant more and more Pinot Blanc
and Pinot Gris (and Chardonnay, for which they will
writhe eternally), the better to produce (mostly) neutral
and softer dry wines. A lot of old dubious vines have
been hacked up—Optima, Siegerrebe, Ortega, Morio-
Muscat - and one is duly grateful; that land was probably
unsuitable for Riesling.