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

A few years ago the Germans had their French-paradox
moment and everyone was planting Dornfelder.
For awhile the world was crazy; prices were higher for
Dornfelder vines than for Riesling; Dornfelder was more
expensive than Riesling in bulk, and now . . . now? Now
the bloom is off the rose, Dornfelder was not the secondcoming,
there’s dreadful overproduction, you can buy
the wines for under 2 Euro in every supermarket, and all
those poor dupes of fashion are bleeding by the side of
the road saying “What hit me?” And I hardly feel the tiniest
bit of schadenfreude!
But Dornfelder notwithstanding, the Pfalz takes
itself seriously as a red-wine region—rather more seriously
than is warranted by the wines, good though many
of them are. I was heartened when Müller-Catoir told me
they’d hacked out their Pinot Noir and would make only
white wines from now on. The Pinot Noir was good, but
it is even better when someone claims an identity instead
of trying to be all things to all people. Let’s not forget to
resist this ominous urge to homogenize. If we allow it to
grow malignantly the next thing you know we’ll insist on
ripe raspberries all year round.
Oh shit; we already do.
The reducto ad absurdum of all this is the truly
ghastly set of rules applying to the “Erstes Gewächs”
(Grand Cru) program. Everything is perfectly enlightened
— low yields, old vines, hand-harvesting, minimum
necessary ripeness — until the ideologues began
vomiting their ghastly ideas and insisted the wines must
either be DRY (up to 12 grams per liter of residual sugar)
or “NOBLY” SWEET (above 50 grams per liter). It is distressing
to be asked to accept these (often) brutally hot
and bitter wines as arguments for Grand Cru status. It is
distressing to see an entire community of wines straitjacketed
to squeeze into a marketing person’s convenience.
If anyone knows a stealthy little munchkin who
needs a job I’d like to hire him to break into all these
deluded wineries and drop Süssreserve into the tanks.
The Pfälzers are terribly proud of their dry Rieslings
and will draw your attention to any competitive blind
tasting when the wines held their own (or even defeated)
competition from Austria or Alsace. There’s also internal
competition to see who can outdo his colleagues in the
Grosses Gewächs category, and this has brought about a
general improvement in quality. Clearly they had
nowhere to go but up, and any improvement is both welcome
and conspicuous. Certain of the VDP-poobahs in
the Nahe have been heard wondering whether the insistence
on only-dry Grosses Gewächs might have been illadvised;
I heard no such thoughts uttered in the Pfalz. I
hardly heard thoughts at all.
Let’s suppose for argument’s sake they start really
getting it right; they learn whatever magic trick is necessary
to create consistently and sustainably viable dry
Rieslings. Then what? Then there’s one additional region
from which fine dry Rieslings come. What has been sacrificed,
however, is just the thing which makes German
Rieslings unique. Other places make good dry Riesling,
lots of them. But NO other place anywhere on earth
makes these miraculously beautiful Rieslings with sweetness.
Thus even if — and it’s a big if — Pfalz dry Riesling
was abruptly consistently excellent, I don’t think I’d take
the trade-off. Something one-of-a-kind in return for an
also-ran? No thanks!
THIS IS NOT A SCREED AGAINST DRY WINES. I
LIKE DRY WINES! This is a screed against sheep-think
and dogmatic uniformity. I want there to be excellent dry
Riesling from the Pfalz, and I want it alongside Rieslings
with sweetness (and I don’t mean “noble-sweet”
Ausleses) and I want growers and their customers to be
flexible and ecumenical and honest in their tastes.
What is he talking about, you wonder: after all,
there’s plenty of “my” kind of Riesling in my Pfalz
offering. Yes, because my existence as a client creates
these wines, which would otherwise be bottled Trocken
and sold in Germany. And because I’ve whittled it
down to producers willing to continue making such
The wines have a great affinity for
food—certainly the most versatile of all
German wines—and yet they have an
indefinable elegance.
wines. I look very much forward to visiting them; I love
them personally and their wines thrill me to the toenails.
But I feel stifled in their environment, and it’s a
relief to get away again.
Still, what little “sweet” wine one does fine is
uniquely precious. Pfalz wine shows a unique marriage
of generosity and elegance; no other wine is at once so
expansive and so classy. The idea of “class” usually suggests
a certain reserve: NOT HERE! The typical Pfalz
wine has big, ripe fruit, lots of literal spice (cinnamon,
ginger, nutmeg), a kind of lush savor, a keen tang of
pineapple, a splendid tautness of acidity under that
frothing stock pot of fruit. The wines have a great affinity
for food — certainly the most versatile of all German
wines — and yet they have an indefinable elegance.
From this point the ways diverge. In what other
region could you superimpose the laser-etching of a
Darting with the big burly power of a Koehler-
Ruprecht, with the fiery-yet-satiny persistence of an
Eugen-Müller with the tingly mineral gleam of a
Messmer with the leesy chewiness and compactness of
a Minges with the little-bit-of-all-of-those-high-flyingyou’ll-break-your-crazy-neck-daredevil-glee
of a
Catoir? NFW, that’s where!
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