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

16
Core-List Wines
The core-list, with which we have been very successful,
was created to ensure greater continuity and help you
build brands. It began as an empirical record of having
consistently selected a certain wine over many years. The
wine needed to be in “good” supply (by small-batch standards).
Yet for all that it’s been fabulously received, it’s
created many “candid exchanges of views” (in the parlance
of diplomacy) among my staff and me. I want you to
know this: no wine will be offered merely because it’s on the
core-list. Every wine will continue to earn its way into this
offering. In the (extremely unlikely!) event a core-list wine
is yucky in the new vintage, off it goes. If we’ve done our
jobs properly, that will almost never happen.
Dry German Wines
Last year I wrote this sentence: “There are people
who like bitter flavors, but I don’t believe disproportionate
millions of them happen to live in Germany.”
This year I am starting to wonder.
The Germans are notoriously averse to their own
(perfectly good) tap-water. I don’t recall when I’ve ever
seen a German person go to the sink and draw himself a
glass of water. What they drink instead is a concoction
called Sprudel, which is a highly carbonated and (to most
non-German palates) aggressively salty beverage. A
grower in whose home we stayed gave us a bottle of
Sprudel for our room, and my wife poured a glass for the
bedside. The next morning I reached idly for it, took a
sip, and the light-bulb went on above my head. I guess I
have magic powers.
The water was significantly bitter, now that it had
gone flat and warmed to room-temp. Almost every
German drinks such waters from his earliest childhood.
And so I find myself wondering whether this might
explain their singular attachment to bitterness. Could it
be such a deep part of their essential aesthetic imprinting
they do not in fact see it discretely?
Because the basic rap against dry German Rieslings
is too many of them are shrill and bitter. I detest such
wines and don’t select them. Yet I do select good dry
German wines whenever I encounter them — rare as that
may be. Thus I was interested to see the last Gault-Millau
(probably the leading German-language wine guide) and
its list of the best dry Rieslings of the 2003 vintage. Tied
for 2nd was a Leitz wine I selected. Tied for third was a
Spreitzer wine I selected. I know the Trocken wines I’m
selecting are literally extraordinary. The prevailing
human palate will usually reject that which is inherently
unpleasant. Yet with exquisite perversity, The Germans
wish to establish their market on inherently unpleasant
wines.
Gault-Millau likes to do what they call a Ten Years
After tasting. (No, this doesn’t involve Alvin Lee in any
way I’m aware of.) Armin Diel told me when they tasted
the top-rated Trocken wines of the 1994 vintage “It was
striking to see how thin and sour many of them were
Are today’s german wines being “raped into dryness”?
compared to the wines we’re making now.” He is quite
correct; modern German dry Rieslings have improved in
the last decade. Yet I wonder whether tasting today’s
wines in ten years will bring about yet another moment
of perspective and clarity.
There’s a certain amount of chatter about increasing
U.S. market demand for Trocken Rieslings. Though I
offered more of them last year than ever before and will
offer even more of them here, I don’t see it. Last year I
offered an exquisitely balanced and fascinating “feinherb”
Spätlese from Kerpen, a nearly perfect dry (or dry
enough) Riesling, and ya wanna know how much y’all
bought of it? Two cases, dude. We showed the wine in
every DI tasting, including those visited by Martin
Kerpen himself, at his own table, commanding your
exclusive attention, and I’m sure at least 1000 of you tasted
the wine. And two of you ordered it. “Demand”.
I have no doubt there are more successful Trocken
Rieslings than ever, though it’s hardly difficult to have
produced “more” from such a teensy base. I also agree
the ones that do succeed are legitimately world-class dry
Rieslings which needn’t shrink from comparison to
Austria’s and Alsace’s best. That said, these are still
smaller in number than their proponents would have
you believe. And the whole matter is rife with groupthink
and dogma, such that the Pfalz has been suffocated
by adherence to an ironclad formula. But let’s take a
step back.
Dry German Riesling is a worthwhile variation of
the theme. It would properly occupy about 15% of the
total production of German Riesling, and be prized for
its particular virtues. At 50-degrees N. latitude, with a
late-ripening high-acid grape, it’s thrilling to beat the
odds and make a good dry wine.
Would it were so.
I think that fifty years from now some wine historian
will write a book about the strange phenomenon that
gripped German wine drinkers in the last quarter of the
twentieth century. RAPED INTO DRYNESS could be the
title (and thanks to Armin Diel for the wonderful
phrase!).
“Yes, we can shake our heads in bewilderment now,
since the plague has passed and things are normal