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

did he have any dosage in the winery with which to
sweeten it. And? He showed me this perfectly balanced
wine under the name “anarchy,” and all I want to do is
change it to SANITY. I tell you I dream however hopelessly
for a day when growers will make the tastiest
wines they can and then figure out how to “position”
them or “market” them—as if beauty didn’t sell itself!
Later on I had this note from Weingart, which is so
apropos I reproduce it verbatim: “While “Anarchie”
maybe implicates a total abandoning of normal categories
that is actually not what I intended. The
“Anarchie” is a natural — non-chaptalized — wine and we
would like to show this on the label by using the
Prädikat. “Anarchie” refers to the fact that it crossed my
plans when it stopped fermenting naturally but in doing
so revealed a perfect harmony that I would not have
found intentionally. It does not fit in the category halbtrocken
but should we care if the result is ideal balance?
“Anarchie” just likes to say that every wine is an individual,
and that this wine taught me to respect that by naturally
finding a balance of residual sugar. We don´t want
to negate the necessity of regulations and categories but
find that life itself and enjoying wine is an experience
beyond categories.”
Oh, AMEN!
It’s also time to bury the whole putrid misconception
of German wines as sweet wines. Sweet wines, as I see
them, are bona fide dessert wines. Their dominant
impression is sweetness. In good German wine, sweetness
is barely visible in itself; it is, rather, a catalyst to the
expression of other flavors. Cooks will know what I
mean. You use a little nutmeg when you sauté mushrooms,
not so they’ll taste like nutmeg, but so they’ll taste
more mushroomy. Just so with sweetness in German
wine. The right amount of residual sugar makes every
other flavor in the wine come to life. Stuart Pigott says
it best: “We don’t call wines which have an oak component
‘oak wines,’ so why should we call wines with a
sweet component ‘sweet wines’?”
The truly dry wines you’re being offered here are
wines which did without sweetness and still were perfectly
balanced. They’re not austere or skeletal, because I
don’t like them that way. The wines with sweetness have
as little as possible and as much as necessary. I detest
sugary wines!
There seems to be little ground for hope. We in foreign
markets are keeping great German wine alive. And
once again I plead; listen to the wine. Look for balance.
WHEN YOU DON’T TASTE SWEETNESS, BUT DON’T
NOTICE ITS ABSENCE, THE WINE IS BALANCED.
By rough count I’m offering around 45 wines either
Trocken, Halbtrocken, “feinherb” or Grosses (or Erstes)
Gewächs), each one of which I believe in and hope you
will buy. Please show me this demand you tell wine writers
about!
More Principles
In the context of my holistic approach to wine, is there
any consistent stylistic signature that unites all my selections?
Yup! And it goes all the way to the first principle.
The first thing I want is CLARITY OF FLAVOR, and the
next thing I want is VIVIDNESS OF FLAVOR. That’s the
beginning of the daisy chain of niceties we all love to discuss.
You can’t answer any of the other questions if the
wine is fuzzy, blurry, unfocused, wishy-washy. None of
my wines is anything but clear, and I’d rather hear that
you hated a wine than that it didn’t do anything for you
either way.
After clarity come the lovelier questions. What is the
actual quality of the flavor? To what extent is it beautiful?
(Subjective, yes, but not impossible, and not meaningless.
After all, I like truffles and I like tortilla chips, but I’m not
confused about which flavor is more beautiful.) Next, is
there a harmonious interplay among all the flavor components?
Are all the parts in balance? Then, is the intensity
of flavor appropriate? Not how intense is it, since sheer
firepower doesn’t impress me; I’d rather have a delicate
but fine and intricate flavor than an intensely boring flavor.
Then, is the flavor mono-faceted or does it seem to
evolve into sentences and paragraphs? Is the finish long,
and does it also evolve, or does it merely echo the highest
note of fruit? Then, is the structure, the architecture, the
carpentry—call it what you will—balanced, firm, organized,
is there nuance, seasoning? This takes a paragraph to
delineate, but less than an instant to discern.
Most important, at least for my romantic side: is the
wine distinctive, does it have character? The thing that
Matt Kramer calls “somewhereness,” the signature of the
place the grapes were grown. Riesling grown in the
Rhineland is a mirror reflecting the soil it grew in, and different
soils give consistently different flavors to its wines.
Or, as Johannes Selbach told me once, “when I
returned to Germany after being in the States for two years
I was totally convinced that all the talk of soil producing flavor
was just old wives’ tales. But when I started making
wines from our grapes I was astonished to find exactly the
opposite.” He believes it, not from any “romantic” cast of
mind, but because it was plainly and concretely proven to
be so. Me too.
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