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

An Essay On Tasting Blind
Kermit Lynch said it best: “Blind tastings are to
wine what strip poker is to love.”
Look, the palate is an instrument played by the
taster. As you learn an instrument you practice exercises
and repetitions until you are facile. Then it comes naturally
and you don’t have to think about “Ah, a C-sharp
is 1st string 9th fret.” You just grab the note. Blind tasting
is the equivalent of playing scales. It’s valuable and
necessary at a certain stage, but don’t confuse it with
making music. Sadly, far too many do.
Have you heard Keith Jarrett’s solo piano CD, The
Melody, The Night and You? He’d been suffering from
chronic fatigue syndrome for several years, curtailing
his performing career and making it all but impossible
for him to even play the piano on some days. The CD is
a recital of standards and folk songs played very
straight, with little embellishment or technical bravura.
The approach is said to have been compelled by Jarrett’s
draining ennervation, but the result is nearly sublime, a
tender, deliberate and caressing reading of these songs,
essential and pure.
Returning from the phone while the CD was
playing I realized if I’d been listening casually I
might have thought it was merely cocktail-lounge
piano. Knowing the artist, his history, and the conditions
under which the recording was made gave it
resonance and meaning. Context gives meaning. And
meaning gives life.
Why, then, do we play at reducing wine to a
thing without context? What’s the good of tasting
blind? Where’s the silver lining of experiencing wine
in a vacuum? Yes, it can train us to focus our palates.
It can hone our powers of concentration. Then we
can discard it! It has served its purpose. If we keep
tasting blind we run a grave risk. It is homicidal to a
wine’s context, and wine without context is bereft of
meaning, and the experience of meaning is too rare
to squander.
Blind tasting will only guarantee your “objectivity”
if that objectivity is so fragile it needs such a crude
crutch. If you’re too immature (or inexperienced) to
be objective when necessary, tasting blind won’t help
you. It will, however, confuse you as to the purpose of
drinking wine.
I’m not even talking about recreational drinking,
fun (remember fun?); the only genuinely professional
approach to wine is to know as much about it as possible!
Who made it, under what condition did it grow,
what’s the maker’s track record, where is (s)he in the
“pecking order?” Then and only then can a genuinely
thoughtful evaluation take place, of a wine in the fullness
of its being. Blind tasting? Done it, done with it.
The 2005 Vintage
This, of course, as you know already, is the vintage
of the century, everywhere. I mean, the kids can wait
another year for college, right? Daddy needs wine.
In Germany it started unassumingly enough. Most
reports described a normal summer, perhaps a bit cool,
certainly drier than they’d have wished (as the vineyards
are still not fully recovered from the drought of 2003),
though vegetation was, once again, “ahead of schedule”.
Expectations, to hear it told, were moderate. Johannes
Selbach says, “2005 already looked like it was going to
be a good if not very good vintage in late August but
then, week by week under blue, sunny skies, made
astounding but quiet progress to the point the wild boar
knew before us how tasty the grapes already were.”
But we’re ahead of ourselves, and if there’s a lesson
to learn about 2005 it is that this is a heterogenous vintage,
a puzzle of which no two pieces are identically
shaped.
It is shaped almost entirely by micro-climactic factors.
Generally the further south you go, the more problematic
the harvest, as several heavy rainstorms led to a
rampant invasion of oogies, which is the technical term
for “things we don’t want to see in the vineyards and on
the grapes.” Canopy trimming seemed to be decisive in
the southerly regions, and I heard several stories about
creative bunch-thinning, including one grower who cut
away the centers of each bunch so that air would flow to
the tops and bottoms. Where rot was in play, the harvest
was spectacularly rapid, completing in as little as two
weeks, and ending by mid-October. One needs to detail
this vintage region by region, and even village by village
in certain cases. But one thing is certain: the further
north one went, the better the results. And other things
being equal, 2005 favored steep slopes. Again in
Johannes Selbach’s words: “We only realized to the
fullest extent that we were dealing with a great vintage
when we had started harvesting.
“The summer was not spectacular, just “normal”,
but the weather from around August 20th throughout
early November was textbook weather for Riesling:
Long, sunny days with warm but not hot temperatures
and nights that cooled off a bit. The grapes were simmered
to ripeness, not cooked — ideal for a long hang-
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