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

28
Ah but this isn’t P.C., you see! In a topsy-turvy
world where Trocken = Proper it follows rationally (if
horrifically) that the potential quality inherent in a site
has only to do with the goddamn residual sugar in a
wine from that site. Too bad it’s nothing less than the
imposition of an ideology disguised as a “helpful” classification
for the consumer.
It is also a dreadful violence to individual wines.
Doesn’t anyone in Germany actually taste wine any more?
Never mind what might be suitable for this wine or that!
They MUST be dry. Let’s LOBOTOMIZE these wines.
Abandon fruit, all ye who enter here. If one of you wellmeaning
but disastrousl
y
wrongheaded
people
are reading
this,
please,
forget all
y o u r
abstractions, “the market,” “consumer taste,” “the modern
drinker” and just taste wine! If you make wines that
taste balanced and taste delicious you will—imagine!—
find a market for them.
You will also avoid a bizarre polarization you yourself
created with your dogmatic rigidity. For a grower can
— and almost always does — bottle a dry wine from his
peak-site called Erstes Gewächs, and another from the
same site called Pudyanker Slugberg Riesling Spätlese,
and what’s the “market” to make of that? “But wait . . .
aren’t those from the same vineyard . . . ? Why isn’t the
Spätlese also Erstes Gewächs?” Ah, you see; because the
presence of the dreaded residual-unmentionable means that
it cannot be sold under the banner of a “great growth”.
And all this was done in order to . . . .simplify?!?!? What
it does in fact is merely to stigmatize the wine with sweetness,
and so its effect is to advance a thinly veiled agenda.
People can make any points they want, but I’d prefer
they be made openly. By the efforts of these apostles of
marketing it becomes clear they seek to brainwash the
“market” into despising Rieslings with sweetness (and
accepting the so-called “noble-sweet” dessert wines
doesn’t count, pal!) and it’s the sneaky stealthy manner in
which it’s being done I find so repugnant.
All in all I’m starting to wonder about the VDP.
They seem to opt as if by instinct toward ideological
strait-jackets. They frequently fix what wasn’t broken
while neglecting what is. Low yields, environmentally
friendly viticulture, hand-picking, strict ripeness minima,
all O.K. Good place to stop. Vineyard classification,
also O.K: I proposed one myself in a DECANTER article
back in 1985. Rather blatantly self-serving (e.g. FAR
too much Grand Cru land in marginal Rheingau villages
which are home to VDP members) but still, it
needs doing and any start is better than none.
Good place to stop. Leave well enough alone. But,
alas and inevitably, the “marketing” guys pull up in the
white truck with the jackets and the Procrustian bed
and the syringes and scalpels and electrodes. Let’s
establish prices, they insist. Let’s decree that only
Riesling can be called Grand Cru (or “Erstes Gewächs”
and other such lingual abominations), and let’s further
decree the precise parameters of residual sugar a priori.
Time to REWIND the tape to just before the silliness
started, eh guys?
Look, it’s always dangerous to force a wine to fit an
idea. Better force the idea to fit the wine, because the
wine exists in nature, it is there, real and immutable. And
if we respect its being and let its needs be heard we’ll
make something beautiful from it. Yet a certain kind of
person feels safer among abstractions. Maybe he’s a
whiz-bang conceptual thinker, and it’s O.K. to let him
play with his toys, until he wants to turn them into everybody’s
toys. It’s always healthy to maintain a distance
between marketing people and wine, especially so when
the marketing people are conceptual-intellectual
Germans. “Hmmm, let’s see; we have determined that all
wines in this discussion should fit into round holes,
because the “market” needs round-holed wines.” But
what if the wine is square shaped? “No! This doesn’t fit
the concept!” Even if the wine is more beautiful that
way? “No. If it’s square shaped then we will just pound
the living crap out of it until it fits in the round hole!”
They will howl I am being unfair. All Chablis is
understood to be dry, they will say. All “Erstes Gewächs
Gerümpel” should also be thus simplified; the “market”
demands it. Really? Is the Chablis really as predictable
as all that? Is it one of them with malo or no malo, with
oak or no oak, lees or no lees, all-stainless or all cask in
the cellar? Shall we legislate every conceivable variable
out of our wines?
Ah but you see, the only variable that matters is residual
sugar, because we are obsessed with residual sugar,
because
we have
f o r
some
p e r -
verse
reason
turned
it into
the sole
aesthetic
CRUX
of the matter. Sugar doesn’t matter, folks, except as an
agent of harmony, one among many, an especially helpful
one at table, but finally just one of many facets. Yet singled
out for special villainy in a world gone gaga.
In full view of the good being done by the VDP, I
sadly conclude they are doing even more harm. For the
member growers they do provide a marketing platform,
but at perilously high cost − beyond the hefty
dues the grower pays. The estates I like best are the
non-aligned, the intuitively sensible and flexible, the
Selbachs of this world.