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

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around until he gets fluent in the new cellar-regime. His
residually-sweet 2004s were all made by stopping fermentation
(is this not also manipulation???? Oh don’t
even get me started). There was a Scheurebe I liked and
which needed to be sweeter, so we tried it two ways—one
using dosage and the other by blending an Auslese into
the base wine.
It was unanimous; the wine with dosage was clearly
superior.
So-called “Süssreserve” (literally sweet-reserve) is
unfermented grape juice separated during the harvest
and kept under pressure (carbon dioxide or nitrogen),
eventually re-blended into a wine in order to fine-tune
the final sweetness. Thus harmony of flavor is assured—
at least in theory. I intervene as often as I can in this
process, as I have definite ideas about harmony. Where
the story of a blend is interesting I’ll share it with you.
Actually, I have decided that I don’t like the word
“Süssreserve” any more and I won’t use it in this text.
Since nobody objects to the idea of Dosage in
Champagnes, and since Süssreserve has connotations of
unnatural manipulation to some people—and since the
two words mean the SAME THING—I think I’ll use the
nicer one.
Another interesting digression (I am full of these, or at
any rate, full of something): when you’re blending with
Süssreserve, you first produce a makeshift blend based
on an intuition of what the base wine seems to need. It’s
often wrong, so you add or subtract in the direction you
wish to move. Much of the time the wine seems sweetsour,
with sugar unknit and detached from fruit and
acidity, standing out like a sore thumb. You’d be tempted
to conclude you’d used too much sweetening. You’d be
wrong. Most of the time you don’t need less sweetness;
you need more. And as you inch upward in increments
you’ll find when you’ve got the blend perfect the sweetness
seems to VANISH! Now it’s part of a balanced,
whole picture. I’m tempted to believe that most of the
anti-Süssreserve crap you hear results from poorly blended
wines from vintners who didn’t respect their material
and were only interested in the quickest shortcut to a
saleable product.
In any case I applaud purism in most places it is found,
but the anti-dosage crusade in Germany smacks not of
science but of religion. I am quite certain that thousands
of growers used dosage willy-nilly—still do—but that
only demonstrates there’s plenty of hacks making wine. I
doubt very much they’d make better wine by stopping
fermentation. Hacks are hacks. Dosage has been seized
upon by a community of growers a little too eager to polish
their halos. It is a convenient symbol of manipulation,
but this is silly; all winemaking is manipulation, and the
authentic questions are not whether to manipulate (one
already does) but rather how to manipulate and to what
end. What we call “non-manipulation” (with rather an
excess of romanticism) is more properly called minimal
manipulation. We prefer growers whose wines are guided
by a wish to preserve natural inherent flavor rather
than ladling all kinds of cellar-sauce over it.
Wines made sweet by stopping fermentation do have
their “own” sweetness, but I’m not willing to presume this
is superior, and certainly not as a matter of faith or ideology.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. True “residual”
sugar has a higher proportion of fructose: therefore it
tastes sweeter and “heavier”. Stopping fermentation
involves either chilling, racking through filters or sulfuring.
In fact these more “natural” wines require more sulfur
than those made with dosage. Andreas Adam insists
“Süssreserve falsifies terroir!” and I’m delighted by how
much he cares about terroir, and if you have to err then it’s
damn sure preferable to err on the side of purism. But
what he says ain’t necessarily so. And there’s the crux:
young growers are also young people, and young people
like things to be categorical. Then life kicks our ass and we
get more humble.
A reasonable compromise is to stop your fermentations
but also to keep a little dosage around. After all, how
can you be sure you stopped at just the perfect point? The
wine is turbulent and yeasty. Isn’t it at least prudent to
give yourself options? Believe me, every wine is easier to
judge several months later.
This was especially apropos in both 2003 and 2005,
largely because of the Kabinett “problem”. That is, the
paucity of actual Kabinett, in favor of wines of (sometimes)
legal-Auslese ripeness labeled as Kabinett. Many
Mosel growers used what little they picked below 90
Oechsle (weak Auslese but still above the legal minimum)
for Kabinett: 90-100 was Spätlese and over 100 was
Auslese. Back in 1983 most growers didn’t pick anything
above 100 Oechsle and were happy to bottle Auslese with
90 degrees; times have changed.
But what’s to be done about the sweetness? If your
Kabinett usually has 80 Oechsle and 40g.l. sweetness, the
same 40g.l. will taste deficient with a markedly riper
must. If you calibrate the sweetness to the actual wine,
the result may be too sweet for “Kabinett”. I must have
tasted 25-30 wines with misjudged sweetness based on
this very conundrum. Dosage was either the solution, or
would have been.
I wonder whether the anti-dosage sentiment doesn’t
arise from a puritanical disapproval of sweetness, especially
sweetness “added” deliberately. No one would say
this outright, but I feel its presence. Thus stopped fermentation,
especially if it stops spontaneously, can be
excused; oh well, nature wanted it that way. And so the
argument isn’t really about dosage, terroir or purism; it is
a shadow-argument about ameliorating the despicable
sweetness.
FLURBEREINIGUNG: Literally this means the “rectification
of the fields.” It’s actually a process whereby costs
of production are diminished by rationalizing land holdings
and building roads, paths, and walkways. Formerly
the growers’ holdings were split into myriad tiny parcels
and scattered hither and yon over the hillside. Often
there was no easy access. It could take a longer time to
get to one’s vines that to actually work them.
In Flurbereinigung, the entire expanse of a vineyard is