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

42
Treking up the Erdener Treppchen
name, he places himself on the scene, and customers
ensue. This means a guy like me just isn’t going to make
the kinds of “discoveries” which were so easy fifteen years
ago. If a producer is good, he’s not waiting around hoping
to be discovered; he’s aggressively marketing himself.
The second major change, the more important one, is
economical. Until around the late ‘60s, there was equilibrium
between costs of production and prices paid. Few vintners
were cash-rich but most did well enough. Their expectations
were modest. They defined “affluence” differently
than we do.
Then in the ‘70s costs began to rise, driven by labor,
driven by the disinclination of the young to break their
balls on the steep-slopes. For a while the growers lived
on whatever fat they’d been able to accumulate. By the
late ‘80s - early ‘90s, they were scraping bone. The young
man or woman emotionally committed to assuming the
reins was only going to do so if he could make a decent
living. These young people were far more cosmopolitan
than their parents; they traveled widely, drank other
wines, knew other markets, and saw the prices vintners
were getting in other parts of the world.
All of us who love German wine share a certain
guilty secret; we know they are grossly underpriced.
They are the last absurd bargains of the wine world. But
we cannot expect young people to carry on this beautiful
culture, this noble craft, for nothing but the altruistic
glamour of it all. Glamour don’t pay the bills. Prices are
going to rise. It is the cost we all must pay to ensure the
survival of the people and the wines we love so much.
For everyone along the Mosel plays the same
lament; labor. It’s hard to get, and because it’s hard to get
it commands a high price. The slopes are forbiddingly
steep—it’s physically dangerous to work such land—and
there’s very little feasible machine work. Hand-labor on
steep slopes in this satellite-TV world is not consistent
with Kabinett wine costing $10.
As a merchant I am caught in the middle. I want
Mosel wine to survive because I love it almost helplessly.
My conscience revolts at dunning a producer for pfennigs
(or cents in the brave new Euro-world) while I look out
his window at the perpendicular mountains I know he
has to work in. But neither do I wish to deliver stickershock
to you, cherished customer. So we’re going to let
prices creep steadily upward until equilibrium is
restored.
The Mosel can be cruel. Floods are routine, including
an especially nerve-wracking flood during the harvest
of 1997. (“In the next life,” Sigrid Selbach told me, “I
don’t think I’d buy a house along the river.”) On
Christmas day 1993 the highest water in two hundred
years poured through villages and into cellars. As it had
ruptured several underground fuel-storage tanks, the
floodwaters were also slick and smelly. You can’t get
insurance for flooding and the economic consequences
of the flood of 1993 were devastating. People will show
you pictures and show you the water marks in their
homes. And the following year saw equally remorseless
flooding: how much can these people endure? The newworld
winemaker “lifestyle” is the heaven these Mosel
vintners hope they’ll go to someday.
The Mosel is also a self-contained culture. Despite
the length of the river (and its tributaries) there is a certain
cohesion there, more so than in other German wine
regions. This isn’t always good, mind you; there’s more
than a little Hatfield vs. McCoy chicanery along with the
petty jealousies afflicting small village life throughout
most of the world. One day Andreas Adam planted a
But the Mosel can be cruel. Floods are
routine, including an especially nervewracking
flood during the harvest of 1997.
quarter-hectare. When he went out the following day to
continue, everything he planted the day before had been
vandalized. The young man is sure of himself (as he has
every right to be), and this infuriated a neighbor. These
cultures are not exclusively lyrical! Yet I have rarely seen
such a spirit of true neighborliness as I have on the
Mosel, at times, among families where there’s mutual
respect and trust.
At Hans Selbach’s funeral I spent a few moments
gazing at the faces of the hundreds of mourners, an
entire panoply of Moselaners, and it was like looking
backward in time. Nearly every face could have been
carved on a Roman coin, all these fine faces etched in
sadness. All those lives for all those years, beautiful and
solemn and brief. Some Summer I’ll take my son Max
with me to visit the Mosel. He’s not a wine-guy (not yet
anyway . . .) and we’re not going to do a lot of tasting, but
there are people I want him to see. Schaefer, Merkelbach,
Schmitt, Selbachs of course. I want him to see their faces,
and then to walk in their vineyards. At some point I
know he’ll look down at the steepness in shock—we all
do, even when we’ve been there before—and perhaps
he’ll ask me Why do people make wine here?
What would you have me tell him?