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

MOSEL WINES
46
could do was sit there blank and immobile and say What
just hit me? Sometimes I think that’s when soul comes.
Not when you’re busy feeling, but later when you’re tired
and done with it. Soul never arrives in an envelope
marked “soul”, but instead it seems to tickle you when
you’re trying not to laugh.
These are good times for Mosel wine lovers, with
more fine producers than ever. We all have our share, my
colleagues and me, and I hope we all admire all the wines
“apolitically.” What I’m about to say isn’t a better-worse
statement, but it’s something I deeply believe. There are
no wines along the Mosel more honorable than those of
Selbach-Oster. They are grounded, honest, intelligent and
meaningful — like the family who produce them. Where
wine is concerned I trust Johannes as I trust very few
other people. He’s not only highly intelligent, he’s also
smart and judicious. He has found his path. His wines
have identity and purpose.
Yet Selbach’s wines reward a certain attention. In
short they are made to be drunk, not “tasted”. They never
show off. Other wines, even very good wines, often do;
like someone with a brand new BMW driving ostentatiously
through town honking at the neighbors. Doesn’t
mean the car’s not great. Just means the owner’s got
some . . . issues.
It’s tempting, you know, to strut, but Johannes is
instinctively immune to sleight-of-hand winemaking. He
knows exactly how it’s done, he sees other growers do it,
and he simply will not. One year, there were a lot of
Auslesen on the table. So much so that I asked Johannes
Selbach if there was a 3-star in reserve, as I didn’t see one.
Many people say many things to me during my
month in Germany, and I dutifully try and scribble the
smart things down. Johannes’ answer stopped me in my
tracks. “Terry, the 2-star Auslese was one block picking;
that’s how that wine came in from that vineyard on that
day,” he said. “We could concoct a 3-star Auslese of course;
blend together some small lot of botrytis-wine with a little
Eiswein and a little BA, but it would be a contrived wine,
the kind you only create 30 liters of to send to journalists
and get big scores. That’s not the business we’re in.”
Listen to this, people. This is what wine means, this
and only this. The vineyards didn’t create a 3-star
Auslese, so there isn’t one. Simple. There’s BA and TBA
and Eisweins, but no 3-star Auslese.
It’s easy to blather about terroir and facile to claim
the vineyard makes the wine. Johannes has acted on a
principle which will cost him valuable PR, but which is
the only sustainable relationship a producer can truly
have to wine. I am both roused to my core and seething
with frustration. Frustration? Witness: a big-Cal-red
first-release called . . . oh, I like the guy personally, and
it doesn’t matter what it’s called; let’s call it HUBRIS
HILL . . . so Hubris Hill goes out for $125 per bottle. The
“producer” doesn’t make the wine, doesn’t even own a
vine, but he’s sure willing to stake a claim on your Buckand-a-quarter
because he knows the world’s gone mad
and a whole bunch of suckers’ll pay it, especially if it has
oodles of jammy hedonistic fruit erupting from the glass in
sub-atomic orgasms of delirium: 90 points.
And this, we are led to believe, is wine.
Wine: (n) anything anybody can contrive to make,
detached from nature, detached from culture, connected
to nothing but our infantile need to be entertained and
our adolescent need to be fashionably correct, to be sold
at the highest price some desperate hipster can be horsewhipped
into paying.
If this is the summit of wine’s aspirations then it
wouldn’t hurt civilization if it disappeared. But I know better,
and I want you to know better, and I know that we can,
most of us, return to the knowledge of wine’s true claim on
our hearts and bodies and souls. All of which is saturating
the very filaments of air at Uferallee 23 in Zeltingen on the
Mosel, where Selbach-Oster calls der schotz.
“You may have noticed our wines are a bit drier the
last two vintages than they used to be,” said Johannes .
“We know how to make reductive fruit-bombs that get
high scores and stand out in big tastings,” he continued,
“but the problem is everyone writes about those wines
but nobody drinks them. We want to make wines for
food, that people can use in their everyday lives.”
One secret is lees. The other secret is casks, the old
mellow 1000-Liter casks the Moselaners call Fuders.
When you ferment in cask and leave the wine in cask on
its gross lees for a month or two after fermentation, your
wines have wonderful plush texture and rich midpalates
and they need less sweetness. They also have what
Johannes calls “soul.”
I drink plenty of wine with my friend Johannes and
I know his tastes are broad. He likes those reductive
fruit-brilliant wines. He simply prefers not to make them.
He wants his wines more imbued. He wants them to
make friends with you, to be companionable and useful.
You can’t be friends with someone who’s showing off all
the time. You can win trophies, but what would you
rather have, a mantel full of trophies or a life full of
friends?
Many of you have met Johannes on his travels. Yet
for me, his winery is perhaps the fundamental example of
the difficulty of removing wine from its contexts of family
and locality. From the very first, the Mosel makes an
impression on you; it’s so improbable and so beautiful.
And from the very first, the Selbach family made an
impression on me, as they do on everyone.
In my case I fell rather dazedly in love with them, or
at least with an aura I had some role in reading into them.