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

In the years that followed I have tried to reduce that
infatuation to whatever unblinking truth lies beneath it.
It isn’t easy.
Sigrid Selbach told me a story one year. “We picked
our Eiswein last year on Christmas Day,” she began. “The
day before, when we realized the weather might permit us
to gather the grapes the morning of Christmas, we were
hesitant to call and ask for help with the picking. But you
know, we called twelve people, and they all agreed to help
us, and they were all cheerful to do it. We went out into
the vineyard before dawn to check the temperature, then
phoned them at 6:00 a.m. on Christmas morning, and they
all came, and all of them were in a good mood. Afterwards
they gathered here at the house for soup and Christmas
cookies. And when they left they were all singing out
“MERRY CHRISTMAS!” as they went home to their families.
Isn’t that wonderful?”
It’s more than wonderful. It literally amazes me that
people would cheerfully agree to get out of their warm
beds before dawn on Christmas morning, leaving their
families, to go out and gather enough fruit for a few cases
of wine that nobody makes any money on. Can you hear
such a story and still doubt that angels walk among us?
Stories like the Eiswein harvest signify more than
neighborliness, or even esprit de corps among fellow
vintners. It is simply taken for granted that certain traditions
are ennobled by observing them with love and
good cheer. When you have a chance to gather an
Eiswein it is beneficence from heaven; you CELEBRATE
the opportunity.
I have two Mosel producers who are neighbors in
the same site; their parcels are contiguous. One producer
hadn’t quite finished picking when their Polish workers’
work-visas expired, which meant the crew had to return
to Poland. No problem, said the neighbor; we’ll pick for
you. We’ll pick for you. It really is another world. People
may know one another for twenty years and still address
each other as Herr-This and Frau-That. But we’ll pick for
you. There is a certain baseline kindness here, I find
myself thinking, a certain understanding of neighborliness.
And it is without affect; it seems to come quite naturally.
It strikes my American ears, so used to hearing
platitudes and boilerplate about neighborliness, citizenship,
fellow-feeling, that this is the real thing. Oh believe
me, they have their problems and jealousies and all the
ratty bullshit which can possibly exist among people,
but—we’ll pick for you.
Being a vintner along the Mosel signifies membership
in a human culture much deeper than mere occupation.
Nonetheless, there are many ways to be a citizen of
this culture; one might be lazy, content with mediocrity;
one might be merely diligent, competent and dutiful. Or
one might be conscientious and nurturing. And one’s
wines flourish under such nurturing. They are vital, for
they exhale back the love that’s been breathed into them.
This may seem abstruse to the “consumer” but there are
many ways to consume, and many things to be consumed
in a glass of wine. You can see the wine merely as an
Object, and assess it “against” its “competitors” using
some arbitrary point-system you have chosen.
Or you can drink something that tells you it was
made by human beings who want to show you the beauty
and meaning they have found in their lives. You
choose.
Part of the Selbach’s aesthetic is the eschewing of
anything confected in the wines. Mosel wine is more a
matter of its internal skeletal makeup, and from that
instinct for structure come all the judgements and preferences
which constitute a house-style. Thus fruit must
also be structured, detailed, and defined, and the overall
effect of the wines should be as bracing as a leap into a
cold pond on a hot day. Hans Selbach once advised a colleague
not to select too stringently at harvest. Better to
leave a few of the underripe grapes in the bunches. They
give structure to the wine.
Tasting the wines of Papa Hans Selbach’s era, one is
always struck by how vigorous they are, how ageless.
One is also struck by their lack of affect; they never try to
seduce with their prettiness. They are upright, firm in
posture, correct, impeccable.
Johannes was raised with these wines and he had no
desire to alter them. What he did do was to build upon
them, to add a layer of sensuousness, to give just a little
more warmth, a wider Julia-Roberts kind of smile. He did
this with great tact and love, but I don’t suppose he ever
deliberately sat down and plotted it all as a STRATEGY,
nor ever said “I must do this with great tact and love.”
The results are some of the deepest of all Mosel
wines. They refuse to be merely aesthetic. They strive for
(and often attain) a sine qua non of Mosel-ness. They take
you through
the gift-wrapping
of mere
flavor and they
show you
something you
may not know
how to see.
Few wines
— few things —
take us to such
places of faith.
Selbach’s wines
take me there
frequently. You
can’t identify
that slippery little
thing soul in
wines by how
they look, smell or taste. It’s how they make you feel. It is
how deeply they peal and echo. It is how quickly they
leave themselves behind and lead you elsewhere away
from “wine.” Johannes told me that he wants “soul” in
his wines, but I doubt if we mean exactly the same thing
by it. Nor should we. The sincerity of his wish, the
assumption of a value in wines of soul is part of what
puts it there. The rest, I think we are not meant to know,
but only to sense.
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MOSEL WINES