Terry Theise Estate Selections
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terry theise estate selections Imported by: Michael Skurnik Wines, Inc. 575 Underhill Boulevard, Suite 216 Syosset, NY 11791 516 677 9300 Fax 516 677 9301 www.skurnikwines.com e-mail [email protected] The Theise Manifesto Beauty is more important than impact. H a r m o ny is more important than intensity. The whole of any wine must always be more than the sum of its parts. D i s t i n c t i n c t iveness is more important than conventional p r e t t i n e s s . Soul is more important than any t h i n g , and soul is expressed as a trinity of fa m i ly, soil and artisanality. v contents What Is Left To Say . .ii Dedication . .iii Theise Manifesto . .v Let Us Write Your Order For You . .viii Introduction . .1 Portfolio Principles . .7 A New Way to Measure Sweetness . .9 Dry German Wines . .10 Wine Approach . .12 2001 Vintage . .14 Earlier Vintages Revisited . .15 How German Wines Age . .18 Label Basics . .20 Glossary . .21 SOMMELIER ALERT! . .23 NAHE . .26 Dönnhoff . .28 Weingut Hexamer (NEW) . .32 Helmut Mathern . .34 Dr. Hubert Gänz . .37 Kruger-Rumpf . .38 Dr. Crusius . .40 Jakob Schneider . .42 RHEINHESSEN . .44 Take Me To Your Liter . .45 J.u.H.A. Strub . .46 Brüder Dr. Becker . .49 Günter Wittmann . .51 Merz . .54 P.A. Ohler’sches . .56 Christian-Wilhelm Bernhard . .58 Gernot Gysler . .60 MITTELRHEIN . .62 Tasting Versus Drinking . .63 Toni Jost . .64 v i Florian Weingart . .66 Why Does Place-Specificity Matter . .68 PFALZ . .70 Müller-Catoir . .72 Koehler-Ruprecht . .78 H & R Lingenfelder . .81 Kurt Darting . .84 Neckerauer . .87 Weingut Kassner-Simon (NEW) . .89 Herbert Messmer . .91 Josef Biffar . .94 Eugen Müller . .96 Theo Minges . .100 POINTS: what’s the point? . .102 RHEINGAU . .103 Josef Leitz . .105 Spreitzer . .108 Claus Odernheimer / Abteihof St. Nicholas . .110 Jakob Riedel . .112 MOSEL-SAAR-RUWER . .114 Mosel Regionals . .116 Selbach-Oster . .118 Selbach . .124 Freiherr von Schleinitz . .125 Erich Jakoby-Mathy . .127 A Primer on Terroir . .128 Meulenhof/ Erben Justen Ehlen . .130 Alfred Merkelbach . .133 Joh. Jos. Christoffel . .136 Heribert Kerpen . .140 Willi Schaefer . .142 Willi Haag . .145 Reuscher-Haart . .147 Hoffmann-Simon . .149 Carl Loewen . .151 Carl Schmitt-Wagner . .153 Karlsmühle . .155 Van Volxem (NEW) . .158 v i i y visit to Germany last month was unexciting. expect to be moved you’re too self-conscious and you sort Oh sure, I tasted the best wines of the last 25 years, and of can’t be moved. That was me. My guests had walked there’s the fact that my wife was charged by a wild boar, if through that little tear in the curtain out into the other that’s what you mean by excitement. Otherwise, ho hum. world. I was happy for them. The boar was doing whatever boars do towards Someone asked Herr Schmitt, “Did you make this evening, in the wild terraces above Müller-Catoir. Karen wine?” “Oh my goodness no, I was just a child,” he Odessa had wandered out there to sniff the wild plum and answered. Then he grew pensive and said “But I do almond blossoms. A narrow little trail runs vertically up remember being a boy of six, picking the grapes alongside the hill between the terraces. K.O. heard a rustling and my grandma,” and then I lost it. I was looking at his hands turned to see the boar, which seemed to be unaware of her. just then, as it happened, the hands of a vigorous old gen- So, appallingly, she clapped, to get the beast’s attention. tleman still ruddy from a life in the open air, and I sud- Yup, she got it! The now-terrified animal saw that its only denly saw the child’s little hands inside them. And saw the means of escape lay on the very path on which my wife child trotting along at his grandma’s side, happy to be was standing, so it did what wild included in the general activity, proud to be useful, there boars do, and ran like hell the among the vines. And now it was sixty-four years later. only way it could. Yi k e s ! The wine in our glasses was enthralling enough to us, but Karen O. turned and ran too, to our host it was the pure blood of memory, bound to the and grabbed whatever scrag- filaments of his earliest joys, with affection and usefulness. gly branches were at hand in This is a man of Wine, I realized. This is what it means to order to lift herself, and managed be a man of wine. to just get her legs off the ground when This `37 called to us from across a passageway to a the boar shot between them. world we barely know. But to Bruno Schmitt it called This having elapsed, she ran back down toward the across each of those sixty-four years from small sweet buildings – “I didn’t look back, are you kidding?” she said memories. I was so lost in my vision of the boy that I reg- – to where we all stood in the courtyard calmly yakking istered the 70-year-old face of the man to my left with a away, unaware of the Mutual Of Omaha Wild Kingdom small shock. He had passed his life in wine, I thought. He drama which had taken place mere meters away. didn’t choose it because he thought it was gracious or sexy Needless to say no one believed her. Oh sure, she was or romantic. He chose it (if it was indeed what we sould scratched and bruised, not to mention terrified, but hey, it call a “choice”) because it needed to be done and it pleased could have been a hedgehog. “Hedgehogs are capable of him to do it. considerable ferocity if they feel their young are threat- Wines which come from such people glow with the ened,” says Marlin Perkins. “Jim here (Marlin’s long-suf- value of human care and enterprise. These vintners don’t fering factotum) will now attempt to grab one of the little seek to reinvent Wine. It is enough that the beauty of wine critters just to enrage the female hedgehog! His family will renews, always, that every year threads its way into a certainly be glad to know he’s fully covered by Mutual Of great story. It nourishes us to take such wines into our Omaha for what promises to be a sensational mauling…” bodies, because by doing so we are connected to the delib- So, as you see, another tranquil year. erate rythyms of the world, and to our human place in it. Not like two years ago, when I wept in front of eleven These ideas have started to become my sc h t i c k ; of my customers and tried not to let them see it. We were they’ve crystalized out of my experience over the years into tasting at Schmitt-Wagner, and Bruno Schmitt had raided something that looks like a contribution I can make. Thus his compresensive cellar of old vintages. He does it every I write and talk about them. If you actually rea d this cata- time I visit, and I can never get over the honor he shows log (you have my sympathies) you might imagine I think me. Though I suspect he gets a big ol’ kick out of it him- about these things a lot, but the truth is I hardly think of self; the wines come out like baseballs at a batting cage and he’s always announcing the vintage before you have a chance to guess it, he’s so eager and revved up. This time he brought out a treas- ure remarkable even by his standards, an Auslese from the great 1937 vin- tage. I had tasted the wine once before (this is a generous man) and I waited for what I knew would come. As the wine was poured the group inhaled audibly at the color, and I saw many faces grow meditative as they sniffed those first mysterious fragrances. But as always seems to happen, when you 1 them at all. I do if I have to, and I have to now. In my daily buying these wines, and to suggest there are meanings life I think mostly about baseball, sex and guitar solos. So, beyond the assembling of X-number of wines that tasted when I all-of-a-sudden am blindsided by an incandescent good. example of everything I think is important about wine, it Oops, meanings. Dirty word. Can’t go there, because wipes me out. And thus, I sat weeping in front of eleven of what if someone feels inadequate because they don’t feel my customers and tried not to let them see. these “meanings” as I do. Dear reader, I have no hidden Charles Simic once defined poetry as “three mis- agenda; you don’t need my permission to approach wine matched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley” (thanks to as your temperament urges. I have my own subjective lil’ Molly McQuade for the quote). The basic enigma that truth to speak, and I will because that’s how I want to “do changes the lens business,” and you can ignore it or simply observe it for by which we whatever it’s worth. receive the A few tenets of that truth are that a g r i c u l t u r a l world.