Terry Theise Estate Selections
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terry theise estate selections Imported by: Michael Skurnik Wines 575 Underhill Boulevard, Suite 216 Syosset, New York 11791 Tel: 516•67 7 •9300 Fax 516•67 7 •9301 www.skurnikwines.com The Three Goals The first goal is to see the thing itself in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly for what it is. No symbolism, please. The second goal is to see each individual thing as unified, as one, with all the other ten thousand things. In this regard, a little wine helps a lot. The third goal is to grasp the first and second goals, to see the universal and the particular, simultaneously. Regarding this one, call me when you get it. -David Budbill i i This year I dedicate this work to Hans Günter Schwarz. Now that he’s officially retired from 42 years at Müller-Catoir, one can begin to glimpse his achievement as a whole. To do so is to step back, nearly awed. When Schwarz started as Catoir’s cellarmaster in 1962, he was an unknown young man working in obscurity. The principles by which he guided his work have since become catechism among virtually all conscientious vintners. “It is no good being Stradivari in the vineyards if you are Stalin in the cellar, ” writes Andrew Jeff o rd in his superb The New France. “The hardest thing for a c e l l a rmaster is to know the right time to do nothing,” said Hans Günter Schwarz on many occasions. I was nine years old in 1962. Some of you weren’t born yet. Everything was techno- logical back then. Snazzy new grape crossings, sizzling new chemicals, nifty new machines (happy new salesmen!)..and soulless, denuded wines. Schwarz was quite possibly the first to smash the technology icon. The results he achieved were magis- terial; the wines reached deeper than anything we’d ever expected possible. People started taking notice. They discovered a dedicated grape-grower with an almost mystic intuition toward the vine. Schwarz is a veritable Dr. Doolittle of viticulture; vines speak to him. (Do- little is an apt term for his cellar work, as it happens.) “If you’re an acitivist in the vineyard it’s only logical to be a minimalist in the cellar,” he says. “Each time you handle a wine you remove some of its vitality; it cannot be otherwise.” Bizarre and inimical as these ideas seemed in 1962, they are ubiquitous now. Even if you don’t practice these principles, you’d beter say you do. Hans Günter’s wines expressed varietal flavors at a pitch precise enough to astonish. Who knew wine could do this? As he got older his wines became deeper, more Saturnine, tenderer. I asked him if this was deliberate. It wasn’t deliberately deliberate, he answered; not a conscious decision. Yet he agreed, he had shown how clear, complex and expressive wine could be, had revealed every conceivable fleck of nuance of varietal fruit; where was there to go but deeper down? To hear the murmur of essence and fumble toward it. The wines of Schwarz’s last half-dozen vintages are a testament to the possibilities of beauty, and to a strange grave pleasure apart from joy. Schwarz himself is lusty yet also avuncular. Everyone who knows him is fond of him. And he has never withheld, never guarded his methods, but instead shared them lav- ishly and generously. No “trade secrets” from this man. One scans the modern German wine scene and wonders how it could exist without the genial aura of Hans Günter Schwarz hovering overhead. He has gleaned the beauty of the world and added to it the sum of his labor and the warmth of his soul. I am absurdly fortunate to have crossed paths with this lovely man. His spirit and his example inhabit my work and my conscience, and give me hope. i i i 6 In Memorium to Helmut Mathern v All graphic design, production, and TLC provided by the incredibe Simone White! 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 i i contents The Three Goals . .ii Dedication . .iii Theise Manifesto . .vii Let Us Write Your Order For You . .ix Introduction . .1 Portfolio Principles . .8 Grey Marketers . .8 A New Way to Measure Sweetness . .11 Dry German Wines . .12 Wine Approach . .14 2002 Vintage . .15 Earlier Vintages Revisited . .17 How German Wines Age . .21 Label Basics . .23 Glossary . .24 SOMMELIER ALERT! . .27 NAHE . .30 Dönnhoff . .32 Weingut Hexamer . .37 Helmut Mathern . .39 Subject: Why Riesling? . .41 Dr. Hubert Gänz . .42 Scheurebe: What Gives? . .43 Kruger-Rumpf . .44 Jakob Schneider . .46 RHEINHESSEN . .48 Take Me To Your Liter . .49 J.u.H.A. Strub . .50 Günter Wittmann . .54 Merz . .57 P.A. Ohler’sches . .60 Christian-Wilhelm Bernhard . .62 Gernot Gysler . .64 MITTELRHEIN . .66 Tasting Versus Drinking . .67 Toni Jost . .68 v i i i Florian Weingart . .70 Why Does Place-Specificity Matter . .72 PFALZ . .74 Müller-Catoir . .76 Koehler-Ruprecht . .78 H & R Lingenfelder . .81 Kurt Darting . .84 Neckerauer . .87 Weingut Kassner-Simon . .89 Herbert Messmer . .91 Josef Biffar . .95 Eugen Müller . .97 Dr.Deinhard (NEW) . .99 Theo Minges . .102 POINTS: what’s the point? . .104 RHEINGAU . .105 Josef Leitz . .107 Spreitzer . .111 Jakob Riedel . .113 MOSEL-SAAR-RUWER . .116 Mosel Regionals . .118 Selbach-Oster . .120 Selbach . .126 Freiherr von Schleinitz . .127 Erich Jakoby-Mathy . .129 A Primer on Terroir . .131 Meulenhof/Erben Justen Ehlen . .133 Alfred Merkelbach . .135 Joh. Jos. Christoffel . .138 Heribert Kerpen . .142 Willi Schaefer . .144 Willi Haag . .147 Adam (NEW!) . .149 Reuscher-Haart . .150 Hoffmann-Simon . .152 Weingut Ansgar Clusserath (NEW!) . .154 Carl Loewen . .156 Carl Schmitt-Wagner . .158 Karlsmühle . .160 Van Volxem . .163 i x LET US WRITE YOUR ORDER FOR YOU! It’s easy! We write the order, you take the wine, we cash the check. What’s not to like? In all seriousness, I have spent the past several years actually writing about 15% of all the D.I. orders I receive, so I thought I’d formalize it. This is for peo- ple who want the wines but don’t have the time to hack through my Amazonian jungle of quivering prose. Here’s what you do: • Give me a budget, and/or the number of cases you wish to receive. • Tell me how to proportion the order; Rhines vs. Mosels, what proportions at which price points, how much Kabinett vs. Spätlese vs. Auslese, etc. • Tell me if you want any Liter wines for floor-stack, any sparkling wines, in fact tell me generally if you want a conservative order or a high-wire order filled with lots of weirdo wines. • Tell me if there are wineries which have done well for you in the past, or which have not. And away I go. I will create an order proposal for you, you’ll look it over and tweak and twiddle it, and send it back in the form that you wish . I promise this: knowing that you’ve bought on trust from me, I will make DAMN sure that every wine I send to you is KILLER WINE. I can’t risk your being anything less than really impressed with every cork you pull. The last thing I want is for you to think I fobbed something off on you. I will write the HIPPEST possible order within your guidelines. We call this the E-Z method of flash-buying. It works. If you’d like my help, I’m standing by to give it. If not, I shall pout, and taunt you for the pitiable order you wrote yourself. Who needs that kind of trouble? x was talking to Helmut Dönnhoff about my lyrical been meaningful wine to start with, nothing industrial or moment with the nightingales. We were in the garden out- “manufactured”, a wine of identity and connection to side the hotel where I’d heard them a year ago. I thought earth and family. But mere evocation would seem innocu- they were haunting and beautiful, but this is apparently ous enough; maybe it could float you into a dreamy mood not the universal sentiment. “On or make you lambent and warm. But this is more. Great a hot summer night when we old wine seems to have distilled reality. All of reality, not sleep with the windows open, only itself: old rooms, echoes of the cooking of many they make such a racket I want meals, smells of worn clothes, the prevailing atmosphere to fire a rifle at them,” said of the time it was made. And like a distillate, it is almost Helmut. Now there’s a vision for too concentrated to apprehend. Thus we are at once grant- you; the arch-wizard of Riesling ed entry into a world and a place of soul we never get to blasting away in the middle of see, and it’s so sudden and unexpected that we are dis- the night at a bunch of birds. armed and laid bare. I’ve been thinking a lot about Dönnhoff lately. How One year when I traveled with a group of customers to he goes about things.