GERMANY 2007 estate selections terry theise Imported by: Michael Skurnik Wines 575 Underhill Blvd, Suite 216 Syosset, New York 11791 Tel 516•677•9300 www.skurnikwines.com Fax 516•677•9301 theise manifesto Beauty is more important than impact. Harmony is more important than intensity. The whole of any wine must always be more than the sum of its parts. Distinctiveness is more important than conventional prettiness. Soul is more important than anything, and soul is expressed as a trinity of family, soil and artisanality. Lots of wines, many of them good wines, let you taste the noise. But only the best let you taste the silence. i “Let us agree that the poet must master the elements of his craft: the rhythm, the strategies, the importance of compression, when to use rhyme and when not to use it—all of that. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that the craft must not become the content of the poem. The craft must serve primarily to deliver what the poet is trying to say to the reader, and to deliver the feelings or discoveries to him with as little loss as pos- sible I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the phys- ical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remark- able things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeing—and the physical world pours in. Their journals fill up with lovely things like, "the mirror with nothing reflected in it." This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not looking—just as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing.” -Linda Gregg ii “This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.” -Abu Yazid al-Bistami iii contents Theise Manifesto . .i Let Us Write Your Order For You . .vi Introduction . .1 Continuing New Approach to Tasting Notes . .7 Making the Case for German Wines . .9 Making the Case for Auslese . .12 Principles of Selection . .12 Gray-Marketers . .13 A New Way to Measure Sweetness . .16 Core List Wines . .17 Dry German Wines . .17 More Principles . .20 Wine Approach . .21 Tasting Blind . .22 2006 Vintage . .23 Earlier Vintages Revisited . .26 If I Were Ruler of the World . .28 What is a Palate? . .31 How German Wines Age . .32 What To Drink Now . .33 The Question of Tartrates . .34 Label Basics . .34 Glossary . .35 Plusses and The Quest For Perfection . .38 SOMMELIER ALERT! . .39 Subject: Why Riesling? . .42 MOSEL-SAAR-RUWER . .43 Mosel Regionals . .45 Selbach-Oster . .47 Erich Jakoby-Mathy . .55 Meulenhof/Erben Justen Ehlen . .57 Alfred Merkelbach . .60 Why Fuss About Connections? . .63 Joh. Jos. Christoffel . .64 Older Vintages in Small Supply . .67 Heribert Kerpen . .69 Willi Schaefer . .71 A.J. Adam . .74 Reuscher-Haart . .77 Hoffmann-Simon . .79 Weingut Grips . .81 iv Weingut Ansgar Clüsserath . .82 A Primer on Terroir . .84 Carl Loewen . .86 Carl Schmitt-Wagner . .88 Karlsmühle-Geiben . .90 Is All Taste Equally Valid? . .92 MITTELRHEIN . .94 Florian Weingart . .95 Toni Jost . .98 SOS: A New Way to Measure Sweetness . .100 NAHE . .101 Dönnhoff . .103 Helmut Mathern . .110 The Matter of Globalization . .112 Jakob Schneider . .114 Weingut Hexamer . .117 Kruger-Rumpf . .120 Schlossgut Diel . .123 RHEINHESSEN . .127 J.u.H.A. Strub . .128 Take Me To Your Liter . .133 Wagner-Stempel . .134 POINTS: what’s the point? . .137 Weingut Geil . .138 Gernot Gysler . .141 Christian-Wilhelm Bernhard . .144 Tasting Versus Drinking . .146 Half-Bottle Offering . .147 RHEINGAU . .148 Josef Leitz . .150 Spreitzer . .154 Why Does Place-Specificity Matter? . .157 PFALZ . .159 Müller-Catoir . .161 Beauty in the Ashes . .165 Josef Biffar . .167 Scheurebe: What Gives? . .170 Dr. Deinhard . .171 Eugen Müller . .174 Herbert Messmer . .177 Theo Minges . .180 Koehler-Ruprecht . .183 Kurt Darting . .185 A Little Essay About Nothing Much . .189 v 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? vi First it was squally and windy and some sort of membrane and everything our cars blew all over the road, especial- was suddenly, and clearly, divine. The ly when you zip around as fast as I do. small teams of people working, the birds Then it became very mild, too mild, and noisily peeping, the silvery Mosel below, too early, but great weather for walking the smell of slate and woods. Isn’t it odd and sniffing blossoming trees. Then it how it happens; you only take a half-step snowed. It also thunder-snowed and back out of what you imagine is your self hailed and there were four inches of hail and you suddenly see the blessings inside on the road that melted in twenty min- things, and inside you, and you receive it utes. Then it was nice again. All the and give it out as gladness and gratitude. growers are worried about late frosts. It’s quicksilvery, this state, but it’s “There was no real winter,” they all said, strangely durable when you’re in it. I and several of them wondered out loud whether Eiswein passed a group of workers replanting in the Sonnenuhr might become a thing of the past. Man I hope not. and bade them Guten Morgen nearly sopping with hap- Growers are so close-in to what they do they sometimes piness as if it were entirely self-evident, but of course to lose perspective, and I’m sure when the next cool vintage them, for all I know, it’s just a gig and I looked like a comes along they’ll forget their chat about planting vines crazy person. I’m sure the work isn’t pretty in the sum- in northern Finland. But still. mer heat. In some senses 2006 will maybe prove to be the first I turned to head back, and caught a glimpse of true climate-change vintage, as its parameters are with- Zeltingen’s church and its cemetery where Hans Selbach out precedent even from the heat-wave year 2003. But is buried. I wanted to tell him it’s still like it was, old friend, none of this was at the front of my mind when I took the it’s a beautiful foggy morning and the workers are working and first of many walks the calm weather allowed each morn- the birds are birding and it’s all as it should be. And you were ing along the Mosel. right; it is divine and full.