terry theise estate selections GERMANY 2006 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. i “Within every effort there has to be calm,” she recites for him. “Always, in every pose, you have to stop just before the effort becomes pain.” “Sometimes I think…a bird, for example,” he says. “Yes, what about it?” “To fly, it has to keep flapping its wings, right?” “Definitely,” she agrees gravely. “I’m not talking about gliding,” he says fussily, and her ear opens a little at the sound of the new word. “There are birds that glide without making any effort, but I’m talking about a bird that has to make an effort to fly up.” “Okay.” Nili shrugs, wondering where he himself is flying with this. “And a bird that lives, say, for a year? Two?” “Let’s say.” “And all that time it has to make an effort with its wings, otherwise it’ll fall?” “Definitely.” “But maybe once, like one time in its whole life, it happens that it can fly up high, the highest — for maybe a whole minute — without making any effort at all with its wings?” She leans forward, shrinking the crease between her eyes, sensing something approaching. “And how exactly does that happen?” He takes on a mysterious expression. “It gets it from the air.” “I don’t get it.” “Like once in every bird’s life, the air lets it fly up without making any effort.” She blinks. What is it with these aerodynamic theories all of a sudden? But he’s very serious and focused. “It’s like . .” He searches for an example, his fin- gers moving, pulling something from the air. “It’s like, say . a holiday bonus, like the air is giving it a bonus. A discount. Once in a lifetime.” “Oh.” Nili laughs with sudden comprehension. “And does it know, the bird? Does it understand?” He falters. “That’s what I keep wondering. `Cause if it doesn’t understand, then it’s like the air’s efforts are wasted on it, no?” “I guess so,” she answers, delighted. “And if it does understand, then . No, that can’t be . No. It must not understand, `cause it’s just a bird, with a bird brain. Sure.” He gets excited; now that he’s made up his mind, his face lights up. “It’s something the air does just for fun!” From the great relief on his face she guesses how long the question has preoccupied him. “It doesn’t even realize it at all! Just that suddenly it feels light, but it’s the air that decides: Okay, now you. Playing with its birds, you see?” Do I see? Nili wonders, looking at him contemplatively. “And by the way,” he adds gravely after a minute, “it’s the same with the sea and the fishes.” From Her Body Knows, by David Grossman Front Cover Photos: Grapes on the vine and in hand at Selbach-Oster, 2005 vintage. Photos by Hannah Selbach. 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 . .6 Making the Case for German Wines . .8 Making the Case for Auslese . .11 Principles of Selection . .12 Gray-Marketers . .13 A New Way to Measure Sweetness . .15 Core List Wines . .16 Dry German Wines . .16 More Principles . .19 Wine Approach . .20 Tasting Blind . .21 2005 Vintage . .21 Earlier Vintages Revisited . .24 If I Were Ruler of the World . .26 What is a Palate? . .29 How German Wines Age . .30 What To Drink Now . .31 The Question of Tartrates . .31 Label Basics . .32 Glossary . .33 Plusses and The Quest For Perfection . .36 SOMMELIER ALERT! . .37 Subject: Why Riesling? . .40 MOSEL-SAAR-RUWER . .41 Mosel Regionals . .43 Selbach-Oster . .45 Erich Jakoby-Mathy . .53 Meulenhof/Erben Justen Ehlen . .55 Alfred Merkelbach . .58 Why Fuss About Connections? . .61 Joh. Jos. Christoffel . .62 Heribert Kerpen . .65 Willi Schaefer . .67 A.J. Adam . .70 Reuscher-Haart . .74 Hoffmann-Simon . .76 Weingut Ansgar Clüsserath . .78 iv A Primer on Terroir . .80 Carl Loewen . .82 Carl Schmitt-Wagner . .84 Karlsmühle-Geiben . .86 Is All Taste Equally Valid? . .88 MITTELRHEIN . .90 Florian Weingart . .91 Toni Jost . .93 SOS: A New Way to Measure Sweetness . .95 NAHE . .96 Dönnhoff . .98 Helmut Mathern . .104 The Matter of Globalization . .106 Jakob Schneider . .108 Weingut Hexamer . .111 Kruger-Rumpf . .114 Schlossgut Diel . .117 RHEINHESSEN . .121 J.u.H.A. Strub . .122 Take Me To Your Liter . .127 Wagner-Stempel . .128 POINTS: what’s the point? . .131 Weingut Geil . .132 Gernot Gysler . .134 Christian-Wilhelm Bernhard . .136 Tasting Versus Drinking . .138 Half-Bottle Offering . .139 RHEINGAU . .140 Josef Leitz . .142 Harvest at Leitz . .146 Spreitzer . .147 Why Does Place-Specificity Matter? . .150 PFALZ . .152 Müller-Catoir . .154 Josef Biffar . .158 Scheurebe: What Gives? . .160 Dr. Deinhard . .161 Eugen Müller . .164 Herbert Messmer . .167 Theo Minges . .170 Koehler-Ruprecht . .173 Kurt Darting . .176 A Little Essay About Nothing Much . .179 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 I felt like Charlemagne. That’s because colleagues at Michael Skurnik Wines took an en it snowed every damn day the whole first masse trip to Germany together, and at one point we half of March, which no one had ever commandeered the stage from a C/W band who’d seen before. I happen to love snow, when been hired to play for us. Michael played gee- you can provision the kitchen ahead of tar and shook his ass. Harmon (Skurnik) time and cozy up to watch it float randomly sang and whacked a tambourine. Andrew and coat the world with that sweet white played drums. I played banshee manic silence. But I had appointments to keep and lead guitar. It was so much fun I forgot wines to spit out, so we spent the first part of who was watching us—imagine what the month slidin’ around wondering if we’d Merkelbachs must have been thinking! The ever see as much as a crocus. But, I felt like mild-mannered wine geek they thought they Charlemagne. That’s because I got to see a knew suddenly morphed into a three-headed thing I almost never see: the vineyards where the snow hydra yowling away on fuzz-whipped guitar. At the melts first. This is plain as day and not subject to inter- same time the younger ones were probably thinking, this pretation. One day I left my hotel in the snow-zone and might almost have been amusing but what’s with the drove down to see Florian Weingart in Spay. It was weird boogie crap? In either case, the personage they maybe 33 degrees when I pulled out.