the voice of Riesling, now mature...

foto: Dorli Muhr

so tonight is Parsifal at the Met—this last work by that old bastard Wagner is somehow less problematic on stage than the majority of his oeuvre… perhaps because it lacks the bloated and hysterical poetry of the Ring, and makes no significant pretense at drama, invoking rather the ritually devotional, filling it out with the various stuffs of legendry stitched reasonably well together. The first several minutes of instrumental music—I have heard a lot, but can think of nothing more sublime that’s ever reached my ears.

My first time was late July 1976, in Wagner’s own hillside temple in Bayreuth. And I had the excellent fortune of arriving in Germany for the first time as the brilliant 1975 vintage was hitting the café tables… And since then have been a devoted partisan of German Riesling, even while I do acknowledge that the boys in Austria and Alsace—and even Down Under in Oz—also make respectable examples.

...so last Easter I was in Vienna, and had the good fortune to experience my second straight Easter Sunday performance of Parsifal in the Staatsoper. I preferred Waltraud Meier from the year before as Kundry, but Kwangchul Youn was spectacular as Gurnemanz, and Wolfgang Bankl—a fine actor, btw—was quite well-staged as a porno-film director in the role of the self-emasculated sorcerer Klingsor.

and afterward? Well, it was 11PM on Easter Sunday in Vienna—not the liveliest of European capitals—where does one go for a late snack? Answer was, the bistro at Palais Coburg—and there we found a bite to eat, along with a bottle of 1975 Rauenthaler Baiken Spätlese from Schloß Eltz. I did raise an eyebrow when the sommelier first decanted the 37-year-old Riesling and then brought out red Burgundy glasses for it—but he seemed to have done this before, so I didn’t bleat.

and what a treat! The wine could not have been in better shape from this vintage that sometimes gets short shrift in between the monsters from 1976 and the grand & eloquent 71ers...  Not only is Baiken among the more photogenic of the Rheingau vineyards, but it also has the reputation of bringing forth rather long-lived wines. The name comes from the word Biegen, which refers to the way that the vineyard arches its back as it flows over the hillside. There’s not much in the way of limestone here, but rather decomposed slate, mica schist and quarzite, blown over with loess.

and the venerable Spätlese, from this legendary but vanished estate—from what had been a difficult period for the storied Rheingau? Bottle in perfect shape. Dark gold in the glass, not nearly gotten to amber, and the secondaries were in full flower, not yet arrived at the forest-floor that someday would come out in the aromatix—and easy on the petrol... the wine possessed a vibrant acidity still; these ’75ers remain lively, and this one played on the palate with a nice breath of passion fruit and a hint of apple—which had certainly been more prominent in its youth—with lovely mineral highlights on the way down. Not so much residual sugar perceptible in the wine... and the background dishes—nothing fancy—served to bring accentuate its texture. A memorable experience.

~ good beginns on the Hungarian side of the fence

—to be sure, something rather promising this way comes...

thanks to my developing relationship with Viennese PR firm Wine&Partners, I recently received the assignment to translate a press-kit into English on behalf of an Austrian entrepreneur, who has in the last dozen years planned and planted some 5 hectares of vineyard on the Hungarian side of the Eisenberg—all with Blaufränkisch; or more properly in the local lingo, Kékfrankos.

Rainer Garger is the man behind the project, with his Hungarian cousin Imre Garger managing the vineyards and Reinhold Krutzler—who needs little introduction—as cellarmaster.

and Herr Garger very kindly sent me a sample bottle of his first release, the 2009 Nador Kékfrankos Reserve, which I lost little time in first carefully examining, then quite happily drinking.

we bear here in mind that all of Burgenland was until shortly after World War I known as Deutsch-Westungarn (Germanophone West Hungary, to put it delicately), and when Burgenland left Hungary and joined Austria, Ödenburg a.k.a Sopron decided to stay, along with Wieselburg (Moson) and Eisenburg (Vas), while Pressburg became Bratislava. So though the name remains, Burgenland lost all four burgs in its birth-pangs...

and there is much about Burgenland that has still little in common with more familiar Austrian neighbourhoods like the Kremstal and Wachau. It's a different culinary culture to be sure, and while there is more Grüner Veltliner planted in Burgenland than anything else, this region that had made its reputation on very fine nobly sweet wines has in the last half-dozen years come up with reds from their three native vines that stand a satisfying comparison to many better bottlings of Burgundy and Piedmont. Reinhold Krutzler and Uwe Schiefer are just a couple growers who’ve been bottling excellent wines in Südburgenland for quite some time now; there had to be untapped potential on the other side of this border that wasn’t always there...

and the wine:

Nador 2009 Reserve started out with a wonderful aromaticity, a whiff of dark chocolate and a bit of anis on top of dried fruit, fried fruit, true-and-tried fruit, mostly of the Weichsel/Zwetschke persuasion—dark cherries and plums... The wood was held nicely in check by Mr Krutzler; it's so easy to overload young vines with it. On the palate the cherries check in once more, rich and deftly textured with much nice spice about it, offering an encouraging mineral touch in the finish. One can imagine the potential for additional depth that will be realised in further vintages when the vines get a little bit older...

a visit to the Karthäuserhof ~

so perhaps it is exactly because webloggery is so-o-o-o 2008 that I am going to revive this one, which I have sorely neglected for the past eighteen+ months—

also, the Schindlers have put me on a very long leash with the Winemonger Imports weblog—this has not gone unappreciated—and I have gotten a great deal of pleasure writing about the wines I sell on their behalf. So although I do enjoy communicating via FB & Tw...

let us therefore call it a Groundhog’s Day resolution—a favourite holiday of mine—when every year I ask myself if I’ve seen my Shadow: the answer, Dr Jung, always seems to be—yes, rather; on many occasions...

and so: a quick look at the bottle up in the corner. Known to all, the pride of the Ruwer, the longest name on the shortest label, Eitelsbacher Karthäuserhofberg. Was just reading the daily, and it seems that Mr Tyrell has sold the place—to a family member resident on this side of the Atlantic—although the long-time principal is not going anyplace any time soon.

I owe a great deal to Christoph Tyrell. And not just because of the wines I’ve always enjoyed, everything from bright and lively Kabinett to the dramatic Auslese trocken. I first met him one day on a solo visit to Germany in the early nineties. He was one of several German growers who, upon learning of my interest in their language—others include Wilhelm Haag and Rainer Lingenfelder—have barely spoken a word of English to me since, which in the early nineties was a sink-or-swim proposition... I remember his patient elucidation of the way their language generates new material, speaking about hailstone damage. ‘Hagelschade,’ he intoned. ‘Hagel, Schade—von dem Hagel kommt der Schade...’

but the best thing Tyrell did for me was to persuade me to reschedule all of my appointments I’d made for the next day, and drive down to Tübingen—a university town way to Hell and gone away from Eitelsbach, 25 miles down the far side of Stuttgart in Schwabenland—and he was very emphatic, in the sense of ‘Do not fail to do this!’ Christoph had just returned from an exhibition of paintings by Paul Cézanne in the Kunsthalle in Tübingen, the most comprehensive exhibit for decades, and made very clear that it had been a rare and extraordinarily rewarding experience. So I took his advice, got on the phone and begged the necessary pardons, and early next morning headed south down the A61.

I had known of Cézanne for years, seen many of the paintings, but I was totally unprepared for the effect that such a widely-ranging collection would have upon the way I looked at visual art—and I have always felt fortunate to have been born in my favourite period of Art History: the first time I walked into the Hirschhorn Museum at nineteen years of age and saw the violent canvases of Willem de Kooning, along with many equally distinctive by Motherwell and Rothko, I had felt right at home. So I had always, fortunately, seen things from a flexible perspective. Perspective: there’s the word, and Cézanne was the innovator.

and it took me a while, but what finally got me farther back than Matisse and Monet was the visit with Christoph Tyrell, and his gentle insistence that I take a day off from wine-tasting. My appreciation of all visual art has ever since been richly informed by a more thorough acquaintance with the works of Paul Cézanne.

here is Der Spiegel’s writeup of the exhibit at the Tübingen Kunsthalle in 1993:

http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13679560.html

set down on the two'th of sept

Seven Hymns to a Real Gone Goddess:

            1. Holy Days Drawn from Darker Fountains

            2. Scarlet Sabbath Commentary

            3. An Anthem for Clowns

            4. A Moderate Alchemy of Desultory Purpose

            5. Through the Mouse-Hole into Heaven

            6. No Fooling

            7. The Winds at Dawn

that Pest most pestiferous and pestilent... ~

Phylloxera Vastatrix...

...it sounds like the stage name of a frowsy screen-starlet appearing in low-budget S&M movies. And oh, what we folks in the world of fine wine wouldn’t give if only that were the case, and this critter—also known as Daktulosphaira vitifoliae—were really a cinema-performer of indifferent talent. Phylloxera is a little beastie of the insect persuasion, a louse—and a lousy one at that. Phylloxera is in the most deadly enemy of the fine-wine grape-vine. In fact, the only food of this worldwide menace is the fine-wine grape-vine, vitis vinifera. This little pestiferous insect, greenish-yellow of hue and silent of cry, nourishes itself by sucking fluid out of the vine. And as it sucks, it injects the plant with its poisonous saliva, which results in formation of small galls on the leaves, along with nodules on the roots. The resultant swelling inhibits growth in the infested sections of rootlet, and the portion eventually dies. This, coupled with secondary damage from fungus and other insects, results in the eventual decay of the plant. The adults are quite tiny, about .04 inch long and half as wide, and thus very difficult to detect. Phylloxera has got a rather complex life-cycle: some lice feed on the roots of vines, while other lice munch in a most licentious fashion on the foliage, providing a one-two punch that is easily capable of putting fine wine production down and out.

They’re quite prolific: each female lays 400 eggs per sitting, often reproducing asexually when there’s no male available. The nymph spends the winter on the vine, awakening with warm weather and commencing to feed. They spread either by being blown around by the wind, or by crawling on their own in search of new fodder once an infested vine dies—on occasion the female lays eggs that produce offspring of both sexes, who do mate. It makes one wonder, if there is indeed anything Intelligent about the Design of things, why Nature would provide such a destructive pest with so many means of propagation and survival...

What can be done to combat the spread of phylloxera? Sandy and wet soils offer vitis vinifera a certain degree of protection from the pest, but humidity presents good grape growing with other challenges. One solution is found in the vine-nursery. Even though our American vines vitis riparia and vitis berlandiera do not produce distinguished or even satisfying wines, they possess a native resistance to the depredations of the plant louse. The trick was developed some hundred and few years ago of grafting buds from vitis vinifera vines onto rootstocks of these aforementioned hardy midwesterners.

And no matter what one’s opinion of the French as a nation might be, one surely knows that they’ve had their gallic pride sorely wounded twice in the twentieth century, when it required armed intervention on the part of the United States to save their butts from the Germans. But an even crueler joke on them guys over there is the fact that nearly all of their celebrated grape-vines in Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne are in fact grafted on to vine-roots whose roots (as it were) are in Ohio.

It has become by now a moot point whether the pre-phylloxera wines of Bordeaux (by which we mean those from the 1860s and earlier) were greater and more profound than those made afterward, but once upon a time there was lively debate about whether or not Bordeaux had ever entirely recovered its former glory.

In the 1860s the insect was indentified who had just begun laying waste to the vines of Bordeaux and the Rhône. It had arrived on vines brought from the eastern United States for experimental purposes. From there, it spread out indiscriminately over the European continent, munching on every vinifera rootstock it could grasp with its greedy little mandibles along the way. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had destroyed two out of every three vineyards in Europe. And for an encore, it marched westward across the Rocky Mountains, and devastated the nascent Californian viticulture in the 1880s.

Imagine the level of panic. Some positive developments resulted, like when Bordeaux’s wine-expertise moved south to Rioja in search of resistant vineyards and created a Spanish still-wine industry, the fruits of whose labor we this day savor... But the European wine industry took up until the nineteen-twenties to come close to catching up.

And more recently in the closing years of the 20th Century, the curse came home to roost once more, when it began tearing a new path through the vines of California. Rootstocks which were developed in the 1960s and 70s to combat other problems turned out to be less resistant to the bug, and have recently been replaced at colossal expense—another factor which has contributed to price increases for the fine wines of Napa and Sonoma.

una sorpresa en sonoma

...so was thwarted in fulfilling my duty to taste an American Grüner Veltliner, because my favourite watering-hole in Santa Rosa—Petite Syrah—no longer had it on by the glass; but was rewarded with a lovely surprise.

first things first—I grew up and spent much adulthood (different from adultery, although I tried that a couple times as well) driving French-door Lincoln Continentals and fuselage Imperials (and a beloved black 1965 Chrysler Newport). I have always demonstrated an uncanny ability to whip any size automobile into any sized parking-space… but now the clever Sons of the Mysterious East have designed a new compact—the Mazda 3, which is by no means a piece of crap—where the driver cannot see the end of the hood or the end of the trunk (neither boot nor bonnet). And since my eye-surgery I am no longer blind as a bat, so perhaps have resultantly lost the proverbial sonar that went with feeling my way through life for so long. Sliding into a mooring in front of my favourite watering hole in Santa Rosa, I actually kissed the back bumper of the rice-burner parked in front of mine… True confessington.

out of respect for a bit of a cold I skipped cocktails, and since there was no American GV by the glass on a wine-list that was more up-to-date than the one on their website, I ordered a glass of the Kistler Chardonnay. Les Noisetiers—and I do love the Dylan/Band classic ‘Hazel’ from their album Planet Waves...

...never understood the fuss, never bought bottles, but have certainly tasted Kistler on numerous occasions. And the glass-pour came like it ought in a Burgundy balloon—just fine... I took one taste and summoned the server. I had ordered a half-dozen oysters au naturel, and said to the nice lady—out of respect for what are likely fine oysters, I’d better have a glass of that-there Albariño you’ve got with them. I always try to drink domestic and preferably local, but an oyster is an oyster, and deserves better than to end up in the bludgeon-like grasp of a monster CA chardonnay—which btw was just grand with a concoction of Squid and Chorizo which was so Portuguese it made me realise that I’d just left Newark yesterday…

imagine my astonishment when I later re-perused the wine-list to select a glass of red, only to learn that the really fine Albariño, which had gone perfectly with the Miyagi oysters, was not from Galicia, but from Napa Valley. ¡Holy Shirt! —hairshirt that is, to wear for the penance that I am due to do… Abrente is the name of the estate, and this stuff was really yummy. 2010 Abrente Stuart Ranch Albariño. Live and let learn. Peppery and citric, floral, mineral-laden—or so it would seem... nice length and grip—a great domestic buddy for the modern bivalve.