~ Riesling Roundup ~

... so I headed off yesterday afternoon into town to an event bearing the enticing name “Riesling Fellowship”... which came off rather nicely up in the lovely and expensive ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. There was a little bit of navigation necessary to find one’s way through the pleasing array of complementary and contrasting flavours, but this posed no great inconvenience...

?¿? do you know the old song, “I went to the animal fair, the birds and the beasts were there...”

such was in fact the case, and not only did I find riesling’s two best American friends Sanderson and Schildkecht in attendance, but there were a number of top German growers on display: Johannes Selbach, Armin Diel, Fritz Hasselbach and Nik Weis. Between the two of them, Diel and Hasselbach have lost about thirtyfive kilos, and both are looking very good indeed. The idiomatic German word for losing weight means “de-bacon-ing”...

Almost all of the retail crowd were where they belonged in a touchy December—in their stores and not at this event—and many restaurant buyers were also not to be seen. My colleagues Evan Spingarn, Steve Miller, Victor Schwartz and Frank Johnson attended, tasted, and likely found inspiration in much the same manner as did I.

as usual, I lost myself among the various German bottlings, and just barely rescued myself from that reverie in time to taste through a very rewarding retrospective of Zöbinger rieslings being poured by the single courageous Austrian grower in the presentation, Johannes Hirsch, who showed multiple vintages of Gaisberg and Heiligenstein reaching back to 1999.

I enjoyed the usual collegial disagreement with Bob Millman, who didn’t like the Schloss Johannisberg 06er QbA as much as I did, and liked the Loosen collection less than I did—we regularly encounter such interesting points for discussion.

my favourite wines were, in no hierarchical order:

Selbach-Oster Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Kabinett 01
Schloss Johannisberg QbA 06
Schlossgut Diel “Dorsheim Pittermänchen” Spätlese 07
Ökonomierat Rebholz “Im Sonnenschein” Grosses Gewächs 07
St. Urbans-Hof “Leiwener Laurentiuslay” Spätlese Erste Lage 07
Gunderloch “Nackenheim Rothenberg” Trocken 07

perhaps my one top pick was the Rebholz, which showed a glorious combination of sap and sizzle—and then the Nackenheimer. I asked Hasselbach about his resistance to calling this wine “Grosses Gewächs” and Fritz replied that next year it would in fact be so; that his next generation at the estate had been agitating in that direction.

and the $60.17 question: Where does one dine after this sort of tasting? This was easily answered by Mr. Millman and me, first with apéritifs of Latte and straight Black at a local coffee-establishment which needs no advertising help, followed by a trip to Carnegie Deli—where Bob and I just barely made it through a single serving of that mountain of corned beef- and pastrami-on-rye known as “The Woody Allen”, with sides of potato pancakes and coleslaw, a Dr Brown’s for Bob and more black coffee for me. Carnegie’s pickles were a little on the aggressive and salty side this evening, but, davon abgesehen ist alles in Ordnung gewesen...

I was very pleased to learn that Millman had just seen and enjoyed my favourite movie, Ingmar Bergmann’s “Smiles of a Summer Night”, a rather Mozartean romantic comedy from 1955—

— hell, I’m a romantic comedy from 1955: maybe that’s why I like the damn thing so much ~

~ Aventinus ~

so one often hears the question raised, about wine-matches involving chocolate...

Banyuls is often cited as the most effective, and some people swear by zinfandel. But my experience has shown that The magic elixir, so far as putting chocolate in more places on the palate is concerned, doesn’t come from any arcane address in the wine-world, but rather from a town on the Danube—and not Krems or Weißenkirchen or Spitz or Loiben—but rather a medium-sized Bavarian municipality called Kelheim, some hundred kliks north of Munich...

and it’s a top-fermented wheat beer called Aventinus—a Doppelbock Hefe Weizen—named neither for the son of Hercules and Rhea nor for the saint, but rather for a local philologist. Made by the famous Munich Weißbier brewery G. Schneider & Co, Aventinus has more alcohol than some Mosel wines at 8.2%, but doesn’t finish at all hot. Really rich, lovely malt flavours—bottle-fermented with the yeast still in play—there’s a bit of art and science to getting the yeast into your glass from the bottom of the bottle—this beverage is truly exceptional. And alongside chocolate, I have yet to find anything else which comes close.

below is what is I am sure a copyrighted image, borrowed under the principle of ‘fair use’ from their website, following the link to ‘secret recipe’ which, translated, means “!@#$%* Top Secret!”

~ and another lazy afternoon at Trestle on Tenth...

...this time with my associate Stephan Schindler from California, visionary winegrower Roland Velich from Burgenland, and my colleague & friend Bob Millman...

We went to lunch, and we drank white wine. Real doggone good white wine. The greater part of this white wine had been sitting in my basement for quite a while, patiently waiting for the right gullets to get itself poured down, and couldn’t have found a better set.

Two of these bottles I had hand-carried from Germany, some ten years ago. They both came from Weingut Koehler-Ruprecht in the Pfalz, and dated from the era before Terry Theise started bringing in the big dry wines with any regularity. Back then I used to feed Bernd Philippi’s then-greatest in Germany collection of California Cabs, and would receive in exchange these magnificent and distinctive dry rieslings grown in the Kallstadter Saumagen, a kettle-shaped limestone site (and sight, as well—that really wasn’t too bad a typo) north of Bad Dürkheim.

Weingut Koehler-Ruprecht:

1996 Kallstadter Saumagen Auslese Trocken

1990 Kallstadter Saumagen Auslese Trocken Reserve

The question is recently often asked, how well do dry German rieslings age? Although this experience yielded no definitive answer, it was clear to the four of us Profis that the 96er, although not quite showing as much sheer horsepower as the 90er Goldkapsel Reserve, more than made up for its comparitive lack of weight by showing an enormous agility and vitality. At eleven years of age, it is hard to imagine a more perfectly eloquent wine than this. At somewhere around 13.5° alcohol it imparted no sense of heat; the minerality melded melifluously with a fruit collection that referenced (with more relish than reverence) several lively orchards...

And was the 90er on a downturn, or did the younger wine merely dance circles around it? It showed acid in adequate measure, clean and still voluptuous fruit, some lovely and encouraging old-riesling tones, and a commanding texture on the palate. Hard to say that it was losing anything, but I remember having been awstruck by bottles of this wine, say, ten years ago.

I found an excellent food match for these wines, Ralf’s salmon with fennel—which I also enjoyed on a subsequent visit alongside a Nigl Zweigelt rosé out in the garden...

...and then came a welcome surprise after I asked for the wine-list. One of the biggest challenges I face when dining here with an Austrian winegrower—and Roland Velich is currently in the process of turning Burgenland on its ear, creating a new and finely-tuned idiom of Blaufränkisch—is what kind of American white wine can I feed ‘em? Plenty of American reds, all shapes and sizes, which will prove fascinating and/or challenging to an old-world palate, but white wine from my native land proves itself a problem. (Guzzling Littorai 05 Mays Ranch Chardonnay at Michael’s with Paul Achs was an uncommon occurence...)

...and the answer to this challenge on that date?

1997 Kalin Cellars Livermore Valley Semillon

I hadn’t drunk a Kalin wine for quite a while. Bob pointed out that this was in fact their current release, and so I yielded to my sense of adventure and ordered a bottle. Talk about scrumptious! Oranges and lemons and ginger-snaps with a bit of caramel and cream. Grew in the glass even more than the German rieslings had. Firm acidity and even a bit of mineral underneath. Extraordinarily good stuff. Apparently comes from ancient vines on the Wente estate. To be sought out, relished and prized ~

¡!¡! ~ DAZZLE ~ !¡!¡

vagrant cloud caught in a fluttering stream ~

extraordinary music, extraordinarily American ~

just an arbitrary selection:

Blues in the Night
Let’s Fall in Love
Stormy Weather
The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
This Time the Dream’s on Me
That Old Black Magic
Ac-cent-chu-ate the Positive
Come Rain or Come Shine
Ding Dong the Witch is Dead
Paper Moon
One for my Baby and One More for the Road
Written in the Stars
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues

all those great songs, you can’t quite think who wrote ’em?
Harold Arlen wrote ’em.

on some occasions his own co-lyricist with Truman Capote, he collaborated extensively with Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Ted Koehler and Johnny Mercer...

and out of all the cantor’s sons who found their way to Tin Pan Alley, Arlen had the ear most keenly tuned to what was happening ’way uptown...

many of his songs find quite an exquisite expression on Ella Fitzgerald’s Harold Arlen Songbook, a current Verve rerelease. Here, in contrast with the elegant and understated stylings of Buddy Bregman on the Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hart collections, the Billy May orchestra is really, really hot...