Enderle & Moll - Great German Pinot that Should be Imported to the US, but isn't Anymore.

This past weekend I held a small tasting for some parents at my younger daughter's school. It was something that I donated (with generous support from Chambers Street Wines and Slope Cellars). The theme was Pinot Noir from various parts of the world. We tasted some very good wines, including Champagne by Brigandat, a Chandon de Briailles wine, a Belle Pente wine, and others. All of the wines cost between $30-40. There were no duds in the tasting - everything was good. One wine, however, was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of quality - the 2009 Enderle & Moll Pinot Noir Buntsandstein.

Binner's 2009 Alsace Pinot Noir was all about fruit and while it was good drinking, it was not complex enough to hold my interest, nor did it distinguish itself in terms of terroir expression. I felt it would have been a better wine had the fruit been harvested earlier. Chandon de Briaille's 2010 Savigny-Les Beaune showed finesse, and a lovely balance of ripe fruit and subtle earth tones. Sandro Mosele's 2010 Pinot Noir Massale the Kooyong in southern Australia had interesting feral animal aromas but also felt a bit roasty to me. Belle Pente's 2010 Yamhill/Carlton Pinot Noir was very tasty and nicely balanced, but did not offer much in the way of complexity, which is understandable in a wine made from very young vines.

Enderle & Moll's wine was world class. It shows that perfect combination of light body, finesse, and pungent aroma and flavor, and a finish that feels tactile on the tongue, and really lingers. The aromas involve red and dark Pinot fruit, but also pine and other foresty smells, and the wine moves across the palate in that light, deft, and powerful way that comes with well tended old vines. The wine is delicious now but seems to me to have the kind balance and acidity that indicate good potential for improvement in the cellar.

Okay, so now you know that I really liked the wine. I wrote about another of Enderle & Moll's wines last year - I loved that one too. Dan Melia (or Dan Amelia, as my daughters call him - you can choose because he's fine with both) and Lars Carlberg, when they ran Mosel Wine Merchant, brought Enderle & Moll to the US. It's not like the wines sold like hotcakes, but red wine wasn't really the point of their portfolio. They sold enough, and there's hardly any wine anyway. When Mosel Wine Merchant was retired, its producers were snapped up lickety-split by some of the juggernauts of the New York wine sales landscape (Louis/Dressner, Grand Cru, vom Boden, and so on). No one is importing Enderle & Moll though, and I'm no wine economist, but I cannot imagine why this is.

The wines are cheaper than most villages level Burgundy and compare quite favorably with even the best villages level Burgundy. These are excellent and distinctive wines, and they happen to be farmed and made in a healthy way. I hope that one of you importers out there, or one of you enterprising wine store owners, sees the light on Enderle and Moll, and takes the wines in before Diageo grabs them.

Here is Lars Carlberg on Enderle & Moll.
Here is the Enderle & Moll website. It's in German, but you'll be able to see immediately that it's about wine.

I promise, I will be your first retail customer.

I Drank German Wine and it was Awesome

Because much of what actually happens in the world is random and unpredictable, after years of drinking essentially no mature German Riesling, in the past few weeks I've had maybe 20 mature wines. This is due to the generosity of friends - dinners and things like that. What I'm about to tell you might be old news to you, but WHOA, these wines can be great.

When the wines are great, what really gets me is the seamless combination of impossibly wispy delicacy and focused pungency. How can a wine be so incredibly delicate and wispy, and yet so powerful? Well, some wines can do both. The power and lightness idea is not new to me, but it feels like it might reach its apex with some of these old wines. Here are a couple from the past few weeks that really blew me away:

1990 Egon Müller Scharzhofberger Riesling Spätlese. Hard to describe my experience with this wine without gushing over. The wine was shocking, stunning really. Lacy, airy, like gauze. Like the sheer cotton cloth that might have been draped over Ghandi's shoulder against the hot Delhi sun. Seriously though, this wine was ridiculous. Such a delicate touch on the palate, the texture is simply not one I have experienced before. And the aromas, although articulate and clear, were quite a contrast in their intensity and power. We drank this wine with salmon sashimi, among other things, and for me it was a real eye-opener. Before this bottle I had drunk exactly one bottle of Egon Müller's wine in my life. I had no context for this wine, and when I asked about Müller, the first thing my experienced and knowledgeable dining companions told me about Egon Müller is that the estate is the DRC of German Riesling.

The following week I was lucky enough to attend a dinner featuring a slew of 1997 German Rieslings and I was able to drink two more wines by Egon Müller. I thought they were both truly excellent, again showcasing that startling contrast between lightness and power. The 1997 Egon Müller Scharzhofberger Riesling Kabinett was a wonderful wine, so graceful, such depth.

1997 Egon Müller/Le Gallais Wiltinger Braune Kupp Riesling Auslese Auction. So I don't really know what's going on here, but I think Wiltinger Braune Kupp is a different site. And I cannot remember what "Auction" refers to, I'm sorry to say. Perhaps someone will explain in the comments. But whoa, this wine was great. I would love to drink the same mature wine at different pradikat levels one day to try to understand how they compare with one another. I'm sure there is a ton of residual sugar in this wine, but it was so perfectly balanced and focused that even in this ripe vintage, the impression of the wine is not one of sweetness.

Willi Schaefer has to be one of the finest producers whose wines I can actually afford. In the past month I experienced some mature examples of his wines and whoa, I am very impressed. Several wines form the 2001 vintage and two from the 1997 vintage. All were compellingly delicious.

1997 Willi Schaefer Graacher Domprobst Riesling Kabinett. Seriously? The new vintage sells for under $25. This wine had to cost less than that. And now, 15 years later, it's really this good? Clearly on the same level of quality, in my rather thin and uninformed book, as the Egon Müller wines. I loved the grace and delicacy of this wine, and its tingly acidity and overall vividness.

And since I'm kvelling about German wines, I have to tell you about the most exciting red wine I've had in some time.

2009 Enderle & Moll Pinot Noir Muschelkalk, $55, Imported by Mosel Wine Merchant. Dan Melia gave this to me as a present before he left town. I assumed it was the entry level Pinot. I was wrong - it is made from a .6 hectare plot of 60+ year old vines and it is a rare and special thing. If you can read German, the Enderle & Moll website might be helpful. I drank the wine over three days and it was delicious immediately, showing vivid wild cherry flavors and excellent balance. But it was days two and three when the wine showed all of itself. The fruit is still vivid but more complex now, and the mineral expression on the finish became an integral aspect of the wine, with iron and dark smokey earthy notes. The wine really is wonderfully balanced and graceful, and it offers all of the pleasures of great Pinot Noir. In fact, in my humble opinion, this wine at $55 offers as much or more than almost anything I can think of at that price point in Burgundy red wine. This is one to buy, if you can find it.

Boston Lettuce, Snap Pea, and Radish Salad with Green Garlic and Buttermilk Dressing, and Goodbye Dan Melia!

Take a look at some of the lovely spring vegetables that my favorite farmer Bill Maxwell had last weekend:

Even my small daughters were interested in eating these radishes. They look like candy.

Snap peas are crisp and sweet. There was also some Boston Bibb lettuce, a favorite of mine, and I knew that I would make a salad.

Green garlic is such a treat. If you've never played with it, you should try. The whole thing is edible - use the green parts the way you would scallions, or fry it in the wok with a bit of meat and a little soy sauce. The head of the garlic is sweeter and milder than the more mature garlic in the supermarket.

I decided to try to make something like creamy buttermilk salad dressing, and I wanted it to be a vehicle for green garlic. Reading the interwebs for recipe ideas, it seems clear that in order to make such a dressing, one combines mayonnaise and possibly sour cream or crème fraîche with buttermilk, a little vinegar, and then perhaps herbs other seasonings. I used a dollop of sour cream whisked with a dollop of mayo, whisked in a bit more than a quarter cup of buttermilk, a glug of white vinegar, the chopped green garlic, some salt and pepper. That's it.

I had enough to dress the salad and then to fill a small glass jar. I was tempted to put a $14 price tag on it and slip it onto the shelves of one of the groceries that front most of our Brooklyn restaurants these days. Instead, I ate the same salad for the next three days. And used the dressing as a condiment for a turkey burger. Tomorrow, I might simply drink what is left of it because it tastes that good.

My good friend Dan Melia, who is very sadly and very soon leaving NYC for greener pastures, came for dinner and we ate this salad of Bibb lettuce, radishes, and snap peas with this $14 hand-whisked dressing. Dan brought along a beautiful bottle of Riesling, the 2001 Willi Schafer Wehlener Sonnenuhr Kabinett, and it was fantastic with the tangy-fresh-sweet-savory-radishy-lactic salad. The wine was so good though, that really it would have been fantastic with anything.

And so, as we have done many times before and will do again, but I guess much less frequently, we ate our food and drank our wine and talked about all sorts of things, and it was exactly as it should be when you are with a good friend.

Goodbye Dan Melia! I hope that there are great vegetables, decent salad dressings, great wines, great people, and great everything else where you are going. I will really miss you.

2010 Mosel Acidity

Just had to quickly tell you this:

What they're saying about high acidity in the 2010 Mosel Rieslings...I think they're not exaggerating. Last night I had dinner with a few friends, including Dan Melia of Mosel Wine Merchant. Dan is my very good friend, and even though there is a potential conflict of interest here, as I want him to do well in his business, I think you know by now that I would never write about something and say that I love for any reason other than that I really love it.

We drank many interesting wines, among them three wines from the 2010 vintage by Immich-Batterieberg. We drank CAI, the "entry level" wine in the portfolio, although it is patently absurd to think of this wine in those terms. It is a Kabinett, it is very serious wine, and it is completely delicious and compelling. I loved it in 2009 and to me it seems as though the 2010 will be even better - more focused and precise, more mineral, more of everything, including balance and harmony. At about $23, this is something to buy a lot of. We also drank the single vineyard wines Batterieberg and Ellergrub. I still do not have the Riesling context to say anything intelligent about them, other than that they were also very delicious. For what it's worth, I heard people at the table crowing about Batterieberg and how perfect a wine it is, how it is so pure that it "tastes like nothing." Trust me, this was said with the greatest of admiration. These wines will cost more than CAI, but I'm not sure how much more - perhaps $50 a bottle.

We opened many wines, more than might be wise on a school night, and I'm pretty sure that everyone went home with something to taste in the following days. Just now I was just making a quick dinner after a long work day, and I poured myself a small glass of both CAI and Ellergrub to taste them after 24 hours open. Still delicious, profoundly so. The point of this post, however, is to tell you that my teeth, after just those two small glasses before dinner, feel exactly as they did after a day of tasting vin-clair in Champagne with Peter Liem! Sensitive, painful to chew even a small bite of red pepper, as though they had been stripped of their enamel. These 2010's...no shortage of acidity here. I see this as a very good thing.

Learning Enough to Know That I Don't Know Anything.

"I've learned enough to know how much there is that I don't know." This is an idea that I firmly believe in. When delving deeply into a complex topic one can reach this point that is both exciting and frustrating where one gains new appreciation for the body of experience and knowledge that exists. Regarding wine, I hit this point some time ago. The thing is, years later, many experiences later, I'm still here.

I am reminded of this by several recent experiences where my judgements about wine were entirely different from what I expected based on past experiences. Starkly different. This is what I'm talking about:

The other night after putting kids to bed I made a simple dinner of a pork chop and some vegetables. Burgundy...I hadn't drunk one in a while and I wanted it. But I don't have many bottles that are mature, and I didn't feel like opening a young bottle, or one of the few special older bottles that I own. I decided to open a bottle that isn't important to me, something that I would cull from my cellar. What would that be? I looked at what I have and decided on the 2005 Domaine des Croix Bourgogne, $25, Becky Wasserman Selections. I bought several bottles in early 2008 and loved when it was released, but found subsequent bottles to be too oaky. Look at my notes from Cellar Tracker and you'll see what I mean:

2/9/2008: up there with the very finest Bourgogne i've ever had. wide aromas of red and dark fruits, lots of earth, dark flowers and a mineral core. lovely medium bodied palate echoing the aromas with really persistent flavors on the finish, and a cool minty sensation. just great wine and a Bourgogne, no less. I am seriously tempted to explore the 1er Cru wines by this producer in this vintage.

4/24/2008: on this one, the oak was very powerful from the outset. after 45 minutes or so it calmed down a bit, but hard to evaluate. will check back tonight

2/11/2009: Not ready yet, and probably needs another 3-5 to integrate, if it's going to. The wood is pretty overpowering now. good underlying materials, but hard to discern the nuances of the wine right now. I wonder...will it be able to integrate all of the new oak?

11/2/2010: Oak oak oak oak. and i'm not at all anti-oak. this is not a judicious use, however. perhaps he got excited about the 2005 fruit and threw everything he had at it. in any case, even late on day 2, it's difficult to separate the wine from the vanilla influence of oak, and to see what its personality is. frustrating.

Seems like a solid candidate for cellar-culling, no? At least in the sense that it's not a wine that I believe in, as evidenced by my notes. The thing is, the bottle I opened, my last bottle, was really good. Here's my note on that one:

9/17/2011: a very good bottle, showing the power and depth of the vintage, and also detail of fruit and mineral. there is some oak but it is not intrusive here. There is also a definite sense of place - the wine is made from plots formerly classified as Pommard and Volnay villages, and the wine reminds me of those places. oddly, it doesn't hold up so well on day 2, very curious.

I had several experiences with the wine, and formed several opinions. Which of them is true? You know what - I think they are all true. I was a different taster in early 2008, and the wine changed too. All of these notes reflect one thinking person's real experience with this wine. If someone asked me today to write a review of 2005 Domaine des Croix Bourgogne I would say that it has good qualities, and it has qualities that had concerned me, but a recent bottle was very good. I would say that in the context of regionally classified Burgundy, I was disappointed with this wine for a few years, but a recent bottle was very encouraging.

Would that kind of review satisfy you?

Imagine having to review this wine for a magazine or some sort of publication, having to score it based on one experience in 2008. Or 2009. How can one bottle of a wine, never mind one sip and spit at a tasting, provide sufficient information to assign the wine an absolute rating, a set of tasting notes that readers should accept as truth? If I am the reviewer, it is clear that one bottle is not close to being enough.

A few more recent experiences, just to illustrate how often this sort of thing happens to me:

--I drank a bottle of 2009 Huet Vouvray Sec Clos du Bourg the other night, a bottle that a friend brought to a restaurant. It was great, everything you could want from a young Huet. The only other bottle I drank came from my own cellar a few months ago and was not good. Dan Melia drank it with me and we both thought it was overripe, not focused, and unsatisfying.

--I drank a bottle of 2008 Alzinger Riesling Federspiel Dürnsteiner the other night. It was fantastic. I decanted it, as I've learned is very important with basically any Austrian white wine, and left most of it alone for about two hours. Delicate fruit, very mineral, perfect balance, absolutely delicious. The bottle I drank three weeks ago, though, was nowhere near as good. I didn't decant it, and it showed big and ripe and without much detail. Disappointing enough so that only three weeks later I was ready to cull this bottle from my cellar. Turns out that I wasted the first bottle - the wine is excellent if you handle it correctly, which I didn't do the first time.

--I drank a bottle of 2006 Michel Gahier Savagnin the other night. A friend brought it to my house for dinner. We liked it, but didn't love it. It was tasty but not complex, constricted, without energy. We re-corked it and moved on to other wines, I stuck it in the door of the fridge and forgot about it. A week later I found it, poured a glass, and it was great! Detailed, expressive, vibrant, completely delicious and intriguing.

So what is there to take from all of this?

1. Wine changes from bottle to bottle, and within the experience of drinking each bottle. We as tasters change and grow too. It is foolish to assume that one experience with a wine is the defining experience.
   
2. Wine ratings that arise from one tasting probably should not be relied upon, unless the critic is one of the incredibly rare people who actually has the depth and breadth of experience to understand the wine in its current state, and extrapolate from that state something meaningful about the wine as a whole. Those people are out there, but they are few.
   
3. Furthermore, reviews of wine that are based on tasting notes that describe specific flavors such as blackberry, smoke, peach, and things like that, those reviews are completely useless if you care about truly understanding a wine.
   
4. We are going to like some of the wines we drink. And then we will not like those same wines as much when we drink them again, or vice-versa. This will be disappointing and thrilling, and frustrating.
   

Probably the best thing to do is to have an open mind, to expect your opinions to change, to experiment a bit, to invest in yourself as a learner. I'm still trying to find my way in all of this, and I'm fine with that.

2010 - The Vintage of the Century !

Okay, now that I have your attention...

From the little that I have tasted so far, I think 2010 is going to be a fantastic vintage for many of the wines that I love to drink. I'm talking about Beaujolais, Muscadet, Chinon and the other Loire Valley sites. Fantastic in the sense that the wines will be both incredibly delicious and also very much true to themselves, highly expressive of place.

Think about these wines in 2009, for a minute. The wines are very ripe, full in body, and I've often thought that they do not express terroir as well as they do in the less ripe vintages. I'm not saying they are bad wines, or that I don't like them, or anything like that. I'm just saying that the average 2009 version of a wine that I typically love turns out not to be a style of wine that I love.

2010, however, seems to be a different story. I remember in the early spring at the Bowler portfolio tasting I spoke with Mathieu Baudry while tasting through his '09s. I told him that I was surprised at how ripe they were. He agreed, and said that while they are good wines, he is extremely excited about his 2010s. He said that they will show a perfect balance of fruit and soil characteristics, great acidity and balance, and a blend of power and grace. That sounds exciting, no?

Dan Melia of Mosel Wine Merchant told me that 2010 was a crazy vintage for Mosel Riesling with the highest acidity levels in years. He said that many producers had to de-acidify, and that some of the wines, even from big name producers, might be difficult. The producers who were able to handle the various challenges made truly great wines, he said, and he is very excited about a lot of the 2010s in his portfolio, including wines by Peter Lauer, Weiser-Küntsler, and others. Yes, he imports the wines and is expected to say that he likes them. But if you know Mosel Wine Merchant or Dan Melia, you wouldn't be thinking about that conflict because for them there is no such conflict, he says what he thinks about the wines.

Peter Liem in ChampagneGuide.net talks of 2010 as a very difficult vintage with prominent rot and other dreary weather problems. He says that he doubts there will be many vintage Champagnes made. But he also expresses a clear optimism for the vintage, saying that conscientious growers were able to harvest ripe fruit, and if they employed "strict, even ruthless triage" they were able to make quality wines.

Those are just stories about wines though. I've tasted just a wee bit and I must say that I have been blown away so far by the 2010 versions of some of my favorite wines. Here are two:

2010 Domaine de la Pépière Muscadet de Sèvre et Maine Sur Lie Clos des Briords, $16, Imported by Louis/Dressner Selections. I always love drinking Clos des Briords, but this is my favorite since 2007 or 2004 and I think I prefer it to them. The wine is simply great - it shows a wonderful blend of minerality, fruit, and acidity, everything in balance, and it is vibrantly expressive and intensely focused. Yes, it's a bit harsh now in its youth, but for me, it promises to be completely delicious and is absolutely and unmistakably Clos des Briords. If you like Muscadet, this is a wine to go long on.

2010 Coudert Fleurie Clos de la Roilette, $20, Imported by Louis/Dressner Selections. I hadn't even tasted the wine and I knew it was great, just the nose is enough. It is dark and meaty and herbal and cooling and completely harmonious. The palate offers great joy in its meaty and mineral-infused fruit, its slender frame, and its nuanced and detailed expression. It is grainy and tannic and still uncoiling, but this is exactly what excites me about Clos de la Roilette, and to me it is as good as young Beaujolais gets. I haven't tasted the Tardive yet and I'm excited...

I have no idea what 2010 will bring in the finished wines of Champagne, in Burgundy, in the Jura, or in the other places I love. But I have high hopes.

Old Vines - Understood via Txakoli

There are terms in wine that, for me anyway, can take on meaning simply because I hear them so often. Do I really understand, though? Maybe. Perhaps I just compile shades of meaning from the many contexts in which I hear the term used to form an understanding, an understanding that might not reflect the actual importance of the idea. To truly learn something, there is no substitute for hands-on experience.

Old vines is one of these wine terms, and the other night I had an experience that adds an important new layer to my understanding of why old vines are important. I was hanging out with my pal Dan Melia at Txikito, a Basque influenced tapas bar. We ate things like fresh peas with minted goat's milk and roasted tomato sauce, squid ribbons with pine nuts, crispy beef tongue, and fried silver fish with poached egg and arugula. We drank a bottle of one of my favorite white wines in the world, Ameztoi Getariako Txakolina. Although still relatively obscure, you've probably drunk or at least read about Txakoli, the lightly carbonated and refreshing wine made in Basque country, near the sea.

Although I have enjoyed every recent vintage of Ametoi's Txakolina, 2010, the current release, strikes me as a classic version of the wine. It's is not so much about fruit, more about minerals and sea air, a vague undercurrent of something like raw lentils. There is a sneaky intensity here too, something deep in the core of the wine. The wine is absolutely delicious and completely refreshing, and probably way too drinkable for its own good. The bartender at Txikito poured the wine in what I know now is the traditional style, in a high arc to aerate the wine, and through a little cap inserted into the bottle with two holes to control the stream.

We were having such a nice time, and the wine was so good that although we finished our bottle, we decided to have another glass before leaving. At the last minute I decided to try a different wine, the 2010 Uriondo Txakolina. Dan stuck with Ameztoi, and comparing these wines was illuminating.

Ameztoi's vines are in the Getariako appellation near the town of San Sebastian. Uriondo is a newer producer whose vines are in the neighboring appellation of Bizkaiko. Both wines are imported by the intrepid André Tamers of De Maison Selections, and based on the high quality of his selections in general, I would happily try anything he brings in. There are differences in terroir here about which I am ignorant, but the differences between these wines was rather stark. The aromas and flavors of the Uriondo veered towards lemon and cream and the texture was fuller. The wine was fine, although not special, and I thought the Ameztoi towers above it in quality.

We were wondering at this when Dan looked at me and said "This is the power of old vines. With really old vines you get physiological ripeness at lower potential alcohol levels, and you retain freshness and purity, you retain the essence of the wine."This makes a lot of sense to me. Ameztoi's vines are at least 80 years old, and the wine shows a great fineness of texture and clarity of aroma and flavor. It is merely 10.5% alcohol, and wonderfully fresh. The Uriondo vines are probably much younger, although I don't know for sure. But this wine was without the fineness, the articulation of the Ameztoi, and the alcohol actually jutted out a little bit at only 11.5%.

I suppose a better comparison would be Ameztoi's wine with a young vines version of the same wine, something that I doubt is produced. Still, it was an interesting experience that advanced my understanding of old vines - it's not just about taste and structure, it's also about what is physically possible in the vineyard.

Drinking Dönnhoff Young: Riesling and the Art of Minimal Sacrifice

A few weeks ago a sample box containing two bottles of wine showed up at my house. I never have high hopes when opening these things, but this one contained quite a treat - a bottle of 2008 Dönnhoff Oberhäuser Brücke Riesling Spätlese, about $50, Terry Theise Selections. It wasn't Theise or Skurnik who sent the samples, it was a group called Destination Riesling (and I originally mis-identified them as Rieslings of Europe).

I don't have a lot of experience drinking German Riesling, and if I were going to buy a Dönnhoff wine to experiment with, I would begin by reading a bit - perhaps Lyle's blog. And I definitely would have started with something a lot less expensive. Heck, I don't even know the Dönnhoff line-up, and whether or not this is one of the top sites. So I called my Riesling lovin' pal Dan Melia and he told me that this is indeed one of Dönnhoff's top wines, and that this particular bottle, the 2008, was actually his favorite wine during a recent visit to the Dönnhoff estate.

Nice! I should tuck this away for a decade or more and one day it will be brilliant. But wait a minute...Wouldn't that be kind of silly, in this case? First of all, it is a sample, and meant for me to drink in the near term, not a decade from now. Also, if I don't understand the wine when it's young, what will I gain from drinking it when it's more mature, or "better" than it is now? There would be nothing to compare it to. So I decided to drink the wine, and the only question was when.

And then on a recent evening, without a whole lot in the fridge, I made a simple dinner that is a monthly staple in our house - firm tofu with celery, carrot, and onion in fiery hot chili and fermented soybean sauce. We had no beer, which is probably best with this dish. But we did have a great young bottle of Spätlese Riesling.

What can I say - the wine was absolutely delicious. Such clarity, such a harmonious package of aromas and flavors. And although there have to be 80 grams of residual sugar here, and the alcohol is only 8.5%, this wine drinks as though it is dry. What I mean is that the sensation is not one of sweetness, although it is a sweet wine. It is balanced perfectly by acidity and feels lush and ripe, energetic. And I loved how on day 2 the wine showed a complex brown baking spices and earthy tone.

I was thinking about drinking this wine young, and wondering what I missed out on by not waiting. I remembered talking with Dan about this, and something very interesting that he said (which I will now present as a direct quote, when in fact I am paraphrasing):

Neil, let me begin by saying how much I like that shirt you're wearing. Now, about Riesling...I think that you sacrifice less when you drink Riesling young than you do with any other grape. Of course good Riesling changes a lot as it ages - the fruit recedes a bit, the sweetness recedes a bit, the specific mineral and soil character becomes more prominent. But good Riesling is delicious young, and there's nothing wrong with drinking it that way. It's not like a lot of other wines that can be closed or hard when young. It's a personal preference thing. There is no best time to drink good Riesling, and I hesitate to answer when people ask me to tell them the prime drinking window for a certain wine. It really depends on how you like your Riesling.

I would be tempted to dismiss this as typical wine business clap-trap that urges me to drink wine quickly, so then I of course have to buy more wine. But Dan bears no resemblance to the people who adopt that strategy in answering wine questions. This was his thoughtful response, before I drank the wine, when I asked him when I should drink it. It's an interesting idea - Riesling as great wine for young drinking in terms of minimal sacrifice.

Weissbier

My friend Dan Melia came for dinner the other night. We ate and drank well - Sherry while finishing up the cooking and a great Bandol rosé with broiled Spanish Mackerel. But the most memorable thing we drank, for me, was Weissbier. Several different Weissbiers, in fact.

I won't try to create a story here where there really isn't one. I don't know anything about beer, never mind Weissbier. I know that I've had bad sweet Weissbier (often served with that odd wedge of lemon), and I've had good versions. The good ones are fruity but they also are complex and bitter and well balanced.

What is Weissbier? It is a German term for beer that is made using wheat, either instead of or in large proportion along with barley. In Germany Weissbier is unfiltered, unless it is called "kristallweizen," which means clear wheat - it is filtered. I've seen this kind of beer before but never tried it, and I'm not sure that I understand the appeal. One of the best things about a delicious Weissbier is the funky flavorful yeast that sits on the bottom of the bottle and the cloudy texture that always feels just a bit chewy to me. Filtered wheat beer? That would be like drinking decaf, or cooking with margarine. What kind of crazy person would do such a thing?

Anyway...we drank four Weissbiers on that evening. I poured tastes of the first two and Dan, who spends a lot of time in Germany gave me this "you are so pathetic" smile, and relieved me of pouring duty. Here is where I learned some truly important things about Weissbier. You want to make sure that the yeast at the bottom is mixed with the beer and included in the glass. No delicate pouring like I was doing. Dan dumped the beer into our glasses, stopping to swirl the yeast when the bottle was nearly empty, and then poured the rest. Dan said that Weissbier is never served on tap in Germany - there would be no way to include the yeast. It's always served in bottle. Hmmm. There's a neighborhood place that I enjoy going to for dinner mostly because I can drink Weihenstefaner on tap. Scratch that place off my list, thanks Dan.

Hopf and Schönram Weizens are approximately $8.00 for a bit more than a pint. These are aromatic and bright beers that very well complemented our spicy food (details on the food in a coming post). Both were delicious, although we slightly preferred the spicy complexity of the Schönramer Festweisse. We then sampled two dark Weissbiers. That's right, dark wheat beers, called dunkels. Franziskaner and Weihenstefaner were both less expensive at about $4.00 for a pint-plus, and they also were nowhere near as interesting. They were very good beers, but they lacked the energy and cut of the "regular" Weissbiers. Grain of salt: I drank the Weihenstefaner a week ago without any other beer to compare it to and I loved it, so go figure.

It's funny how when I was at Bierkraft browsing for beer, I remember thinking "Wow, $8.00 for just over a pint of beer, that's not cheap." But compared to what you might spend on a bottle of wine of similar quality, it is very inexpensive.

We had a ball sampling these beers with our dinner, and although you may not read about it here, I have a funny feeling that there is more Weissbier in my immediate future. Last thing I'll tell you - as Dan left he made me promise to check out the video of the special mechanism he uses for pouring Weissbier when he's in the comfort of his own home:

Four Rieslings - a Long and Winding Road

The other night BrooklynLady and I went to dinner at Vinegar Hill House with Peter Liem and Dan Melia. We had a great time and I thought the place essentially lived up to the hype. Forgotten New York neighborhood, lovely decor, even if painstakingly mussed like a Williamsburg cool-cat's hair. Appetizers were fantastic, the rest of the food very good too, everyone was happy. And someone over there loves wine, because there are many enticing things on that list at fair prices.

While we were waiting for our table, and part of the way into our appetizers, we drank 2007 Romano Clelia Fiano di Avellino,"Colli di Lapio". Fiano is something that Levi Dalton has poured for me several times now, and he feels that it offers perhaps the best raw material of any white grape in Italy. This wine was so well made, and just delicious, vibrant and well balanced. And my last smokey sip was a ridiculously good match with grilled charred octopus. Our 1998 López de Heredia, Gran Riserva Tondonia Rosado showed beautifully too, and worked with everything on the table. Fleshy, oxidative, focused, pure, this wine is its own special thing and if you haven't yet had it, at about $25 retail it's just spiteful of you to continue not trying it. Especially now after a year or so since release - this wine has never shown better. We moved onto the 2007 Agnès et René Mosse Anjou Les Bonnes Blanches, and I'm just not a fan. I know that all the cool-cats love Mosse, and they are darlings of the natural wine scene, but for me the wines are hit or miss. This one showed a lot of volatility and simply wasn't very interesting, but it didn't matter - Opici "Chablis" couldn't have darkened our mood at that point.

Dinner with company like this is always great, but on this particular evening there was a nice little ancillary benefit. Dan arrived right from work, and his work is selling Mosel Wine Merchant Riesling. He schlepped 20 wines with him in a crumby red Toyota Tacoma (it might be in perfect condition for all I know, but in my mind's eye it's crumby) to Prune and TriBeCa Terroir and Blue Angel, and lots of traffic and other hassles later, he arrived at my house. He brought four great Rieslings with him for us to enjoy as apertifs, and then tired of the schlepping, Dan left the bottles with me. How cool is that?

These were all 2008's, all harvested at the Spätlese ripeness level, but they are all dry wines. Well, only two of them are technically trocken wines, but the other two drink as if they are dry wines. These are some of the top wines from each producer and it was quite a treat to enjoy them over the next few days. A few notes to follow, but since I have precious little experience with Riesling, my notes aren't all that interesting. What I can tell you, is that as a group, these wines have a common thread. They are remarkably pure, they are delicate and detailed, they have great intensity and length, and they are very much of the soil. They are great wines, and if they were Burgundies, they would cost upwards of $75. But they are dry German Rieslings, they typically require the hand sell, and none of them will run you more than $35 - honestly, a bargain.

2008 Peter Lauer Saar Ayler Kupp Riesling Fass 12 Unterstenbersch, $35, Mosel Wine Merchant. I suppose if I had to pick a favorite, this would be it. A bit of sponti natural yeast fermentation musk on the nose, deeply earthy and mineral too. Pure, vibrant, sweet fruit, a delicate springwater feel to the wine, but also intense and with great length. The thing that killed me about this wine is that is so intense and still is a wine of such finesse. Lauer is not using the typical German wine language, and the label says nothing about must weight at harvest or dryness level. Instead, Lauer describes the terroir, in this case at the bottom of a south-facing slope just west of the Saar river, from 50-year-old vines.

2008 Clemens Busch Vom Roten Schiefer, about $28, Mosel Wine Merchant. Vom Roten Schiefer means "from red slate," and Clemens Busch is also avoiding ripeness and dryness on the label, in favor of a statement about terroir. Again, amazing purity, a creamy sense to the wine, a bit doughy and spicy. I took a sip of this wine and then, rather unglamorously, had to go and change my older daughter's pull-up (a diaper for the mostly potty-trained to wear while sleeping, for you non parents out there). As I leaned over her on the changing table, amidst several other pungent aromas, she asked if I had been eating bread! The finish

is all herbs and rocks and bitter pits and the length honestly is rather startling. This wine is not yet available in the US, but it will be soon. A bit more about it here, from Lars at Mosel Wine Merchant.

2008 Stein St. Aldegunder Palmberg-Terrassen Spätlese-trocken, $26, Mosel Wine Merchant. Perhaps the most delicate of the lot, this wine also showed the most overt fruit - lots of apricots. Very pure and fine, intensely mineral, and the creamy mid-palate merges with the very mineral finish that lasts forever and buzzes with some sort of herbal honey. Such a delicious wine.

2008 Knebel Winninger Röttgen Spätlese-trocken, $36, Mosel Wine Merchant. More muscular than the others, more concentration. Also a bit more fruit on the nose, with green melon, but still a wine of rocks and bread. Energy, depth, finesse, purity - I've said the same thing about each of these wines, but it's true of each. One more thing I can tell you - this wine had already been open for 48 hours when I mistakenly left about a glass in the bottle, same for the Stein wine, overnight and out of the fridge with no stopper. And the next day at 1 pm they both were excellent with our fluke lunch.

An Evening with the People and the Wines of Mosel Wine Merchant

Lars Carlberg and Dan Melia, the two fine gentlemen of Mosel Wine Merchant, are in town this week with a few of the growers they represent. They hosted a dinner last night at Prune in the East Village, and I was lucky enough to attend.
I know so tremendously little about German Riesling that it simply wouldn't be proper for me to try to discuss the wines in a meaningful way - I have no context to share with you, nothing to say about them other than how delicious they are. And they are very delicious.

Instead, I can tell you a few things about Lars and Dan, and the work they're doing. Mosel WIne Merchant is not a large company. It's Lars and Dan - that's it. They're a couple of smart, well-educated, well-traveled, genuinely kind fellows who love wine, particularly Mosel Riesling. They could be doing many things that would probably be far more lucrative, but they run this little company together, bringing naturally made, small production Mosel Riesling to the US and other markets. They really believe in these wines, and it's easy to understand why after drinking them with dinner.

Lars grew up partly in Germany and partly in the US - he lives in Germany now and runs all of Mosel Wine Merchant's European operations. Dan managed Prune for 8 years and left to travel in Germany. He's completely fluent in German - "his German is better than mine now," says Lars. Dan is the guy who schleps the wines all over NYC and the rest of the country, making sure that we have the chance to buy them in retail shops.

Dan, left, and Lars, with 2007 Lauer Kern magnum.

I sat next to Mattias Knebel at dinner. As he poured the first of his wines, the absolutely delicious 2008 Mosel Riesling von den Terrassen trocken, $20, I told him how much I enjoy his most basic wine, the humble 2008 Mosel Riesling trocken, $14. Matthias turned to me and smiled and said "I love making that wine. It's from our estate grapes, spontaneous fermentation, I make it the same way I make all my wines. We make no money on it at all, but I love it." The $14 Riesling Trocken is excellent wine, absolutely of its place, and should be part of everyone's under $15 wine repertoire. But the von den Terrassen is a serious step up for a few dollars more, with an expansive nose of ripe fruit and rock, and an ultra-clean palate that continued to grow even as we finished the bottle. It was perfect with seared monkfish liver finished in lemon and soy.

Matthias Knebel

The 2007's were lovely and interesting wines, but might now be entering a shutdown phase. The 2008's were showing beautifully, ripe but controlled, pure and elegant, and with a great balance of fruit and mineral. I loved drinking Knebel's 2008 Röttgen trocken next to his 2008 Uhlen trocken, the more muscular and concentrated Röttgen working perfectly with marrow bones and rock salt, while the wipsy and graceful Uhlen was delicious with a Parmesan omelet. I don't know how much those wines cost, but I would eagerly welcome both of them into my cellar. They drink so well now that it seems a shame to age them for 20 years, which Lars assures me is a great thing to do with these wines.

Lauer's Rieslings were also delicious. They seemed to me to be more ethereal and less concentrated than Knebel's wines. There was a 2005 Lauer Kern with a mature and mellow nose that initially showed some peach and floral elements, but after 15 minutes in the glass, had morphed into liquid slate. There were two sparkling wines by Lauer that I thought were great. It's not often than inexpensive sparkling wines show textural finesse and elegance, and these wines were both wonderfully textured. The current release was lovely, with a good balance of fruit and mineral character, but the 1994 Sekt Reserve was for me, one of the wines of the night. Disgorged in December (although the label says March), it was fresh and lively. Changing constantly in the glass, it was about the bitterness of the pit and the saltiness of rocks, with this great lacy texture. I was sorry to see it go.

Lars, Dan, and the growers are in NYC this week sharing their wines and stories at places like Chambers Street Wines, Uva, and Crush. These are good people doing good things, and their wines taste great and are reasonably priced. If you can make it to one of these tastings, you really should.