riesling

Welcome Wagon

by whitney on April 2, 2013

This is what a New Orleans welcome wagon looks like, population 1.

I was the first person to arrive to our sweet little cottage in the Garden District last week. I had a handful of hours alone to explore the neighborhood and prepare some snacks for my sure-to-be-hungry friends. Wine was also on the shopping list. Duh. I googled ‘wine shop’ and found a place called Martin Cellars about 5 blocks away. Hooray! I approached with low expectations, thinking I would have to settle for some wine I possibly didn’t want to drink. But, not true!

I grabbed a bottle of 2011 Leitz Eins Zwei Dry Riesling and scored the last bottle of Occhinpinti SP68 red. They also had a nice cheese selection and some dang good pickled green beans, so I snapped those up too. One stop shop!  I did have to hit up one other spot to complete the cheese board and that spot was local grocery store Breaux Mart, for a big bag of limited edition baby back rib flavored Zapp’s. You heard me! Ain’t no shame in my Zapp’s game.

A Tale of Two Tables

by whitney on November 29, 2012

I had dinner with my lovely friend Sally Kim last night! She was back in town from Toronto, where she’s running the wine program at Terroni and its sister restaurants. We decided to meet up at Papilles for a delicious French-inspired dinner. We sat on one side of the dining room…and her boyfriend and his bros sat on the other. Has anyone gone this route before when in a relationship? I actually think it’s kind of genius.

We had girl talk time and were able to catch up, but we all shared wine and leftovers between tables. Sally brought along some 2008 Moreau Vielles Vignes Chassagne-Montrachet and Sally’s guy Hershy came through with a magnum of 2003 Erben von Beulwitz Kaseler Nies’chen Spätlese Riesling.

The Riesling was beautiful with the foie gras. I mean. Um. We totally didn’t have any illegal foie gras with fresh figs and warm toast. Not at all.

But seriously, single sex co-dining is the new double date.


J.J. Prum

by whitney on October 10, 2012

The Mosel finale. The Last (Riesling) Supper. The Holy Trinity. This is getting religious y’all. I mean, I DID have a heavenly experience. Tis cheesy, but true.

The final day of German wine fun included 3 visits: Willi SchaeferMonchhof and J.J. Prüm. So glorious! I thought I’d wrap up these past few weeks of German wine posts by sharing the time we spent tasting at Prüm. OK- the facts. The Prüm estate was founded in 1911 in Bernkastel-Wehlen in the Mosel. They make 100% Riesling (99% sweet, only 1 trocken) from 21 hectares of their own vineyards. The wines ferment spontaneously and, since the 90’s, the wines spend time only in steel and fiberglass, no wood.

Hey J.J., what’s happening my man?

J.J.’s grandson Manfred is running the show nowadays. His lovely wife, Amei, spent a few hours sitting and talking with us, pouring wine and just being an all around delight.

We were able to taste wines from the same vineyard in different vintages and sweetness levels as well as various vineyard sites within the same vintage. Such an interesting comparison of soil types and to see how those wines evolve as well. Their vineyards are Himmelreich in Graach and Sonnenuhr in Wehlen and to be able to taste the wines in this way was such a treat.

My overall impression is that these wines are built to last and I am salivating/foaming at the mouth to try some of the older vintages. Like way older, since we only went as far back as 2007. The wines have curve and texture but brilliant mineral intensity and acidity. Aromatically, they surprised me with a kind of exotic and mysterious complexity that I hadn’t quite experienced on the trip.

You guys might be getting sick of all this Riesling talk by now, so I’m giving it a break for a bit. But, I’m still craving the stuff like crazy. This is the only wine trip I’ve ever been on when I leave a week of tasting a particular wine day in and day out and still want more. Hopefully this inspires you to get on the Riesling bandwagon, if you aren’t already.

I’ll see you there.

Wein & Tafelhaus

by whitney on September 27, 2012

Can life just be one big dinner around a table with friends, good food and good wine? Can we just go ahead and make that a thing? The world might be a happier place. One of my happy places while in Germany was sitting around this candle-lit table at Wein & Tafelhaus in Trittenheim, Mosel.

The menu had been planned, but the wine had not and with a large list in front of us we decided to explore a winemaker we weren’t able to visit during our time in Germany- A.J. Adam. We settled on his 2008 Dhron Hofberg Feinherb Riesling. Feinherb and the 2008 vintage, two of my new best friends.

Feinherb is a category of non-VDP Riesling that hovers somewhere around the halbtrocken (half dry) zone. It’s the money spot for me, just a hint of sugar weight and fruit but still refreshing and mouth-watering. It is, in a word, balance. Obsessed.

This particular Feinherb was freaking fantastic. But, I mean, every A.J. Adam wine I’ve had has been superb. The 2008 was drinking so well- there was purity, depth, texture, length and a kind of dancing acidity. I always know a wine is good when I try to become some kind of tasting note poet. I’ll spare you the actual things I wrote in my notebook.

We had a dish later that night that will stay in my taste bud memory for life. Local venison with wild cherry sauce and carrot puree with wasabi foam. Don’t hate on the foam. It seemed like an odd assemblage of flavors, but it was really good. That meat was just about the closest thing to perfect you can get. Fresh and cooked down to the second of tenderness. I will forever be searching for another piece of meat like that.

Life! It’s a really delicious place sometimes.

Willi Schaefer

by whitney on September 23, 2012

One of my favorite visits of the Germany trip? This one. Willi Schaefer. Graach, Mosel. Baller status.

On our last day, perhaps my favorite day of all, we spent our hours in the heart of the Mosel visiting three fantastic winemakers. Willi Shaefer was our second stop of the day and an eye opener. Literally, my eyes might have been slightly too wide to look normal for an extended amount of time during the visit.

We drove up to the Dompropst vineyard, which houses some of Schaefer’s 4 total hectares of land, and checked out a crap ton of blue slate, talked crazy inclines, pH and the Mosel-Heart. Background info: the estate has been in Willi’s family since 1121, the winery is named after his grandfather, current Willi started making wine in 1971 and his son Christoph (middle name Willi) stepped in to help in 2002.

We headed back down to the cellar and got to tasting. The wine below is probably the best Grosses Gewachs I tasted all week. Since, you know, I am an authority on all things GG. I didn’t really know exactly what Grosses Gewachs was until I got to Germany.

Willi made only one fuder (foudre) of this wine, which holds 1,000 liters. That’s around 1,300 bottles or 111 cases. Nothing! It was the purest of the pure in both slate-y minerality and fruit. Talia said, quite accurately and poetically, that the wine was “so pure, it is just pulling you through it.”

The Schaefer’s ferment with native yeasts, age on the gross lees for a handful of months and then on the fine lees for a few more after that, use a mixture of stainless steel and cask and add sulfur after fermentation and not again.

We got a little lucky. Willi said he had a bottle of his son’s birth year Beerenauslese (1976) open and would we like to taste? Yeah, we would. Such a treat to be able to see a Riesling like this as it can be, how it changes and evolves with time. The aromatics were so complex- savory, sweet, earthy, tangy, spicy, leafy. Tasting it, the acidity-fruit-minerality-sweetness marriage was seamless.

Before we left, we headed downstairs for a peek at the Super Special Schaefer cellar, home to a lot of really old stuff that anyone would kill to get their hands on. It’s like a library of deliciousness. And mold. But amazing mold.

Praise be to the Willi. Halleluyer.

Eva Fricke

by whitney on September 18, 2012

After a failed flight attempt and a 24 hour delayed start to my trip, I was beyond happy to have a walk through the vineyards and dinner with Eva Fricke to look forward to soon after my arrival. You know what’s extremely cool about German winemakers? They like to take you through the vineyard while pouring you wine. Kill two birds with one glass. Super fantastisch!

Eva’s vineyards are in Lorch in the Rheingau region, which is just about where the Rhine river meets the Main river. She makes Riesling and only Riesling and aims most importantly for purity in her wines, which she certainly achieves.  While working as cellarmaster at Leitz for 7 years and beginning her own namesake project in 2006, she is now finally on her own with 4 hectares of vines, some as old as 60 years. She farms organically, ferments with native yeast (in addition to neutral Champagne yeasts when needed) and ferments/ages in stainless steel.

She makes some single vineyard bottlings and hopes to exclusively do so in the near future. Eva is intensely curious about her vineyards, their soils and how she can make the best wine possible for those sites. She says, in recent years, that she’s had an “awakening awareness to nature.” I can’t wait to see what she has in store for all of us in the coming years! This is just the beginning.

After our vineyard fun, we settled ’round the dinner table at Franz Keller’s Adler Wirstchaft in Hattenheim. Eva brought the bottles, those guys brought the eats and mother nature brought that perfect dusk light.

First of all, how lovely is Eva? Really lovely. Can we just get that out of the way? She is all sunshine, quiet smiles and elegant Riesling.


This tomato dish was a surprisingly good match with some of Eva’s Rieslings. The versatility of Riesling was just beginning to show itself to me on this trip!

Many of us were really impressed by the 2011 Lorcher Krone Trocken. Krone is the vineyard site and Lorcher is the way of saying that it is in the town of Lorch. Just FYI. Krone has some of her oldest vines and the depth and concentration is palpable. The vibrancy, saltiness and freshness of her wines were the main things that made a lasting overall impression.

Thank you Eva for sharing your time, your wines and your passion.

To Spritz or Not to Spritz

by whitney on July 5, 2012

There are some days when I only want to drink Riesling. That’s the only thing that will do, my mouth literally waters for the stuff. July 4th happened to be one of those days and it also happened to be a day when pre-lunch hour drinking was perfectly acceptable. I wanted to get my poolside drink on, but not be three sheets several hours before fireworks even began. Not cute. Light bulb! Wine spritzer.

Introducing my friends San Pellegrino and Selbach 2011 “Incline” Riesling. This wine is a sort of entry-level offering from a really fantastic German winery in the Mosel, Selbach-Oster. It’s under $15 and is quite the drinker for not a lot of cash money. High acid, just a tiny touch of residual sugar, really focused and pure. Great on it’s own, of course, but also a good base for…a spritzer. So shoot me.

Some people might think this wine spritzer thing a taboo. Is it? In the words of the late, great Whitney Houston- “hell to the no.” Guidelines: 1. Don’t spend more than $15 on the wine, 2. Make sure it is fresh, light and unoaked (white or rosé), 3. Go with a 1:1 ratio, then it doesn’t seem like the wine is too watery or the water too wine-y. Make sense? Carry on!

Further wine spritzer inspiration: NY Times

The Summer of Riesling

by whitney on July 8, 2011

On my whirlwind trip to New York, there were a few must-see/drink/do situations on my itinerary. Going to Terroir for a crap ton of riesling was one of them. I have no pictures of my time hunkered down at the bar with several glasses in front of me, but this is what came with my check…
The truly amazing and wonderfully wacky Paul Grieco of Hearth and Terroir, of course, began his crusade for riesling back in the summer of 2008. He proclaimed it a Summer of Riesling and presented a wine list where every white wine by the glass would be riesling and riesling only. In its 4th year, it is still going strong and has even spread across the country. Wanna see Paul and Frank Bruni chatting it up and sipping on riesling?

 

The man behind the Terroir Twitter account (terroirNY who are you mystery man??) responded to my need for extra hours in the day to be able to get to all of the amazing wine bars and restaurants I wanted/desperately needed to check out. He proposed the following genius idea: “COMING SOON: Grieco Rickshaws AKA @ubriaca cycle.”

Someone NEEDS to make this happen. It’s a multi-hundred dollar business opportunity! If you live in New York or are planning on visiting, please head to Terroir.  After all, it is “the elitist wine bar for everyone.” And when you thought it couldn’t get any better, there is…drumroll, please….a Summer of Riesling Cruise! I swear to God.