Home | Stuart Pigotts Planet Wine

Time 2020-10-31 06:02:50

Web Name: Home | Stuart Pigotts Planet Wine

WebSite: http://www.stuartpigott.de

ID:100092

Keywords:

Stuart,Home,Pigotts,

Description:

At 10:29am this morning it became clear that the story I was planning to post here will have to wait for another day. That’s when the Wine + Partners press release announcing the resignation of Weingut F.X.Pichler in Oberloiben from the Vinea Wachau wine producers association they co-founded in 1983 landed in my email and the shit hit the fan. The determination of winemaker Lucas Pichler (pictured above with his wife Johanna) to focus on place of origin and the character deriving from it, aka terroir, as the defining feature of his wines lead to a fundamental disagreement with Vinea Wachau and this radical step. The situation demands immediate explanation, because I think it represents a change of direction for the region no less important than that of 1983.37 years ago the Wachau producers acted to protect the integrity and reputation of their region. There was also the pressing need to give consumers clear orientation to increase their confidence in the wines’ authenticity. For all these reasons three patented designations for exclusive use by Vinea Wachau’s members were introduced: Steinfeder (light-bodied dry wines); Federspiel (medium-bodied dry wines); Smaragd (full-bodied dry wines). Since then, those names have been learned by sommeliers and wine lovers right around Planet Wine.Simultaneously, chaptalization – the addition of sugar to must and/or fermenting wine to increase the alcoholic content – was banned for all wines bearing these designations. Here, I must point out that back in the Wachau of the 1980s it often wasn’t possible to pick grapes with 13% potential alcohol, in fact, in some vintages even 12% natural alcohol was rare!“The Heurigen isclosed today,” the wiry winegrower said to me dryly and I wondered if I wouldget the chance to taste his wines. Then he invited me to follow him down asteep stone staircase. In the dim light of the cellar between large old woodenbarrels his deeply furrowed face spoke of enormous determination. With a glasspipette, the form of which spoke of an earlier century, he carefully drew asample of white wine from one of the barrels, then presented me with some of thewine in a tall-stemmed wine glass.“Riesling RiedSteinertal” he said in a professional tone. The wine had an incredibly subtlebouquet and tasted as clear as a bell; an image of ferns surrounding awaterfall popped into my mind. “Riesling Ried Oberhauser” quickly followed, andthis second wine was much richer with a seductive apricot aroma.As you can see from this true fairy tale, terroir and the striving for truly exceptional quality were the twin obsessions of Franz Xaver Pichler. The wines he made during those years redefined what dry Riesling could be and established new benchmarks for those wines. It was really exciting to follow all that during my frequent visits to the region and I often purchased small quantities of wine for my cellar. I still have bottles of Kellerberg Riesling from F.X.Pichler going back to 1994. Of course, I wasn’t the only one who was excited, and their reputation grew during those years in leaps and bounds. Sometimes there was literally a queue outside that gate waiting to buy wine!By the time the 1994 Kellerberg Riesling was released every wine expert, along with everyone who thought they were a wine expert, had an opinion about the F.X. Pichler wines. Some preferred the Steinertal Riesling or the Loibenberg to the Kellerberg, while others were obsessed with one or other of their Grüner Veltliners. This was understandable because they all tasted so strikingly different, and wine drinkers’ personal preferences differ too. However, it wasn’t difficult to find naysayers who would tell you the F.X. Pichler wines were totally overrated. Franz Xaver and his wife Rudolfine relished the controversy, knowing that it only made them better known.During the late 1990s Lucas Pichler became ever more closely involved in the family estate and it wasn’t long before he had to suffer those determined to tell the story of how the son wasn’t as great a winemaker as his father. It was all bullshit and many fans rushed to Lucas’ defense. Roughly ten years later the situation repeated itself when the modernistic new F.X. Pichler cellar was built. Now, Lucas really is in the spotlight.The root of the current situation lies in the painful truth that the world has changed. The new climatic situation means there’s no longer any problem harvesting grapes with 13% or more potential alcohol in the Wachau. You just wait a bit longer before picking. Additionally, within the German-speaking wine world the focus has shifted completely away from grape sugar content as the defining principal of wine quality to place of origin. This is also usually divided into three categories: region; village; single-vineyard. Here I’m thinking particularly of the German designation GG or Großes Gewächs for dry single-vineyard wines at the top of the VDP classification, and the Austrian equivalents EL or Erste Lage for dry single-vineyard wines at the pinnacle of the Österreichische Traditionsweingüter classification. Both are translations of the French Grand Cru and function as such in the marketplace; a hard fact that can’t be ignored without peril.The introduction in the Wachau of the DAC regulations with the 2020 vintage Austria’s version of France’s appellation d origine contrôlée laws that focus on “classic” grape varieties and place of origin brought things to a head. For Lucas Pichler, “the introduction of the DAC designations would have been the right moment for a modernization of the Vinea Wachau regulations, for example, by limiting the Smaragd designation to the top sites, or doing away with the three Wahau categories that climate change has made obsolete.” None of this happened, and with the support and his wife and parents, Lucas has taken the decision to stick his neck out. I suggest the sensational quality of his dry single-vineyard dry wines from the 2019 vintage is a strong argument in favor of his decision. Trink is a new online magazine about German-speaking wines founded by American writer duo Paula Redes Sidore and Valerie Kathawala. At their invitation I took part in the second of their #TrinkTalks on Zoom recently. So did London-based writer on german-speaking wine subjects Anne Kebiehl MW and New York Times wine critic Eric Asmiov. The latter asserted that the reason German wines don’t have a better image in the US is the widespread perception of Riesling – Germany’s signature wine grape – as a sweet wine, though today the great majority of German wines are dry. He prescribed education as the cure, but I’m convinced there’s an additional problem that’s yet more fundamental. Let me explain:None of the experts dispute that the best drywhites from Germany are world class wines, yet, with a small number ofexceptions, they continue to struggle for recognition in America. Why? Let’s take two bottles of a top dry German wine, for example, the Morstein GG (German for Grand Cru) from Wittmann in Westhofen/ Rheinhessen; one of the new wine classics of Germany (typically under $100 retail). We decant one of the Morsteins into an empty Burgundy bottle, say, the delicious Corton Charlemagne Grand Cru from Coche-Dury (around $4,000 retail if you can find it). Experience of many such comparisons tells me that most American wine lovers will prefer the Morstein in the bottle with the French label to the one in the original flute bottle, so the fundamental problem for the wines of Germany is not taste, but their national identity.The image problem of German wine is rooted in the perception of Germany as a wrong wine location by a majority of Americans regardless of the facts regarding climate, soils, the winemaker s ability and commitment and all other factors that actually determine wine character and quality. It’s often supposed national and other stereotype must be frequently and clearly expressed to have a serious effect on the way people think and behavior, but my training as a cultural historian taught me that stereotypes beneath the waterline of easy audibility and visibility can still exert a pervasive influence upon the way we think about people and things.The widespread belief that the Germans are excellent engineers, efficient technicians and excellent bureaucrats, but humorless people lacking in sensuality makes it hard for most Americans to imagine that they could make great wines. This stereotype is neither the product of experience nor the result of rational enquiry, yet it is rarely doubted, much less challenged.The reality of modern Germany is physically and experientially far removed from the majority of Americans, even well-educated Americans, and therefore cannot disturb or disrupt the deeply rooted Groupthink that shaped this stereotype over decades and continues to shape it. For most Americans France is romantic Paris,Christian Dior, Coco Channel, Paul Bocuse, cheese, truffles and wine. That’s amassive contrast to the automobiles, engineering, punctuality, order, sausagesand beer association with Germany. There’s no hint of romance anywhere inthere!For those Americans who watch TV Germany is the mythicalhome of the Ultimate Driving Machine, because that’s been the slogan of BMW’sTV ads for many years. How could the creators of the automotive equivalent ofthe Terminator possibly be hedonistic, funny or sexy?German supermodels like Claudia Schiffer and Heidi Klum might seem to contradict this image, but they became famous through association with non-Germanic cultures. Young Claudia Schiffer reminded everybody of the French Brigitte Bardot back in 1987 when she had her breakthrough in Elle Magazine and she still does. Heidi Klum’s already looked like an All American Girl in her breakthrough photos in Sports Illustrated Magazine in 1998, since when she became ever more Americanized in appearance.The tendency for German immigrants to integrate in America in a way that de-Germanizes them goes back to shortly before 1917 when the US entered WW! and grew enormously from 1941 when the US entered WWII. It would be possible to write a substantial work of history about this largely undocumented aspect of American culture.Of course, Americans sometimes encounter exceptionsto their stereotype of the Germans, but this rarely results their expectationschanging, because the stereotype is so deeply ingrained. Only direct experienceof Germany, for example of the New Berlin, seems to do that.Recent events have begun to shift perceptions ofGermany in America and some American journalists have gone out of their way totry and tell the truth about contemporary Germany, yet wider public perception continuesto lag far behind the reality.Let us imagine a transgender woman winemaker in Germany who is funny, sensual and emotional, and that her wines wonderfully reflect her personality. In liberal and cosmopolitan New York City she ought to have a great chance of becoming the talk of the town. However, I fear there would be one obstacle to that and it would be neither her gender nor her sexual orientation. It would be the fact she’s German. If she were French or Italian, then she would have it so much easier! By the way, she exists and her name is Simona Maier and she lives in Mühlhausen/Baden close to Hiedelberg. Why should all this occur to me? I lived in New York City for 4 years from the fall of 2012 and before that I’d spent at least another year traveling in the US. During that time my interest in German wines and culture frequently surprised many of the Americans I met and sometimes caused consternation. As a trained cultural historian I did a lot of thinking about all this and investigated the history of how Germany, the Germans and their wines were perceived in the US. I lived in Germany for 20 years before that, and live there again now. I have spent almost my entire adult life with one foot in one culture and one foot in another. As a result this kind of reflection come naturally to me. These observation are not moral judgments of any kind. Tasting for JamesSuckling.com is demanding work, but often a lot of fun too!The cancellation of major trade events such as ProWein Dusseldorf in March, the largest annual trade fair on Planet Wine, then Vinitaly and the Mainzer Weinbörse in April created huge problems for the wine trade and media this year. Even Bordeaux’s 2019s have had to work extra hard to win the attention they deserve. Unable to travel to Bordeaux to taste the 2019 vintage from barrel as he’d normally do, James Suckling had cask samples air-freighted to him in Hong Kong and was able to taste more than 1,000 wines for his comprehensive 2019 Bordeaux report. Check out those reports for some of the most extensive coverage: James Suckling with one of his collection of Cuban art at his home in TuscanyEven domestically Germany’s exciting 2019 vintage received scant media attention. This is a great shame, because on the basis of the small number of 2019 Rieslings I’ve tasted so far, the new vintage has everything I look for in great German wines: impressive ripeness and concentration, racy brilliance, minerality and subtlety. There may be a few overblown wines out there due to the unusual harvest weather – a very warm southerly wind in mid-October 2019 pushed both ripeness and the development of noble rot – but so far, I haven’t encountered them. With the current economic crisis nobody in Germany is going to increase prices, so this looks like a great buying opportunity. There’s a limit to how much wine a single critic can taste, so James Suckling has asked me to cover this year’s new releases in Germany. I was a member of the JamesSuckling.com tasting team from September 2016 through March 2019 and was a Senior Editor at the end of that period. As well as leading coverage of the wines of Germany and Austria, I also tasted with James in France, Spain, Italy, Chile, Argentina, and California and reported on the wines from the US states east of the West Coast. I left the company to work as a consultant for the Gut Hermannsberg (GHB) estate, one of the leading producers in the Nahe region of Germany. Of course, there’s a conflict of interest there, so James will taste the GHB wines for the report. I will also take a month’s unpaid leave from GHB during August, when I will undertake the tastings and visits necessary for the report. Before making this announcement,I spoke with a number of leading producers in Germany and all of them weresupportive. They’re delighted that James is determined to cover Germany in thesame depth as the other leading wine regions of the world. Continuity is vitalto building interest in Germany’s distinctive wines. That applies as much tothe stunning 2018 reds (most notably to the Spätburgunder/Pinot Noirs) as itdoes to the 2019 whites. I’ve tasted the young wines of each vintage on the German Rhine and Mosel since the 1983 vintage and was recently awarded the Professor Muller-Thurgau prize for lifetime achievement by the famous Geisenheim Wine University in the Rheingau. Since 2015 Germany has had a run of very good to excellent vintages. My goal is not only to find the most exciting new wines for the readers of JamesSuckling.com, but also to figure out if 2019 really is the best of these vintages, as it currently appears to be.For a writer it can be shocking to realize out how few of your own strongest associations aren’t shared by the majority of your readers. However, almost everybody who reads this will know who the original Big Brother was. The events of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (1949) take place in the year of the title in Airstrip One, the former Great Britain is now just a province of Oceania, one of the three totalitarian empires that rule the world. Big Brother is the personification of the ruling party of Oceania and the party’s most important slogan is Big Brother Is Watching You.The hero of the novel, Winston Smith, finds out just how closely he is being watched, not only by every telescreen – in 1984 each television is also fitted with an eye-like camera – but by further hidden cameras. He lives in a world where the Newspeak language is the tool of the all-powerful party’s policy of doublethink. All opposition is deemed to begin with thoughtcrime and is ruthlessly crushed, if necessary with the ultimate weapon Room 101, usually before the potential rebel even acts. Who doesn’t find this vision of totalitarianism combined with 24/7 surveillance frightening? There’s even a word for anything that reminds us of this scenario: Orwellian. In spite of this, with extremely few exceptions,each of us is carrying a mini telescreen aroundwith us and that doesn’t even seem to worry us. Of course, our mobile/cellphones or whatever else we call them are extremely useful and often serve our needsand wishes. That’s why we carry them around with us and why we push the thoughtthat somebody might be using them to spy on us to the backs of our minds.Occasionally, a media report jolts some of us out of that state of complacency,but we still carry the thing around with us.The Big Brother reality TV shows are something else entirely, since the TV audience “spies” on a group of paid volunteers who live together in a sealed container. It’s a competition and the winner is the last person left in this cramped luxury prison. They were developed by the Endemol production company, and the first of them aired on the 16th September 1999 in the Netherlands. There are now 54 Big Brother franchises around the world, and this ubiquity combined with the trivial and voyeuristic nature of the show has helped make Orwell’s vision seem much less threatening. The show also pushed the reality TV category into the big league. But recent events have changed this whole situation in an entirely unexpected way.It was a very strange moment recently when Romana, one of the contestants in the German SAT1 station’s Big Brother TV show, was released from the container. Less than three weeks earlier the show’s producers broke with normal practice and told the contestants what was going on outside the container, that is all about the global Covid-19 pandemic. It led to shock and tears. The odd thing about that situation is how itmust have slowly dawned on the contestants that they weren’t exceptional anylonger, because exactly that very day the great majority of Germans began livingin a few rooms sealed off from the outside world except for brief shoppingtrips. If I’d been one of the contestants I’d have thought, “Shit! Now nobodywill want to watch us any more!” However, the Big Brother contestants remaineddifferent form the rest of us, because they started isolating long before we alldid and they did so of their own free will. That was enough to keep themwatchable.The moment when Romana stepped out of thecontainer into “freedom” was even more bizarre though, because not only was shesuddenly confronted with the uncomfortable reality that were all struggling to copewith, but she was merely transferring from the isolation of the Big Brothercontainer to the more extreme isolation of her own home where she had even lesspeople to talk to or do things together with than in the container! Thatremained me of one of the slogans of Oceania’s ruling party in 1984: Freedom is Slavery.All this made it plain how reality TV is only “real” for the participants (but never the audience) as long they’re inside the container and they don’t really know what’s happening in the outside world. As soon as they step out of the container the TV reality collapses like a bursting bubble and is revealed to have been a form of self-delusion. From an outside world perspective the Big Brother container is an alternative reality with its own alternative facts. Of course, the other people in our world creatingalternative realities out of alternative facts are the new generation ofpopulist leaders. They are simultaneously like the Big Brother contestants and theshow’s producers, since each of them is forming the alternative reality withinthe “container” of their administration and also believing totally in all theirown alternative facts. Perhaps this is the reason several of them seemconvinced they can’t catch Covid-19, a trap at least one of them fell into. What is it that makes these people enter those “containers” of their own free will? That’s a question for psychologists, but my guess is that just as we had to be persuaded and prodded into our present/recent confinement, some part of each of them had to be pushed reluctantly in there by another part that was much stronger and more demanding. Let’s face it though, a great many of us are members of of cliques or associations that demand a degree of agreement with the other members regarding whatever’s the focus of the group, be it skateboarding, flower arranging or socialism. Who doesn’t sometimes tow the party line in such a group in order to fit in? Psychologists have a horrible Orwellian term for this phenomenon that turns groups into bubbles: Groupthink. It causes everyone inside a bubble to see the world differently to how everyone outside their bubble does and that distortion alters their members judgement and behavior. So, a lot of us were already in a limited form of self-isolation in a kind of invisible container – a social bubble – before Covi-19 came along!Of course, mainstream reality has been shaped notby populist leaders, but by the untold millions of people in various degrees ofself-isolation and those people unlucky enough to be in the more frighteningisolation of hospitals. Our huge number makes the basic facts of our everydaylives overwhelmingly objective. Now it is the populist leaders who look to bethe most isolated people of all in their totally subjective bubbles. Shut inside their alternative realities they’re desperately trying to spin the unfolding catastrophe as a story of their own heroism, although the reality of the outside world frequently contradicts their narratives. The real cause of their isolation though is not some physical barriers or the guards who man them though, rather it is the way they turn away from the enormous suffering they are surrounded by. Although they all have that in common I think they fall into two distinct groups, the first of those being the leaders who are genuinely hungry for power and control. These Big Brothers are still watching us, that is watching for any sign of dissent or opposition from among the populations of the countries they rule in order to crush it. The other group of leaders isn’t interested in power for its own sake, but because it makes them the center of attention. They are obsessed with having vast numbers of people watching and listening to them, with being at the top of the TV ratings, filling the newspaper and magazine front covers. These New Big Brothers don’t feel any empathy for us, nor even curiosity and therefore are uninterested in watch us except in order to measure how much we are watching them!Im Hotel of Hope bei dem deutschen TV-Journalist Jürgen Fränznick (oben) habe ich Herbst 2012 bis Sommer 2013 in East Village von New York City gewohnt. Gerade habe ich diese bewegende Nachrichten von Ihn erhalten. Die Fotos sind auch von Jürgen und (mit Ausnahme des Letztens) sehr aktuell Hiermit der Link zum erwähnten TV-Beitrag mit Christiane Meier (ARD New York Korrespondentin):I lived in the German TV journalist Jürgen Fränznick s Hotel of Hope in the East Village of New York City from the fall of 2012 through summer of 2013. I just received this moving news from him. The photos, including that of the author above are his. All of them very fresh except for the last one. Bisgesternstrahlte das Wetter wie in jenen Frühjahrstagen 1986, als der Reaktor in Tschernobyl geschmolzen war. Und das Datum springt nochmal: 9/11 we never forget doch diesmal sitzen wir alle in den Twin Towers. Aber auf welchem Stockwerk und wie weit zum Treppenhaus?Until yesterdaythe weather was beautiful like in those spring days of 1986 when the Chernobyl reactor melted down. And that date comes to mind again: 9/11 we never forget however, this time we re all in the Twin Towers. But on which floor and how far from the stairs?Und ganz schlimm: diese brutale Ruhe in Grand Central Station (ohne Verkehr zum schönsten Shelter der Stadt mutiert) kannst Du die Obdachlosen atmen hören.And really terrible: the brutal silence in Grand Central Station (without traffic converted into the most beautiful shelter in the city) you can hear the breathing of the homeless.Kein Flugzeug am Himmel. Mehr Corona als in China. Die Stimmung kippelt. Help me make it through the night (Kris Kristofferson).No airplanes in the sky. More Corona than in China. Moral collapses. Help me make it through the night (Kris Kristofferson).Seit der Nacht zumDonnerstag wir waren dabei, die Tagesschau 20 Uhr/26.03.2020“ vorzubereiten unser Studio-Kameramann Peter war da bereits unter Verdacht isoliert, aber noch wussten wir alle nicht, dass Peter amMorgendes Donnerstages positiv getestet sein würde kriecht jetzt doch Sorge hoch in mir: das mobile Leichenschau-Zelt hinter dem Bellevue Hospital Downtown Manhattan ist groß genug, um mich zu erschüttern; und die Bilder vom Elmhurst Hospital“ in (meinem) Queens machen mir nein keine Angst, aber machen mir klar: Hilfe hier wird schwerlich zu finden sein. Since the night of Wednesday to Thursday we were preparing the 8pm news for the 26.03.2020; our studio cameraman Peter was already in isolation with a suspected infection, but we didn t know that on the Thursday morning he would test positive the worry grows in me: the mobile tent morgue behind the Bellevue Hospital Downtown Manhattan is large enough to shock even me; and the pictures from Elmhurst Hospital in (my) Queens don t frighten me, but they make it clear: help would be hard to find here. Heute meine Sorge wächst… aber ich kann über mich meine Verfassung noch spotten: Sicherheitshalber übe ich schon mal der Text zum letzten Lied der Bordkapelle auf derTitanicein: Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee! (Lowell Mason) Today my worry grows but I can still poke fun at my condition: to play safe I practice the last song of the ship choir on the Titanic: Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee! (Lowell Mason) Und natürlich geht stay home“ abfive o’clockleichter vonstatten: Dann darf der Moon over Bourbon Street (Sting) aufgehen. Glasweise. Und wenn das nicht hilft, dann geht’s in den Arm von Sister Morphine (Rolling Stones). Die liquor stores“ in Manhattan gelten als substantial business und bleiben offen. Klar, New York ohne Drogen geht gar nicht es gibt noch Verlässlichkeiten in dieser Welt im neuerlichen Stresstest. 25 minutes to go

TAGS:Stuart Home Pigotts 

<<< Thank you for your visit >>>

Hot Websites