A BOOK, AN EMBLEM OF ALSACE WINE, AND A SUPERB RHEINGAU GROWER

The book  is truly the best thing I’ve read in the last few years. It is Steve Hoffman’s A Season For That, and it has already been reviewed rapturously (and excellently) by one of my favorite writers, Tam(lyn) Currin for Jancis Robinson’s “Purple Pages.” More somewhat dazed plaudits are certain to follow – “dazed” because at times it strains credulity to experience how fine this book is.

I won’t review in depth here. My task is to send you, quickly, to this book, and to promise that you will find – on every page – something either wryly humorous, lyrical, touching, , humble and clear-eyed, and on many pages you’ll find all of these. Hoffman’s prose is pitch perfect, to a degree I wondered why I (or anyone) should write any more, as it has now been done to perfection. This oscillated between despair and inspiration, to hone my own writing to a point where it might approximate the fluid grace and fearless candor we find in Hoffman’s pages.

The book may be “positioned” (erroneously) as another entry into the genre of  credulously naïve American ex-pat wannabees hurling themselves at Provence or Tuscany and writing paeans to the colorful locals and the gracious lifestyle to which we Americans seem constitutionally immune. I, too, hesitated to investigate the book, as I have a rather generous quantity of books by Yanks with their anecdotes about living in France, and I was certain I didn’t need another. My friend Meg Maker surmounted by resistance, because Meg has impeccable taste, and she kind of insisted. I must, however, suggest you not read this in bed if you sleep with someone, because you will keep that person from the sleep (s)he craves by constantly wishing to read passages out loud.

Yet there are a lot of books in the world and many are outstanding, so what is this one doing here? It is, let’s say, indirectly what we could call a “wine book” though that isn’t the reason to read it. Wine becomes both a fact, a vocation, a metaphor of culture, and a glide-path to getting past the superficial membrane and inside the wordless life of a society, a People. Hoffman’s arrival into wine – I think it’s proper to call it that – turns out to be the best possible way to not just “understand,” but to internalize what wine actually is.

I respect the world of “wine educators” and the people who live and work in it. But they could actually discard their textbooks and flashcards and syllabi  and aroma wheels and schemas and simply have their students read this book, which would prepare them to go out into the wine world asking the right questions and noticing the right things. And not only about wine….

AN ALSACE MOMENT

We drank a bottle of one of my all-time favorite wines – Zind-Humbrechts Muscat Grand Cru Goldert, in this case the impeccable 2016. With a single exception (the bizarre 2012, which I couldn’t finish) this is, for me, one of wine’s nobilities.

It made me cast my mind back to Zind-Humbrechts “notorious” days, when the wines tended toward bombast and often grotesque overstatement, and were reviewed accordingly, which is to say fulsomely, which is to say wrongly. (I often think these wines were a high-water mark for this phenomenon – which included certain Australian wines that were lauded to the heavens but which drinkers didn’t actually like, and the backlash followed from this point.) Later vintages of “ZH” retreated from the bellicose yowling and journeyed back to their proper identities, and these were (and still are) excellent, expressive wines, which are now getting perhaps less credit than they deserve. No matter. As long as the estate can survive, the world is better for its wines.

You’ll recall they were early to the organic-biodynamic-regenerative-sustainable community. Indeed they were among the first settlers in that community. Olivier Humbrecht – whom I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting personally – is an articulate advocate for that view of the world, and how it intersects with terroir and imbues the wines with an expressiveness one finds less frequently with, let’s say, “other types of thinkers.”

Yet it is distressing to see all this elegant intersectionality stop short of one of the simplest things a vintner can do to aid our world. THE BOTTLE IS NEEDLESSLY HEAVY. There is no earthly reason why. It’s probably because it’s a Grand Cru, but it both isn’t needed and contradicts 99% of every other things the estate embodies. The wine is so good, and I drank it so happily, and I came away with no small melancholy. What must we all do to make this stop???

I suspect there is a masonic “understanding” among bottle manufacturers, vintners and chiropractors – because anyone luckless enough to have to handle these cases it putting a king-hell hurt on the vertebraes. And the air, and the water….

WEINGUT GOLDATZEL

This impeccable Rheingau estate needs (and richly deserves) an American importer. A resourceful one, and one who isn’t too large, as these wines do best with careful attention and a certain amount of hand-selling.

They are, for me, the German cognate to the wines of Martin Nigl in the Kremstal. You can’t believe how wonderful they smell, almost psychedelic, as though you never sniffed wine before. It leads into equally and euphorically clear palates, micro pixilated and amazingly precise – and also (and importantly) delicious.

To some tasters they may seem “cerebral,” as if that was a drawback, and they usually display the “proper” reserve of classic Rheingau Riesling. They are correctly priced for their quality, but you wouldn’t call them bargains. The family who make them are hardly pretentious, but the wines are not, let’s say, casual. They don’t slouch and they’re not sloppy. It’s hard sometimes to receive an image of correctness without superimposing one of haughtiness. Yet that is the opposite of how I receive them. For me they are gigantically pleasurable and seven tons of fun, but that’s because nothing in wine matters more to me than clarity.

Yet Nigl is successful in the States, but this is misleading. If you subtract the big-seller (The Grüner Veltliner Freiheit) the rest of the line just schlumps along. We’re hedonism junkies, I guess. In any case, regardless of whether Goldatzel’s wines are available over here, they are far too important to ignore, and I’ll continue to cover them because I believe in them.

Everything but the red is screwcapped, which I like, and many of the bottles are the heavy type, which I detest.