AT LONG LAST SPREITZER!

Andi means to send me samples; he’s just busy and forgets. So it’s been a few years, and because of that he sent me what amounts to (mostly) a vertical collection of his two GGs, rather than the current assortment in its entirety. It would be churlish to complain, but those are highly interesting wines I’ve sometimes found to be closer-in to the soul of the domain.

Should you be wondering, those wines include a Muschelkalk Trocken, an Oestricher Doosberg Scharfenstein (a cadaster parcel now a 1er Cru) and an Alte Reben from the Oestricher Klosterberg, often my favorite among all the dry Rieslings from here. I also miss the reliably superb Halbtrocken wine from the (Grand Cru) Winkeler Jesuitengarten. But I’m sure that wine’s being snatched up by the enlightened domestic market, who recognize both its mastery and its rarity – as if. Any of these would have been preferable to the zero-alc wine he did send.

(There is a third “GG” in the mix, but Andi is laudably tolerant of my stubborn refusal to consider that site a true Grand Cru. I shall refrain from naming it here.)

Now ask me about Engelmannsberg. Then stand back.

At some point I learned the Spreitzers had a parcel in this Hattenheim site, which I would consider a 1er Cru, and which I was surprised they didn’t bottle separately. The parcel was small, as it happened, but it was on loess, which already gives wines with “sweet” fruit, and my imagination fired to conceive a perfect feinherb wine from this little vineyard.

We prototyped it and in fact it was perfect, one of those amazing sweet/not-sweet German Rieslings no sane drinker could possibly resist. Could we do it, a custom bottling? We could, but I’d have to take most of it. That wouldn’t be a problem, not with something as superb as this wine was. So it was bottled, and I praised it to the skies, as it deserved, and as long as I was active the wine took a noble place in my portfolio.

Not long after I “retired” the wine was discontinued. It “didn’t sell” without me to push it, and to be fair it didn’t sell so terribly well even when I was there to push it. But I hated to see it vanish. And so I will inveigh against the ignorance, shallowness and stupidity that wouldn’t recognize the utter masterpiece this wine was.

It’s the same sad story. People “understand” dry wines and they “understand” sweet wines, not as many of them but at least the idea is conceptually comprehensible. But look at that word “conceptually,” because that is where the canker gnaws. I’ve said that before we drink a wine we drink an idea of a wine, and this is acceptable as long as the “idea” doesn’t supersede the wine, because when that happens – and it happens way too fucking much – we sacrifice our sensual tastes to an abstract idea, and when that happens nothing but trouble ensues.

At its worst it creates an occlusion of taste whereby you don’t actually knowwhat you like; you only know what you “ought” to like. You remain acceptable to your colleagues and friends but the price you pay is to have no taste. The prevailing” taste is always a race to the bottom, and that underground cavern of witlessness has too many people crowding into it, and not enough oxygen for them to breathe.

That Engelmannsberg feinherb was as good as German Riesling could be. And now it is extinct.

So I got what I got and this is what I got, and I am thankful for what I got. So let’s start slingin’ us some Riesling.