Can a wine be too good…?
I suppose the simple answer is, too good for what? And then I guess, for the purpose we intended to put it to. The bottle giving rise to these speculations is a 2006 Dönnhoff – there’s a big surprise! – Norheimer Kirschheck Riesling Spätlese. We opened one a few nights ago. I have a few of Dönnhoff’s ‘06s in the cellar, as a consolation prize for shamefully missing out on the ‘05s, and as I’m in no great hurry to drink Dönnhoff’s wines, which age beautifully and deliberately, this was my first encounter since tasting the wine in its infancy.
As a rule 2006s are what I’d call rough-and-ready. It was a ripe, opulent vintage and the wines either show sometimes-obtrusive botrytis or they’ve faded finely into the flavor of soft overripe persimmons. It’s an outlier vintage, not a classic one.
The first whiff was transporting. The empty but not rinsed bottle sits next to me as I write, and even after 72 hours there’s no decay, no acetification. I took the first glass outside to share with the juncos and crocuses who have set up camp in our little yard.
Now I know, I have spent (squandered?) many many words on the curious existential life of these singular wines, and I’ll resist doing so here. Probably fruitlessly, but still. When I took the first sip it was clear, this was nothing other than ur-Riesling, seeming to calmly breathe an essence of the variety; it gave me an image of the world before there were people, before thoughts that knew they were thoughts. Nor did the wine feel in any way separate from me. Even with good (and even great) wines you feel they are companions, maybe even friends, but it is the two of you. Not now. This wine simply and effortlessly enveloped me, absorbed me and quieted me down - quieted everything down. I tried like hell to think about the wine, to grok its flavors, its Flavor, its structures and dialogues and the many arcs of its sheer activity. That only worked somewhere in the second glass, as the sensuous spell relaxed.
A meal was being cooked, and would soon be eaten. The wine would fulfill its quotidian purpose, to wash down our dinner with as many gestures of harmony as the pairing engendered. But with this wine, I felt it was somehow being wasted on mere food. It wanted more white space around it, a lot more. The Italians have their lovely phrase Vino di Meditazione, but how often do we actually just sit with a bottle and dream? I’m about as willing as anyone to do that, but life and its businesses intrudes. I also wonder whether Dönnhoffs themselves would agree that a wine like this one ought to stand apart. Helmut is more “poetic” than his son Cornelius, but I suspect even he would feel a little sad that some of his wines seem to require solitude.
So we stand on the shore of a riddlesome question: what are such wines actually for? Are they too good for the normal occasions of a bottle of wine? And if this is so, is there a risk such wines would seem to be too precious? I’d hate to think so, and yet I also doubt that the dinner table is a place for reverie. And reverie is what this wine embodies, and what it gives to us. Perhaps there’s a middle ground, one in which we offer the wine the ceremony it asks for, in return for its retreating modestly when it comes time to eat. That was what I hoped for, yet each sip of the wine I took with my dinner seemed to be misspent.