NOTES ON HANS-GUNTER SCHWARZ

“HGS” as he was known to most of us, succumbed at last to the various maladies that had dimmed his aura in recent years.

He will – already has, when he turned 80 – receive a clamor of encomia both for the impact he had on viticulture and for the gentle soul he was personally. I paid tribute to him when he “retired” from Müller-Catoir back in July 2002. You can find it on this website by looking under “portfolio” and then downloading my 2003 Germany catalog.

There aren’t many people in the wine world, or in any otherworld who can truly be said to have changed everything, who were pivot-points between old and new realities. Who were seminal. If you’re a guitarist, Allan Holdsworth was one such person. Hans-Günter’s wines were shattering in multiple ways, not only for the fundamental revolution enacted about the way white wines could taste, but also for the viticulture that enabled them to exist. You’ll read all about it, from any among the multitude of voices who will sing his praises. As the Müller-Catoir estate was (and remains) a so-called Meisterbetrieb, the hundreds of students who passed though its door over the years returned to their homes with flames in their souls. Schwarz’s is an echo that peals across the valleys and hills.

But it was his genial company that pealed across his back garden one early summer evening, when he first invited me into his home. I had represented the estate maybe eight years by then, and known HGS for 5-6 of them. (I was not, let us say, “encouraged” to meet him by the estate-proprietor, and when I finally did I blurted something like the legend exists! Which made him laugh.) I’d like to say we were simpatico, but there were many people simpatico with Hans-Günter, so I was far from unique. But there we were, sitting in the grassy garden with glasses of wine at hand, and HGS appeared from a far corner holding a palm-full of little wild strawberries, which he encouraged me to take. I didn’t want to hog them – there were two others in the group – but he urged me, “Take as many as you like; they taste best from the hands of a friend.”

My companion was there, and I met Hans-Günter’s wife Gisela, who was more bohemian than I would have anticipated. It was the first of many times we’d “hang out” after my official tasting visits. One such occasion is indelible. We were taken to one of his favorite Kneipe, the local term for an unpretentious wine tavern. Everyone inside knew him. It was like being with the mayor of the entire Pfalz. Everyone was fond of him. Considering his genius in the cellar and his greenest-of-green thumbs in the vineyard – an authentic vine-whisperer – the man in person was as down to earth as could be imagined. You couldn’t call him unpretentious because that supposes he knew how to be pretentious. He liked a good joke, saucy but not “dirty,” and he loved to….Plaudern is the German word, for which the English terms “chat” or “gossip” or “schmooze” are all inadequate. Let me call it “aimless conversation as an artifact of conviviality.” Shooting the breeze.

I knew Gisela had taken ill but didn’t know how ill until several years later. It was cancer, and as relentless as cancer can be. Her final weeks corresponded with the 1998 harvest, “The best I have ever seen,” said Hans-Günter. “Perfect clean fruit, all levels of ripeness all the way to the very top, and plenty of it. I don’t expect to ever see its equal.” In a quiet moment when it was just him and me in the tasting room, I asked after Gisela. It was near the end. “She’s just not much more than a skeleton now. I can easily carry her to the bathroom when she needs to go.” He then paused, considering. “Terry, it was as though God himself whispered to me, I’ll take care of the weather for your harvest so you can look after your wife.”

After her death he lived alone in the house with the garden, in Haardt, not far from the winery. The years passed. Then in 2002 he parted from Müller-Catoir. He didn’t exactly “retire” but there was a powerful psychic and emotional split between him and the former proprietor, and the situation became untenable. Hans-Günter was aggrieved and outraged, and I had never seen his ever-present geniality so ruffled. I got an earful, as did many others, and at the time I was militantly in his corner. Today I still would be, albeit less militantly, but looking back I see how deeply sensitive my friend was, and the outrage he felt was the result of a moral injury.

We stayed in touch, a little more loosely over time, as such things go. But news reached me many years later that HGS had remarried, and coincidentally his wife was the mother of a wine guy I worked closely with. “Is this news as good as it sounds?” I asked. “Better.”

Dinner at the home of HGS and Sabine was a celebration on more levels than I could apprehend. Sabine was a lady of infinite and dignified sweetness. Hans-Günter couldn’t stop glowing.

A couple years later, being with him again, I asked politely how Sabine was doing, and he said “Terry, if you had told me I would find a woman like this now, late in my life, I would not have believed you. She is a blessing like I never could have expected.” I heard versions of this prayer of gratitude every time I saw Hans-Günter, year upon year. But then his own health began to falter, first with joints and bones and then with other, internal things. The last time I saw them together I said to Sabine, “The sick man gets most of the attention but the caregiver can be neglected. How has this been for you?”

“Ah,” she sighed. “Es gehört dazu.” It’s part of it.

I’ll leave you with this. The Müller-Catoir estate was brokered to me by the Selbachs, who handled logistics, legalities, and finances. One year Hans and Sigrid – both then alive – said they would drive down from the Mosel to meet Hans-Günter, having tasted the wines and heard me yammer about how remarkable they (and he) were. They joined my tasting; Hans sat immediately to HGS’ left and the two men, so much alike, became almost conspiratorial. The wines carried all of us away, because that was what those wines did. Later that evening we shared impressions. Sigrid Selbach, herself one of the great geniuses of the heart, said “It’s not just how fantastic the wines are; we knew that already. But he was nothing like I thought someone would be who made wines like that. He has about him a sort of naïveté….no not really naïveté but innocence, delight, like a little child has delight. No wonder his vines love him.”

Hearts like these ones move through the world lighting up when they meet a cousin of the spirit. I watched the ignition between Hans Selbach and HGS. I saw it again talking with Willi Schaefer, who was HGS’ roommate when both were judges at one of the “official” German wine competitions. Those two men were brothers before either was born.

The wines of Hans-Günter Schwarz will endure in the glasses of the myriad vintners whom he influenced. And the man himself can never be effaced nor ever forgotten, by anyone fortunate enough to have had even the smallest sliver of his friendship.