PEEVES UP MY SLEEVES (& BERGER TASTING)

Part-3 of a series beginning with “Rants In My Pants” and “Fusses In My Trusses.”

A VIP from an elite winery is visiting various U.S. markets. In one of them there is a wine dinner planned, and someone I know at the relevant distributor reached out to me for pairing suggestions.

When I saw the menu I was, to put it mildly, dismayed. It was as though the kitchen had consulted a list of “17 Confirmed Wine Killers” and designed a menu to check as many boxes as it could.

The wines in question are focused, spectacular, on-oaked whites fully faithful to some of the greatest terroirs on earth. They come from a country whose language is German. This is where the most egregious trouble arose.

The main course of this luckless menu was “Green Garlic and Ginger Bratwurst.” Seriously?? Bratwurst???? Leaving aside the green garlic, which is guaranteed to be homicidal to wines of this type, are we really reduced to serving Bratwurst because the label is written in German? Why not just hold the dinner at Herman’s Haus o’ Pig-Parts and then everyone can go home yodeling. (I haven’t even mentioned that one of the sides is Käsespätzle…)

But let’s say some cosmic perturbance occurs and the match actually works, or is at least neutral. What is the meta-message? Can’t you imagine people heading home saying “The wines were okay, but we don’t really eat that sort of thing normally…”

If you’re going to do an event like this, it is much smarter and more effective to do it in an “upscale” culinary mainstream, or in a place where the pairings will surprise, so that people will head home thinking either “Wow, who knew?” or “Those wines were really excellent and we eat that kind of food all the time, so maybe we should get a little deeper into that kind of wine…”

Instead you hurl the same hoary old cliché that “Teutonic” wines have to be served with the hocks-and-knuckles platitudes of German food of the Weimar Republic. (And no, I am not persuaded by the “modern spin” on Bratwurst, because A) it includes public enemy number-1 in the form of green garlic, and B) it is Bratwurst.)

I felt awful for my friend who had to set this debacle in motion, but I had to tell him to suggest the restaurant 86 the entire menu and start over. And this time, to show some respect to the VIP visitor and to the supernal wines.

Now on to happier subjects.

2025: A NEW ERA FOR BERGER

In one way it’s not so new. They’re discontinuing red wine production (except I assume for the Zweigelt in Liters), partly because the wines sold slowly and partly because the experiment had run its course and was extraneous to the domain’s current identity.

The other change is more significant. For the middle and top wines the fermentations will now be spontaneous. Sounds geeky but it isn’t. When I first arrived here, in 1993, Erich was a young pup working alongside his father, and if there were two salient words to describe the wines, they would have been delicious and charming. Some of this derived from cold fermentations with neutral cultured yeast, which gave the wines rapturous fruit and a jasmine-rice-like umami, and when you combined that with the impact of the (mostly) loess soil, you got the swooning delight I feebly refer to as “wet cereal.” You could use a word like maybe “porridge” if you were more chic than I.

I have mixed feelings about the change. That’s just me. There can never be too many charming delicious wines in the world, but Erich’s son Max is gradually assuming command, and young people seek to make a point. I can’t speak for Max, but my sense is that charming-and-delicious may strike him as mundane and hardly worth the efforts entailed. The question will be whether the change is warranted by dint of improving the wines, and for now that question remains open. However, one or two wines in the current lineup threaten to make a believer out of me.