RHEINGOLD

Riesling: it's what's for breakfast

As grownups, we don’t often find our inner three-year-old steering the ship, but it happens. You scream at your computer. Your body orders, pays for, and consumes a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone when your mind could have sworn it was dieting. My inner child goes ape in a group. Five minutes in a lecture hall, and I’m ready to turn the curtains into my own personal trapeze.

            Just ask the group of wine buyers I traveled to Germany with recently. The ones who voted me off the bus. I’m not just impatient. Like many journalists, I’m spoiled—used to a little pampering. But when buyers travel, it’s strictly business. And that business consists of tasting more wines in one day than most people drink in a year.

            I would never have considered going except Terry Theise invited me. Terry is a legend among wine importers. His taste is so highly tuned I’d pretty much recommend any bottle with his name on it. He was offering entrée to the cream of German estates as well as first look at the extraordinary 2005 vintage.

            Unlike such carbon-based life-forms as me, Terry does not seem to require sleep, showers or any time off, but appears to live by Riesling alone. From dawn to midnight we sloshed and spit high-acid wine until our teeth were etched into little points.

            If you’ve ever thought wine-tasting was the fey pretension of twits, you haven’t seen Terry. He doesn’t so much sip as plunge into the wine, splash around, kick, sing and blow bubbles.

            His sales catalog is the only must-read in the genre. Technical wine descriptions range from, “Cold cider poured over hot slate,” to “So long and juicy you need to strap a feedbag under your neck to catch the drool.”  

            He detects extra dimensions. “Eerily solid,” he’ll write, “as if you could roll it in a ball and bounce it.” Another wine’s palate is “in constant motion, not fidgeting but gliding.” In the great sea of Rieslings, he finds unique personality in each. Like the “genial aristocrat, who has to wear a suit but would much rather not.”

            Despite Terry being American, rumpled and unshaven, and at times quite the control freak and know-it-all, German producers adore him. They greet him with hugs and kisses, ask his advice, and bring out cobweb-covered bottles quivering with slatey, old fruit. It’s not just his fluent German, it’s that he’s so unashamedly, passionately in love with their wines.

            And he’s on a quest to save them from the German government. As he sees it, their misguided trendiness plus an innate Teutonic desire to quantify and control is about to ruin everything he loves in these wines.

            And what is that, exactly? There’s the sweet thing, though he’ll firmly deny his sweet tooth, claiming he cares only about balance. There’s the fact that these wines shimmer with harmony and complexity, especially next to the grating tannins, overblown oak and knock-out alcohol of New World reds. Monsters, he claims, that are an affront to food, “Like dropping a bowling ball on your sore toe.”

            But what seems to entrance him most is the way great German wines reflect their roots. Pure and un-Photo-Shopped, they sing out their dirt and history and lineage. And Terry craves that. Adopted at birth, he wrestled for a long time with a sense of being unmoored, of not belonging anywhere. The extreme somewhereness of German wines makes them an anchor. “It salves a kind of loneliness,” he says. “Though it isn’t my home, it is at least a home.”

            Eventually, he decided to hunt down his birth parents. The first time he spoke to his bio father on the phone, the weirdest thing happened. Not only was the guy drinking wine, and a German wine, but it turned out to be a wine imported by Terry.

            Terry is enthusiastic about sharing the bliss. But it’s hard to appreciate lightness and restraint being force-fed twenty bottles of it an hour. It’s subtle, damn it, See? Subtle, I said! Whack! I suppose that’s the only practical way, but a few hours’ sleep would have done wonders for my pre-frontal cortex’s ability to detect nuance. Or, to put it another way, my three-year-old could have used a nap.

Next week: Germany puts the terror in terroir.