The flavor clarity of German wine picks me up but the analytic clarity of German producers' numbers game gets me down.
Statistics come easy to the orderly German mind. Winemakers can't wait to volunteer that their 1999 Riesling Auslese had a must weight of "x", and "y" grams of residual sugar per liter, and "z" grams of acidity per liter and, not only that, the '97, which the '99 resembles, had, by contrast, a must weight of "x", and "y" grams of sugar per liter, and "z" grams of acidity per liter. As for alcohol levels...well, you get the picture.

But seldom is there a word said up front about how their wines actually taste. That's a mistake: The adjectival lexicon of Rieslings' flavors, changing as the wines mature from youth to adulthood, is richer than that of vaunted Burgundian whites.

Okay, in fairness, many winemakers from all cultures seem tongue-tied in one-on-one conversations when questions of descriptors arise. (I like to believe their hesitations arise from a belief that wine speaks for itself, that human commentary is superfluous.)

Numbers, I vividly remember, figured heavily one chill evening in the Rhineland some Novembers ago. A famous and powerful chief executive officer invited me and my wife, Beatrice, to his sprawling winery for a private briefing and dinner paired with eight wines. The company president, whose last name is synonymous with German wine, was there, too.

The firm had spent a fortune reconceiving its Rieslings intended for the potentially lucrative American market. The briefing turned out to be a quasi-academic lecture about the program, with charts, graphs, slides and sales projections, and with the arguments confidently resting on reams of supporting data.

As I listened, stupefied, to the hourlong presentation by the obviously well-intentioned, cosmopolitan CEO about how the new Riesling styles would appeal to American tastes, my heart dropped into my shoes. With all that showy research, what he didn't know about Americans' taste preferences would fill the Black Forest. Ultimately, the winery's campaign went nowhere.

The CEO's method was all too familiar. While California producers babble about fruit and ripeness traits, and earthy Burgundians trot out sexist terms about "feminine" and "masculine" wines, the analytically oriented German vintners spout math.

I remember, uncomfortably, a German wine dinner at a fancy suburban New Jersey restaurant at which the otherwise engaging guest of honor, the owner of a big Mosel-Saar-Ruwer company, seemed to lose the audience gradually while cranking out technical details. Ditto at two German wine dinners in Manhattan at which an importer droned on and on about the Öechsle scale (used to measure the sugar level in grapes) as minds glazed over.

This practice felt especially irritating this year at the German Wine Information Bureau's first-rate comprehensive tasting of the 1999 vintage in New York. "Oh, no," I heard myself saying, maintaining a façade of polite interest, eager to delve into actual tasting, as yet another well-intentioned German producer launched yet another disquisition.

I wish this cultural tic could be cured. Rather than jack-in-the-box recitations of cellar records, wasting tasters' time (who remembers? who cares?), the German producers would be wiser, especially with defenseless American consumers, to be reactive, tapping into their data bank only when directly asked, and stressing instead Rieslings' flavors and food matches.

A wine lover's personal practice of exploring, noting and naming the flavors and complexities of Riesling is far more interesting and memorable than laboratory summaries of a wine's architecture.

It's a timely moment to drop the numbers game. Anecdotal evidence and importers' optimism suggest that German Rieslings (and Austrian Rieslings, but that's another story) are generating more interest in America than they have in years. One sees this both in the volume of restaurants that have put Rieslings on their wine lists (and have kept them there) and in the seemingly rising numbers of sommeliers and retailers attending German wine tastings.

At this moment, when several big German producers, I'm told reliably, dream of establishing a beachhead in the American market with $8 to $10 Rieslings - that almost certainly would be more interesting than comparably priced Chardonnays - an uncritical reliance on market statistics might boomerang.

Predictably, these big guys will bend themselves into pretzels trying to quantify Americans' stylistic preferences mathematically: Trocken (dry)? Halbtrocken (semi-dry, off-dry, near-dry, depending on personal interpretation)? Kabinett (sweetish or dryish)? Spätlese (fuller-bodied, sweetish, dry)?

For international tastes, France is about many wines. Italy is about many wines. But Germany is about one wine: Riesling, which is not merely a culinary contribution but a gift to civilization.

Unlike, say, Britain, a small country with a somewhat monolithic market, America is a continent full of varied beverage and flavor preferences.

Presidential candidates spend two years crisscrossing the country; this year, even weeks after the election we hadn't selected a winning candidate. We are partly a nation of undecideds. Fickleness drives us from California Cabernet to oceans of Merlot to, what next, Washington Syrah?

The worst step German mass marketers could take would be to deviate from Riesling by dumbing down: by emphasizing a wimpy Riesling manqué, such as Müller-Thurgau (I'd prefer Oregon's carefully wrought versions, such as Chateau Benoit's), or vaguely agreeable but usually thin Sylvaner from Rheinhessen. This would undercut, rather than complement, the premium-quality image being successfully created nationwide in an uphill struggle by the small estates, which essentially own the market.

The German producers' best step would be, first, to budget heavily for years of advertising and promotion, and, second, to crisscross America the way Johannes Selbach does. Quality aside, the reason the Rieslings of his estate, Selbach-Oster, on the Mosel, are among the best-known from coast to coast is that he spends 25-hour days, 8-day weeks and 13-month years pushing his wares here, never letting them fade from awareness.

At the German tasting, looking worn - it isn't easy to pack, schlep and unpack umpteen dozens of bottles - Selbach made the point that only foot power and attentiveness count. You visit customers, pour for the public, all the while listening very carefully to opinions, and then use the information, such as it is, to adjust your Rieslings - an easy job technically - to meet shifting currents in taste.

Even Selbach slips into the numbers game now and then. But, savvy about American ways from long experience, he'll interrupt himself with a remark such as: "Enough. We're drinking Riesling, not statistics." Exactly right.

Howard G. Goldberg, a wine critic for The New York Times, has written about German wines since the mid-1980s.




Courtesy of The Wine News