by Bob Ross » Tue Oct 02, 2007 10:08 am
Schildknecht's comments on the members forum are always excellent. I sent Jancis a short note -- only partly in jest -- that all Schildknecht comments should be cross-referenced in her updates to the OCW3rd.
Here's an extract from one of his magnificent posts:
While it might appear unseemly for me to be seen rushing to the defence of my friends Messieurs Parker and Kramer in the wake of James Halliday's scathing critique - not least now that I write for The Wine Advocate - I would like to point to several areas in which Halliday's perspective deserves sceptical attention if not correction.
A minor concern is one of historical perspective. Halliday writes that Australia has "failed to market" its "sophisticated" wines, whereas "the French have had 300 years (Bordeaux) to 700 years (Burgundy) in which to accumulate sophisticated marketing know-how." Has it somehow failed to register with him that those oh-so-sophisticated French have of late been falling on their faces in the world market? Furthermore, one need have only a passing acquaintance with the history of wine in our respective countries to realize that - allowing for a late start, rampant root lice, and two wasted decades in Prohibitive exile - California has been at the business of wine for a considerably shorter time than than Australia. Yet, if there is one area where you have to hand it to my West Coast countrymen (although, being a partisan, I would credit them in a great many other respects as well) it would be that they don't neglect marketing! My point, then, is that historically accumulated reputations which count for ever-less - do not modern marketing clout make. Now to a more serious area of contention which, begging the reader's pardon who anticipates an opinion about Australia, I must first approach from my own area of (at least purported) journalistic expertise.
In my two decades covering wines of Austria and Germany for a primarily American readership it has remained a source of amusement - but not mystery - to me the marked degree to which the perspective of Austrian and German journalists and the qualitative pecking order of wines and wineries they espouse differs from my own and that of my countrymen.
In the case of Germany, for example, I make absolutely no apology for maintaining a thoroughly Riesling-centric perspective. It does not surprise me that the Germans themselves take a great deal more interest in - and vociferously defend - local red wines and those crafted from numeous other indigenous and Burgundian white varieties. But I stubbornly and happily defend what I consider the manifest superiority of Germany's best Rieslings to most of the world's other wines, never mind most of Germany's other wines. In matters of style, too, I have over the years conspicuously and systematically begged to differ with my German colleagues. I resolutely proclaim the virtues of the classic post-war Mosel Kabinett and of Spätlesen with judicious residual sugar, whereas for the better part of two decades you could scarcely find a self-proclaimed German wine critic who would admit to tasting - much less giving an unbiased account of - any Riesling having more than 15 or fewer than 100 grams of residual sugar. Even today, and even among sincerely dedicated vintners themselves, one hears the Manichean mantra "if dry then truly dry and if sweet then nobly sweet."
Naturally, such national perspectives - including such as I would deem prejudices - are reflected in magazine articles, tasting journals, restaurant lists, and the results of competitions. But presenting me with a long list of such "evidence" only confirms what I already know about German tastes and perspectives, while doing nothing to dislodge me from my own. I have occasionally even had the temerity, as an outsider, to opine that some icons of German viticulture were scantily clothed.
It was not so many years ago that my German colleagues were ridiculing the preposterous Mr Parker. How dare he compile a "best of" list of German growers, a field in which he never claimed special expertise? Based on unprejudiced tasting of the wines such as I and fellow American German wine fanatic Terry Theise were presenting to him from then obscure vintners like Hans-Leo Christoffel, Willi Schäfer, Selbach-Oster, or Müller-Catoir, he got things quite upside down from a German perspective. But compare Germany's wine guides and tip sheets of today or the lines of German supplicants on the mailing lists for the aforementioned wineries - and (please pardon my arrogance, but) one might conclude that the American perspective has begun to gain serious ground even inside Germany. Pre posterous we were indeed, and just possibly prescient. But there is more at stake than pride or published pecking orders. If I can help save a single fine, steep acre for Riesling or one fine Riesling Spätlese from ideological strangulation by Übertrockenheit [over-reverence of dryness, I assume - JR] and astringency, I shall count my work worthwhile.
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