Category Archives: Dr. Loosen

It’s Complicated: Four Things I Think I Learned at Riesling Rendezvous 2016

July 26, 2016 By in Chateau Ste. Michelle, Dr. Loosen, globalization, Riesling, wine, wine markets 7 Comments

rrSue and I are back from Riesling Rendezvous 2016, a gathering organized by Chateau Ste Michelle and Dr. Loosen. The conference brings together winemakers and industry leaders from the four corners of Planet Riesling for three days of tasting, discussion and debate.

I have been fortunate to attend four of the five editions of Riesling Rendezvous beginning with RR2 in 2008. Herewith a quick accounting of my takeaways from the 2016 meeting.

1. Talking around in circles

One constant of the conferences has been a tendency to talk around in circles during the formal tastings — twenty dry Rieslings on Monday and twenty more off-dry wines on Tuesday. (Twenty wines for three hundred participants each day– that, my friends, is a lot of stemware to set up, fill, dump, and replace and a lot of bottles to organize.)

Don’t get me wrong — these tastings are amazing. What a great opportunity for winemakers to benchmark their own wines and assess the state of the industry than by tasting forty of the finest Rieslings on earth and hearing from the winemakers. Truly a priceless experience.

But as the discussion unfolds I have found that the same issues seem to come up over and over again. Do you really think this is a dry Riesling (often stated as an accusation more than a question)?  The focus often shifts to the analytical data (RS, TA, PH), which is another set of circles. Then the big question: is this Old World or New World (the wines are tasted blind)? It is as if each wine must fit neatly into a set objective category and, of course, they don’t because wine isn’t really like that.

These debates, unlike the actual tasting of the wines, seem like a dead end to me. Perception of sweet and dry is individual and subjective, so what is dry to you might be sweet to someone else. The analytical data have limited significance, as Jamie Goode, who also attended the meetings, recently explained.

And it doesn’t matter to me very much if someone can guess where the wine is from — wine should not be a game of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. In any case, even the experts usually couldn’t answer the Old/New geography question with confidence and there were many surprises when makers and regions were revealed.

Talking around in circles doesn’t lead anywhere by itself, but I think it does serve a purpose. Like the tasting itself, it brings people together and often puts them in a frame of mind to take action either in their own winemaking or address the industry’s collective problems.

2. Actions speak louder …

The good news is that once the Riesling folks get beyond ritual circle talking they can and do accomplish quite a lot. One problem that is often noted is that many consumers think of Riesling as a sweet wine, unaware of its great diversity of styles and unable to figure out what is what. The International Riesling Foundation and its very useful Riesling  scale came out of earlier Riesling Rendezvous gatherings. Not every winery uses the scale as a back label way to communicate with wine drinkers, but those that do give consumers useful information and the confidence to try a new wine.scale-300x103

Chateau Ste Michelle uses the scale, for example, and has seen significant growth in both its Dry and sweeter Harvest Select wines that share shelf space with the big-volume off-dry Columbia Valley bottling. Consumers seem to be able to find the particular wine style they like best and come back from more. That’s progress.

The “winemaker only” sessions at Riesling Rendezvous allow for transfer of knowledge as well as a frank exchange of opinions and it seems like these discussions have had an important impact. The quality standard of Riesling has risen as technical expertise about vineyard and cellar practices have been shared. That’s progress, too.

3. Riesling’s rising tide

One impact of the rising quality tide, as noted earlier, is that even the  experts find it more difficult to tell Old World Riesling from the New World wines. At one point in the dry wine tasting, for example, Tom Barry (of Jim Barry wines) responded to a question by looking at the unidentified wine in his glass and saying simply and approvingly, “This is a nice wine from somewhere.”

The days are gone when Old World wines were typically better made than their New World competitors. Now there are well-made wines from all the regions that participated in the program. But I don’t think the wines have been reduced to a homogeneous “international style” — there is still great diversity even if there is also a trend, well documented in John Winthrop Haeger’s recent book Riesling Rediscovered, toward market-friendly drier styles.12182-110

The big moments of the earlier meetings happened when we found a stunningly good wine (and great wines still earned applause in 2016). This time most of them were stunners and the oohs and aahs were loudest when we encountered a wine that surprised  by walking a tightrope defined by terroir, vintage or technique with great success, like the memorable 2014 Tantalus Old Vines Riesling from British Columbia. The rising quality tide has served to accentuate and reward originality and authenticity, which is a good thing in my view.

4. Keep it complicated (and tell stories)

Riesling is special — it is my Desert Island wine if I have to choose one. The wines that we tasted spoke clearly and truthfully about Riesling’s progress around the world.

But as quality has increased Riesling has also become a bit more like other wines in the sense that the key factors are not simple dichotomies — Old versus New, dry versus sweet, good versus not-so-good and so on. And this is also a good thing.

Riesling Rendezvous revealed a wine world taking the next step from dichotomies to richer ways of thinking. As Ernie Loosen said at the opening session, complicated things need to be understood in complicated ways. How is this done?  People understand complicated things through the stories they tell about them.

And that’s where I see Riesling headed now. The story of what is happening today is complicated and important. It’s time to move beyond dichotomies and develop richer narratives about Riesling wine in the Loosen style that will attract and engage consumers, especially younger ones, by connecting them more persuasively to the people and places behind the wines and to their friends who they invite to share them.

Riesling Rendezvous has an important role to play in shaping those stories and helping producers get their complicated messages out. Can’t wait to see (and taste) the next chapter.

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Thanks to Chateau Ste Michelle and Dr Loosen for sponsoring Riesling Rendezvous and allowing us to attend. Thanks to everyone we met and talked with for your insights.

Flashback Friday: What Was Revealed at Riesling Rendezvous

July 15, 2016 By in Chateau Ste. Michelle, Dr. Loosen, Flashback Friday, Riesling, wine, wine festivals Leave a comment

Riesling Rendezvous 2016 starts on Sunday with a grand tasting on the beautiful grounds of Chateau Ste Michelle in Woodinville, Washington. Riesling Rendezvous is a project of Ste Michelle and the Mosel’s Dr. Loosen that brings together people from the four corners of Planet Riesling for three days of tasting and discussion.

Riesling Rendezvous comes around every three years and this is all the excuse needed for a Flashback Friday feature that returns to a dramatic moment at the 2013 conference.

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2_rr_wineglassI’ve been writing about the problems of marketing misunderstood and misunderappreciated wines for the last couple of weeks and before I leave this subject I want to take time to give you a brief report from the Riesling Rendezvous conference hosted by Chateau Ste Michelle and Dr Loosen in Seattle last month.

Although the public face of the conference was the sell-out Sunday Grand Tasting on the grounds of the Chateau in Woodinville, the real work took place at the waterfront Bell Harbor Conference Center on Elliott Bay. What did we learn about life on Planet Riesling (as Stuart Pigott calls it)?

Small Worlds and Big

Well, its a big world after all — that’s the first insight. We tasted spectacular wines from many corners of the globe and regions of the U.S. and Canada. But it is a small world, too, as global quality standards have risen due in part, I think, to the international exchange of technical information that Riesling Rendezvous and its partner conferences have promoted. The gap between Old and New Worlds has closed dramatically.

You might have enjoyed the scene at the two formal tastings, where about 300 of us sat in front of 20 glasses each of dry Riesling on the first day and off-dry Riesling on the second. We tasted the wines blind and then, one by one, members of the expert panel commented on the wines and tried to place them in terms of origin — Old World or New? Cooler climate or warmer site? Particular time (vintage) and place?

Sometimes the experts were spot on, but I think the organizers might have selected the line up of wines to make the point that Planet Riesling is changing, so sometimes (more often than not, I believe) they were fooled. Fooled, generally, by unexpected quality from an unexpected source, which is a nice way to be surprised.

Ooohs and Aaahs

There were ooohs and aaahs, for example, when one wine was revealed to be from Elesko Winery in Slovakia. Wow, none of us saw that coming, probably because we didn’t have Slovakia on our radar. I remember tasting a few crisp, delicious white wines from this region when I taught in Prague, but beer, not wine, is probably the first thing that comes to mind (despite Austria’s obvious presence) when you think Central Europe.  Very impressive.

Tim Atkin, who moderated the off-dry tasting (John Winthrop Haeger handled the job for the dry wines) seemed to take special pleasure in revealing that a wine that had been firmly placed in the Mosel region by a panelist was in fact made by Ste Chapelle of Idaho (part of the rapidly rising Precept Wine group).

How many cases do you make, Atkin asked Marueen Johnson who represented the winery, probably imagining the sort of hillbilly Idaho wine industry that the old Muppet Movie scene suggested? Forty thousand cases came the reply. Wow, that’s lot, Atkin said obviously surprised (and that’s just Riesling — total production tops 100,000 cases for this, the largest winery in Idaho). It’s a brave new world on Planet Riesling when fine wines can come from such unexpected corners of the globe.

Two Directions at Once

Further evidence of how the Riesling map is changing was provided by two new Chateau Ste Michelle Riesling wines: Anew Riesling, which seeks to broaden the Riesling base, and Eroica Gold, which aims for a more classic style and promises to deepen interest in this category.

Anew, with its elegant bottle (which reminds me of a graceful off-the-shoulder gown) and subtle flower label seems to enter the market as a wine targeting  women, who of course make up the majority of wine drinkers and, for reasons that I’ll explain in a future post, a disproportionate part of the Riesling base. Off-dry but not too sweet,  it makes a tasty aperitif — a nice way to end of day of work and start the evening. Coming from the creators of the hugely successful 14 Hands wine brand, this is a wine that could convert Pinot Grigio drinkers to Riesling fans.

Seafood

Eroica Gold is the newest project of the Ste Michelle – Dr. Loosen partnership and it builds upon and expands the very successful Eroica Riesling line. Eroica has a hint of sweetness and can often be purchased for $20 or less (I’ve seen it at Costco for about $15) — very good value for money and often listed as one of America’s best Riesling wines.

Eroica Gold is riper, botrytis influenced, and, at $30+, more expensive. It aims to take American Riesling consumers to the next stage. Hopefully it will both communicate to American consumers what they might find in European wines and also represent the New World effectively to the Old.

Inevitable Seattle Food Porn

The conference ended with a festive reception at the Chihuly Garden, a blown glass fantasy highlighting the work of Northwest art icon Dale Chihuly, which I mention only because it gives me an excuse to include this “food porn” photo of the seafood buffet. Ahi tuna, smoked salmon, oysters, shrimp, and crab. What a treat!

Riesling may be misunderstood and there certainly are problems to be worked out, but on that warm afternoon in Seattle, with Riesling in my glass and smoked salmon on my plate, life on Planet Riesling seemed a pretty sweet place to be.

Riesling’s Rising Tide

July 19, 2010 By in Chateau Ste. Michelle, Dr. Loosen, Flying Winemakers, globalization, Long Shadows, Riesling, wine history 4 Comments

The continuing globalization of wine presents many challenges and opportunities. The opportunities are fresh in my mind because I recently attended the third Riesling Rendezvous conference – an international gathering of Riesling makers from around the world (Germany, Austria, France, Canada, Australian and New Zealand) and across the U.S. (Washington, Oregon, California, Michigan, New York and New Jersey).

It was a real love fest. Riesling is the fastest growing market segment in the United States right now and the rising tide raises all boats. There was a strong sense of good will and collective achievement.

International [Wine] Relations

The meeting was organized by Washington State’s Chateau Ste Michelle (CSM), the number one U.S. Riesling maker, and Dr. Loosen, a leading Mosel producer. Their partnership was really at the core of the event — you could see evidence of it everywhere. Loosen and CSM have collaborated for a dozen years on a number of projects, the most visible of which is Eroica, consistently one of America’s top Rieslings.

It was interesting to listen to Ernie Loosen and Bob Bertheau, CSM’s head winemaker, talk about their work together and how much they have learned from each other. There was a real sense of mutual respect and pride of accomplishment – part of the feel-good feeling.

Another of Washington’s best Rieslings is also the result of international collaboration. I’m thinking of Poet’s Leap, the wine that Germany’s Armin Diel makes with Gilles Nicault, the resident winemaker at Allen Shoup’s ambitious Long Shadows winery in Walla Walla. I got the same feeling about this collaboration from Gilles.

Eroica and Poet’s Leap are wines I recommend to my students – exceptional wines, widely distributed and  priced at around $20. Loosen & CSM and Diel & Long Shadows have made their partnerships work very well.

The Ghost of Rieslings Past

But collaboration is difficult and partnerships don’t always work out so well. This was the case with the first attempt by an international winemaker to make Riesling in Washington State. I’m talking about the great failed (and now nearly forgotten) F.W. Langguth winery experiment.

The Langguth family has been making wine in the Mosel for over 200 years. F.W. Langguth is today best known mainly for its mass market wines – it purchased the Blue Nun global brand (see  the Curse of the Blue Nun ) a few years ago and makes many of the low cost wines that fill German supermarket shelves.

Langguth became interested in international expansion in the early 1980s (two of its current brands, made in Tunisia of all places, were born in this period). The success of Washington Rieslings from Chateau Ste Michelle and other producers caught Langguth’s attention and soon plans were under way for a major investment.

Langguth and local partners developed Weinbau Vineyard (now part of Sagemoor Farms) on the Wahluke Slope and built a $5 million 35,000 square foot state of the art winery in Mattawa. The winery was the second largest in the state at the time, behind only Chateau Ste Michelle’s big Woodinville facility.

A Simple Idea

The idea was simple – make German-style Rieslings in Washington State and ride the rising U.S. market tide. The first vintage (220,000 gallons) was made in 1982 and released the next year. The wines sold for $4 to $6 per bottle, equivalent to the $8 to $12 price band today. There was a heady feeling of coming success, both at Langguth and within the Washington wine industry generally, which I think was flattered and encouraged by the international attention.

It did not last long. By 1986 the bankrupt Langguth winery was being sold to Snoqualmie Vineyards, where Mike Januik and Charlie Hoppes made wine. Snoqualmie was eventually absorbed by CSM’s parent company and the gleaming stainless steel of the Langguth facility disappeared. The big building was eventually used for storage.

What went wrong? Well, as I said, collaboration is difficult and it seems that there was a great failure to communicate in this one. The wine was made in Mattawa, of course, but I understand that all the decisions were made back in the Germany. The grapes were picked early at low brix and high acid, just like in Germany where climate and geography make this necessary, even though that combination didn’t make much sense in sunny Mattawa, where longer hang times are the current norm.

Remote Control Winemaking

The technicians back at the mother ship analyzed the data – wine by the numbers — but I guess they didn’t taste the grapes, as winemakers around the world always do. So they couldn’t tell that the resulting wines were soulless (as one critic concluded) and seemed over-processed. The market was under-whelmed by the wines when they were released.

Although Langguth wines improved in the following vintages, it was already too late. The market opportunity was gone. It is too harsh to say that Langguth was the Edsel of Washington Rieslings, but that’s the general idea I get from published accounts.

No one talked about Langguth at the Riesling Rendezvous – and I don’t blame them. Why dig up old skeletons?

But I think remembering the failed Langguth experiment usefully helps us appreciate how truly exceptional these recent successful partnerships really are. Here’s to Riesling’s rising tide!

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Thanks to Chateau Ste Michelle for inviting me to participate in Riesling Rendezvous. Information for this report was drawn from Paul Gregutt’s Washington Wines & Wineries (2005), Ronald Irvine’s The Wine Project (1997) and Ronald and Glenda Holden’s Touring the Washington Wine Country (1983).

A Riesling Revival?

August 12, 2008 By in Chateau Ste. Michelle, Dr. Loosen, Riesling, Supply and Demand, wine brands Leave a comment

A hundred years ago the most treasured and expensive wines in the world were not the great reds from Burgundy and Bordeaux, they were wonderful Rieslings from Germany.  Since then Riesling has fallen on hard times in the market, although its status among wine critics and cult collectors has not wavered.  Now there is change in the air.  Have we entered a Riesling Renaissance?

Riesling Rendezvous

Woodinville, Washington was the center of the Riesling world for a few days in July when Chateau Ste Michelle and Dr. Loosen hosted a program called “Riesling Rendezvous” that brought together more than 200 producers, critics and industry representatives from around the world. (Chateau Ste Michelle let me attend to do research for my next book – thank you CSM for your support!).  This was the second Riesling Rendezvous conference and a third round is planned for 2010.

Chateau Ste Michelle is the largest Riesling producer in the United States – more than 700,000 cases of their Columbia Valley Riesling are released each year along with a number of other Riesling wines that range from a Dry Riesling all the way to a deliciously sticky Ice Wine.

Dr. Loosen is a famous Mosel producer that has a decade-long relationship with CSM – they jointly produce a Washington Riesling called Eroica and work together in other ways – so their Old World – New World partnership makes this event a natural.  Ernie Loosen (as everyone calls him) is a great ambassador for Riesling.  He reminds me of the glass artist Dale Chihuly – funny, flamboyant, affable and dead serious about his work.  We tasted a lot of wine at the event, including one that Ernie made in 1983 that still sings; quality Riesling is built to last.

The Curse of the Blue Nun

Riesling Rendezvous operated on at least two levels.  The top level was a celebration of Riesling in all its diverse forms.  The $50 ticket to the Grand Tasting on Sunday is one of the great values in the wine world, in my opinion, as dozens of producers poured their best wines on the Chateau grounds and the CSM chefs prepared finger foods to accompany them.  Each of the trade sessions I attended included tastings of great Rieslings brought from afar by the producers.  Honestly, no one could come away unimpressed with the state of Riesling wine today and the commitment that winemakers around the world have to this great varietal.

The state of the Riesling wine economy is another matter.  The Riesling market went all to hell in the 1970s when German producers pumped out lots of low quality wines to try to appeal to a mass market (a market defined here in the US, I suppose, by the big jugs of sweet California “Rhine” wine that filled the supermarket shelves).  They made the fatal mistake of devaluing their brand.  Riesling’s reputation suffered and it has been a long struggle to rebuild it.  Perhaps this is Riesling’s moment, now that everyone has grown tired by simple over-oaked Chardonnay and thin Pinot Grigio. Perhaps this is under-appreciated Riesling’s time to shine?  Certainly the sales numbers are trending up, although a relatively small segment of the market accounts for most of the sales.

But Riesling has an identity crisis and a lot of the discussions centered around this fact.  There is no one Riesling wine, as we learned through the tastings, because Riesling reflects it terroir so faithfully.  Wines from different vineyard areas (or subject to different cellar choices) taste very different.  This diversity is one of Riesling’s most appealing characteristics, but it makes it hard to sell to confused and uncertain buyers.

Consumers as a group tend to think of Rieslings in terms of a single characteristic: its sweetness. This is a shame because there is much more to wine than sweet versus dry, but it is Riesling’s particular burden, its  Blue Nun curse.

Rieslings are sweet, of course, but they also are dry.  I tasted wines that ranged from a few grams per liter of residual sugar (very dry) to perhaps fifty times that.  But the key to Riesling isn’t dry-sweet, as Pierre Trimbach said on the first day, it is balance – the balance of sugar and acid and the other critical elements of the wine.  The technical problem is to produce balanced wines of whatever degree of alcohol and residual sugar.  The economic problem is to communicate to consumers the characteristics of the wine so that they can buy it with confidence.  I would say that the Riesling Rendezvous showed that producers are closer to solving the technical problem than the economic one.

Riesling and Thai Food: How Many Stars?

Consumers want to know what’s inside the bottle and it is particularly hard to explain this with Riesling.  The nature of the wine isn’t as transparent to buyers as the glass bottle it comes in.  The German wine labeling rules classify wines by their sugar levels, which reveals something about the wine, but that isn’t as useful as you might think since two wines with similar residual sugar levels can have different tastes depending upon the acid balance, the type of sugar (some forms of sugar taste sweeter than others) and of course the myriad other factors associated with wine.  The German code gives some information, but it doesn’t solve the problem. In a way, in fact, it might define the problem because it defines Riesling by its sweetness.

New World labels aren’t much help either.  Only a few of them give technical data that would help a geek like me figure out what’s inside.  Some use vague descriptors (what does “off dry” mean and why is this one producer’s off dry so much sweeter than another’s?) but most just make you guess what style of wine you have before you.  Guess wrong three times in a row and I predict you will stop buying Riesling wine for a while.

A producer group, the International Riesling Foundation, is trying to address this problem by creating a clear and simple system that would tell consumers what to expect – something perhaps like the star system commonly used in Thai restaurants.  You know how it works: one star is mild, five stars is very very hot.  The star system makes people more comfortable ordering food at Asian restaurants, although there is obviously more to Thai food than just heat (and more to Riesling than residual sugar).  It’s worth a try, I suppose.  Even a trustworthy dry-to-sweet graphic index would probably help in the marketplace.  Sake producers (see below) are working on this problem, too, although I wouldn’t recommend their particular descriptors (a translation problem?).

This is how different styles of Sake are described on www.sake.com

This is how different styles of Sake are described on http://www.sake.com

I hope that Riesling producers can find a way to make the complex characteristics of their wines clearer and therefore more appealing to confused consumers.  Conferences like the Riesling Rendezvous are a useful way to get that conversation going. There is a natural tendency, however, for such gatherings to “preach to the choir” and focus on the well informed specialist market that already exists rather than the potential market of former Chardonnay drinkers looking for a more interesting wine, who could be drawn to Riesling if they understood it a bit better. I think this educational mission is the real challenge for Riesling Rendezvous III: thinking beyond today’s market to tomorrow’s.

I am hopeful that the International Riesling Foundation will make progress in this regard, but the collective action problem is significant here. It won’t be easy to get dozens of producers of differing size, style and market position to agree to standards and then implement them uniformly. It is more likely, I think, that a few of the big brands like CSM will lead the way and define the image of Riesling in consumer minds.  Others will follow or not and so the future of Riesling will unfold.