Memorable Moments from a Turbulent 2018

BY DAVID SCHILDKNECHT | JANUARY 2, 2019

While I lack Neal’s talent or experience in this genre, I was invited to address one or more personal highlights of my year. If you and I are lucky, the recitation might pleasantly distract us from the symptoms of social and governmental dysfunction that have been so conspicuously in evidence. There was one vinous event in which I participated that could conceivably be set alongside the year’s many cultural calamities as “historic.”

Comet Wine

My Vinous colleagues enjoy far more regular exposure to venerable and legendary fermented beverages than I do. But thanks to a tasting organized to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Weingut Geheimer Rat Dr. von Bassermann-Jordan (“Bassermann-Jordan” for short), I suspect I may now have one up on them when it comes to wines of the Napoleonic era – or at least, of ones that can be not only contemplated in awe, but still enjoyed as wine. Granted, I have only tasted one beverage meeting those criteria, but doing so was indubitably a high point of my year. 

The “comet wines” of 1811 became legendary not just because the growing season coincided with a then-unprecedented nine months during which a comet – Comet Flaugergues, or the Great Comet of 1811 – was brilliantly visible to the naked eye (a record shattered in 1997 by Comet Hale–Bopp) but because it set viticultural records that, by remarkable coincidence, were only approached again this very year. Andreas Jordan – who took the reins of his family’s estate in 1783 and introduced the Pfalz’s first all-Riesling vineyards as well as its first vineyard-designated bottlings – chronicled with mounting disbelief the earliest flowering ever recorded, followed by a perpetually balmy summer, culminating in a September 8th entry: “grapes already completely ripe.” That freakishly precocious ripening season of 1811 – like certain momentous events (notably of 1812) – was widely attributed to the comet. Would that those of us gathered at the end of August for this commemorative occasion and almost incredulously sharing anecdotes of Riesling already on the cusp of ripeness could pretend that vintage 2018 had any similarly singular, supernatural explanation. (I promised to try to distract us from social and political calamities, but climatic calamity is already baked into contemporary discussions of wine.)