BY DAVID SCHILDKNECHT |
Entering its sixth year in 2018, “Rieslingfeier – A Celebration of Riesling” reflects increasing enthusiasm among North American consumers and the wine trade for Germany’s great white wines. Those who annually brave New York City’s winter weather and share precious bottles from their cellars to celebrate a beloved grape are not just self-obsessed citizens of a strange and distant Planet Riesling. Most consider themselves the proselytizing leading edge of an unstoppable vinous wave.
Gala dinner
Creation and Evolution
On October 1, 2012, I received an e-mail from Stephen Bitterolf, then Wine Director at Crush Wine & Spirits and recent founder of Vom Boden, a German wine import company to which he would subsequently transfer his full professional allegiance. “I would like to ask you about one rather unrelated thing,” he wrote. “I'm going to be throwing what I'm tentatively calling ‘RieslingsFeier’ – it will be a VERY small-scale ‘La Paulée-type’ event to be held in New York. I would love it if you'd consider being a part of it. So far I have the following winemakers coming: Katharina Prüm, Klaus Peter Keller, Thomas Haag and Andreas Adam.” By late 2012, the notion of bringing together lovers of a particular wine genre around a Paulée-style event had already enjoyed a more than decade-long North American run with Daniel Johnnes’ bi-coastal edition of Meursault’s eponymous La Paulée. A year earlier, Antonio Galloni had inaugurated La Festa del Barolo; and Sherryfest had just commenced its roving run with a New York City event, the brainchild of Peter Liem, who in 2014 would team up with Johnnes to inaugurate La Fête du Champagne.
I replied enthusiastically to Stephen’s invitation, with two reservations: I insisted that German grammar dictated removing that “s” from the prospective title of his event, and expressed doubt that it could possibly be kept small-scale – let alone “VERY small-scale” – with the likes of Prüm, Keller, Haag and Adam having already signed on. Two Saar vintners, Florian Lauer (whose wines Bitterolf imported) and Dorothee Zilliken, eventually joined in the inaugural February, 2013 Rieslingfeier, which Eric Asimov in his enthusiastic New York Times coverage was, admittedly, correct in calling “a modest event by Paulée standards.” I led a seminar highlighting the stylistic diversity of Mosel and Saar Rieslings, and the gala dinner itself drew a hundred German Riesling enthusiasts, including some of that genre’s most dedicated merchant-advocates and collectors, to Rouge Tomate, where we enjoyed an impressively orchestrated menu with an array of rare, at times downright ancient (but by no means fatigued) Rieslings whose sheer diversity I had never experienced in one place. In-between, Bitterolf and the growers organized an afternoon-long “crawl” of selected Manhattan retail establishments, at each of which, in overlapping time slots, one of the featured growers poured current releases to consumers determinedly standing elbow to elbow. Not a few of us hoofed our way through Midtown and Downtown to hit every stop.
Even before that first Rieslingfeier happened, Bitterolf and I were getting excited by the prospects for, in his words, “more exposure, and hopefully more growers next year,” hopes that proved well-founded when Rieslingfeier 2014 hosted Clemens Busch, Cornelius Dönnhoff, Eva Fricke, Florian Lauer, Johannes Leitz, Egon Müller, Hansjörg Rebholz, Christoph Schaefer, Frank Schönleber and Christian Vogt (then of Eitelsbach’s Karthäuserhof, which Bitterolf at the time represented). Subsequent installments brought the total of the dinner participants to 140 (about one-third from beyond the U.S. Northeast), a number that seems to satisfy the Goldilocks principle by justifying the moniker “grand gala” while ensuring that each table represents a small gathering presided over by a grower, that attendees can comfortably make the rounds of every other table to meet old friends and each of the growers, and also that a waiting list will inspire eager, timely action on the part of next year’s would-be attendees. As Rieslingfeier’s format evolved, independently sponsored winemaker dinners sprang up in the day or two beforehand, and the “retail crawl” gave way to a Grand Tasting in conventional stand-up fashion, which last year supplanted the grower seminars that I had initiated, and this year drew nearly 400 visitors for a collection of recent releases sprinkled with older bottlings and the occasional under-the-table taste of an as yet unbottled 2016.
