Did you ever lay your
eyes on the random passer by
and invent a
story that is behind this person?
Indulging your
freedom of
imagination, have you plucked scraps of
names from the depths of your
memory, cutting, pasting
and attaching
them in your own mode, perhaps, even
choosing names for a couple of characters
and having assorted
the whole artistic conception in your
conscience, washed away the unborn literary masterpiece in the
sink along with the bolognese remnants on
the plates after dinner? Laziness, laziness,
laziness is a ruthless killer
of so many masterpieces.
But some people,
such as the German playwright Carl Zuckmayer,
didn't spend time on washing up, maybe
hasn't even dined
at all, what a waste! When the passion
takes you by surprise, who
cares about routine, take
a quill and write. And that's, actually,
what he has done. Saw a
girl, fell in love, proposed, has
been refused, got disappointing, got
angry, wrote a play. 'And the girl? What
happened to the girl?' - you
might ask. And I'll answer you: 'She
got married to a
respectable banker by profession and winemaker by vocation (also
Carl, but another one,
from the Gunderloch
family), gave birth to
children, and they lived happily after
until... Until the revenge of
the rejected playwright, has overtaken
them with the
play 'The Happy Vineyard' in which Carl Gunderloch
was described as a drunkard and
adultery inclined man with all the ensuing consequences in the
form of illegitimate children. The scandal
and the fifty or, maybe, even the hundred
shades of hatred and contempt from Gunderloch
family served as an excellent advertisement for
the Zukmayer's play (the
balming effect it produced on his heart
wound was a bonus) and
only roused
interest towards theatrical
performances, bringing all
possible success
to the play.
And that's how
strange life is, every
cloud has a silver lining or 'there's no such thing as bad
publicity', in spite of the moral damage to the owners (grandmother
and grandfather of the current owner of
Weingut Gunderloch
– Agnes Hasselbach)
the play made the winery famous.That
is to say, I
don't mean, that the
wines that
are shipped all over the world
with the Gunderloch
name
on
their
proudly
protruding chest (well, surely,
if the 'bottle'
according
to the
official terminology has
the
'neck',
why
wouldn't it have a 'chest'
as
well)
sought any
additional advertisement
or
fame.
Being
as
gorgeous
as they are, they could make anyone else famous by
association,
but, you see, there
are not so
many
wineries in
the world
that
could
boast
this 'kinship' with classical literature. Not
a 'second cousin twice removed' kind of
relation,
but
as direct as one
could
be.
Through
two
generations. Here you go.
How do I know all
this? Have learned it on my way from the
winery to the cellar, the kind of cellar where the wine has been
kept for centuries, from Friedrich Hasselbach, winemaker
of Weingut Gunderloch and husband of Agnes Hasselbah, whose
grandmother ... Well, you know already.
After a short tour
to the production site
(it is a bit bizarre
to use those words in relation to an intimate family business with
a hundred years of history) we went to see the vineyards. The
'Roter Hang', a
unique slope of the
Reinhessen, from which some of the most famous German
Rieslings and one of the most famous white wines in the world
proceed, is beautiful, obstinate
and dangerous. Beautiful, because it offers a remarkably beautiful
view of the Rhine. Obstinate, because
despite the 21st century's technological
progress and all this
blah, blah,
blah, the
cultivating process remains
as hard as it was centuries ago. Why
is it dangerous? 'This is,
perhaps, a question to the tractor's
driver, who's been crossing himself each
time he had to drive down the narrow path of the hill...up to 50
times a day' - says Friedrich Hasselbach.
Well, if the
vine should suffer in order to give a good wine (and it suffers
a lot... to get to the water
through the red shale, is difficult even if you are a human
with a set of garden tools, not a fragile plant!), so
the winemakers have to go
through the trials on their way to awards and praise by
Decanter, Wine Advocate and other wine gurus. 'Yes, in the old days, everything on the
vineyard has been
done manually, we went up
and down, up and down the slope, countless times a day. But
it's not the the most
difficult thing'- says Friedrich as we
stay at the foot of the hill -'the main
difficulty is to
avoid botrytis,
which is the regular companion of the
humidity that comes from the river and the fogs. It
is the main enemy of dry Rieslings if you want to follow the organic
trends'.
The
day before we arrived to the winery, it has been visited by the
photographer from Wine Spectator, the magazine, which has awarded
different vintages of Gunderloch Nackenheim
Rothenberg TBA with the highest 100
points in 1992, 1996 and 2001. Sitting in the
tasting room I contemplate another wine
magazine's - the Decanter awards
hanging on the wall and realize perfectly
well that
everything that could have been
said about these wines already is already said
and written two hundred thousand times. Therefore, I will not
bore you with long descriptions, just will name
the wines that we have tasted:
1.
Nierstein 2013 – Peach
and lime strike you first, followed by mineral notes. Dry, mineral
and spicy
2.
Pettenthal
2012
–
elegant,
opening up with exotic fruits aromas, spicy-mineral on the palate
with well balanced acidity.
3.
Nackenheim
2013 – apples,
lots of apples in the aroma, touched with citrus and herbal hints.
Very mineral and intense on the palate.
No comments:
Post a Comment