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Recently I did an interview with my friend, the wine critic Stuart Pigott about summer wines and his recommendations for cheap bottles. This is the fourth article I’ve written for EXBERLINER and I was really annoyed to find that the article was printed without a byline. Not only was my name no where to be found, the piece was edited down to sashimi thin slices of flat copy. Needless to say, I won’t be writing for them any more, which is a shame because they were the only English language print magazine in Berlin and I had only begun to scratch the surface of what I wanted to write about.
For those of you who are interested in reading the full article, I am printing it here, enjoy!
Sabrina Small: I found this amazing white wine, it’s really good on ice. It’s called Liebfraumilch. Ever heard of it?
Stuart Pigott: Yeah of course. Liebfraumilch and I go back 40 years, at least. But if you like it, and you like it on ice, then I won’t try to dissuade you.
SS: really?
SP: It’s not my job to tell people what they should enjoy.
SS: But how could the world be snowed by something like Liebfraumilch for so long without learning about the truly good wines that are available in Germany?
SP: Well people did discover other wines and Liebfraumilch collapsed in every market beginning in US in the 80’s. But most of the time, the new wines they discovered came from places other than Germany. That was sad. But it was because Germany had identified itself so much with Liebfraumilch, just as it had simultaneously with BMW and Mercedes. That continued to work, up until now.
SS: Do you think Liebfraumilch could come out with an amazing wine today?
SP: I see no reason at all why the basic idea of Liebfraumilch, that you blend together different grape varieties to make a wine with a bit of sweetness that’s not too heavy…this seems a great idea to me. But, you know, if you start with shit grapes you’ll end up with a shit wine, and this was the problem.
SS: I’m from California, and the wine bottles coming out of Napa Valley and Santa Barbara always seemed sort of playful to me. They had funny names and wild typography. I feel like the old school German wine labels look like police badges in comparison.
SP: (Laughs Boisterously) I can understand that. The old style is very old indeed. The whole German wine game changed dramatically roughly ten years ago. All the old stuff went out the window and people began from scratch, in a really creative way. If it hadn’t changed, I doubt I’d still be writing about it, but the wine-makers in the Pfalz region, where Liebfraumilch was made, are mostly under 30 and they are blowing my mind with their wines.
SS: Now that we’re in summer gear, what do these wine-makers have to offer that wasn’t there before? Is it still Riesling Riesling Riesling?
SP: Well Riesling is statistically the most important grape in Germany for good reason. It gives the most amazing diversity of white wines, ranging from feather light to heavy metal, from raspingly dry to honey sweet. But the new wines that are being made with Müller Thurgau grapes, Sylvaner, or Weiss Burgunder, are developing a cult following and they are more interesting than they’ve ever been. And recently, I’ve had some psychedelic experiences with Scheurebe (a sweet explosive white).
SS: Beer trumps wine because you can drink a lot of it, cheaply without getting super shit-faced.
SP: (Laughs Boisterously) I’ve seen a lot of people get super shit-faced on beer. And if you’re gonna vomit on beer, a lot more liquid comes up than wine.
SS: So you’re advocating for wine because it’s easier to deal with coming up?
SP: I’m saying that wine is a drug, just like beer is, and it offers a different sort of high. I’ve had absolutely effervescent experiences with wine, and I’ve also had ghastly experiences talking to the big white telephone when I’d reached my limit.
SS: Is that a British euphemism for puking?
SP: One of many.
SS: Well one idea I had to get the most out of wine in summer, was to mix it with mineral water. It would dilute the alcohol and allow you to drink at the same pace as your beer buddies. Is a weinschorle out of the bounds of good taste?
SP: You can do whatever you want. People think that wine is a snooty zone where you have to play by the rules. But this is all complete bullshit! I think mineral water mixed with a very dry Riesling is a damned good idea!
SS: But would that Riesling be really expensive?
SP: You can get a very decent Riesling for €2.50. I wouldn’t buy it in the discounter grocery stores though. The buyers there will take a bottle that’s a cent cheaper than one that would taste 10 times better. Geitzig ist Geil is a real problem in Germany. But penny pinching only ends up pinching their customers in the ass.
SS: So where should I buy wine?
SP: Well, the bio markets are much more picky about the wine they buy. You will have a much higher success rate there than at a regular supermarket for the same price. But, you have to buy the slightly more expensive stuff. €2.99 will taste like shit. €4.99 will taste dramatically better.
SS: Why is there so much cheap crap out there?
SP: Well, there is a serious overproduction of wine, a global surplus. Too many vineyards were planted in places like South America, Australia and South Africa, and now there is a lot of crap sloshing around. It’s a hit or miss thing. If you’re willing to try a bunch of wine, you might find something good, but you have to buy it up because next month, it’ll be some other ridiculously cheap wine from the same label and it might not be half as good.
SS: What about wines for grilling? Would you go red or white?
SP: Well there’s this very old-fashioned idea that’s still in the heads of a lot of cool young people that somehow with red meat, you need red wine. Well this is complete bullshit. This is drivel your parents were sold about wine, and it’s high time your generation act like rock stars and chuck this idea out the window.
SS: But most people think Germany produces terrible red wine.
SP: Well this is also complete bullshit. Even 20 years ago, Germany was producing top-notch red wines, but it came with a steep price-tag. 10 years ago, partly thanks to global warming, and partly because the new wine-makers stopped making the same mistakes with red grape varietals, the price of red wine in Germany has gone way down and the wine is totally pleasant.
SS: I had a real epiphany as a wine drinker when I realized my beloved Pinot Noir was being produced in Germany under the name Spatburgunder.
SP: Oh absolutely, Germany grows the third highest amount of Pinot Noir in the world.
SS: And they’ve been making these wines for a while?
SP: Well, since the 14th century.
SS: That seems like a time-span you can trust as a consumer.
SP: These things happen in waves. I think, for example, French Pinot Noir in the lower price-range is not half as good as what Germany is producing. But 20 years ago, my opinion was the exact opposite.
I am working on an article about the composer John Cage’s secret life as a mycologist and in my research I came across these beautiful water-colors by a German couple who live in Maulbronn, which is located in southern Germany. Here is a link to their website, http://www.wandernundzeichnen.de/
Doesn’t this make you want to go out and hike? I keep looking out my window, at the construction workers on my corner and I feel totally exasperated by the fact that I’m not in the woods. City fever, it’s a real problem.
I really love their 70’s naturalist style. I used to be obsessed with the painter Neil Welliver, who lived in Maine and sketched every day (no matter what the weather was like) in the woods near his home. His images were so stark and un-idealistic but really beautiful in their minute descriptiveness.
There is so much art that needs to be thought about. Sometimes it’s nice to have images appeal to you without that sense of carving away at your brain through some sort of conceptual canal.
First of all, I need to say that one of my favorite all time film moments is the moment in Before Sunrise when Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are in the listening booth of an old Austrian music shop and he wants to kiss her so bad–it’s actually difficult to look at his face without feeling that longing too. It’s just thrilling film making! And it’s so simple to understand why it works. It all boils down to chemistry between the actors and a director who is willing to let that lead the story at its own pace. But it would be virtually impossible to recreate that moment again. That’s a magical moment, plain and simple. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they shot it in the first take.
So then there’s Before Sunset, which takes all the promise of that first film and the magic between the actors, and tries to envision their cinematic future. Formally, this film seems much less free than the first one. There’s a lot that the actors need to say to each other and not so much time for them to seemingly discover what’s important about each other. And whenever a plot point gets touched upon, the writing seems heavy handed. We loved Before Sunrise because, not always, but at certain moments, there didn’t seem to be a writer. Before Sunset has fewer of those moments.
But to say that it doesn’t have something is plain crazy. I think the key to liking this movie is realizing that the annoying aspects of these characters is what’s most real about them. Ethan Hawke’s tacky, overtly sexual comments, for example, seem so honestly inevitable. His thin veil of machismo is so perfectly crafted over his intense self-consciousness and vulnerability. He’s not subtle. He’s not cool. He’s sort of horny and obnoxious.
And she is equally obnoxious. She’s tense and graceless. She doesn’t say anything funny on purpose and her references are a bit boring. In fact, it’s only when she talks about herself personally that she really seems appealing.
Sexual tension is a really important part of this film. Whether or not they will end up together is the central question and also the fantasy motivating the characters, pushing the plot along. Julie Delpy’s character, Celine, inserts sex into the conversation with what she hopes will seem like intellectual frankness but underneath, there’s something manipulative going on. She’s using it as a ploy to excite him and keep his mind trained on her. But when she does get that reaction she looks away from him; as if she’s angry with herself.
There have been plenty of female rom-com characters who try to be cute, or seem affected for the sake of men, but, it’s rare to see a woman acknowledge that performance with subtle facial expressions of remorse. At the same time, Ethan Hawke looks like he’s actively trying to recapture the connection they had the first time they met and even though those attempts looks awkward on film, it feels real because they are so clumsy and awkward.
If it’s possible, their characters seem more excruciatingly vulnerable in this film than they did in the first one.
Kelly Richardt made this film in 2006 and sort of challenged Gus van Sant’s take on Oregon as film muse.
The film is maddeningly atmospheric. It’s like the visual equivalent of “aural wallpaper” The viewer is literally staring out the window for 15 percent of the film. And Yo La Tengo keeps the soundtrack so understated that we aren’t really able to stray too far metaphorically from the literal view.
Maybe I’m thinking about vanSant because he is a gay filmmaker and Old Joy is, if not a homosexual film, then certainly homosocial. Will Oldham’s character is a little bit Buck from Chuck and Buck and a little bit like Sal Mineo’s character in Rebel Without a Cause.
It’s hard to understand a character like this one unless you’ve met someone like him before. His intensity is stark and raw, perhaps in a way we’d all like to feel sometimes. But it’s also on the edge of delusional.
In Old Joy, this character is named Kurt and he and his friend Mark go on a short camping trip to an isolated hot springs in the forest outside of Portland. The two men seem out of step with each other from their first interaction. When Mark drives to pick up Kurt from his house, Kurt is off somewhere collecting a cooler and some other junk for their trip and Mark sits on the porch wondering if his friend will show up at all. Mark also has a pregnant wife and in the brief glimmer we get of their relationship, the two seem stressed and sad.
When Kurt does show up, he seems shy and beholden to Mark. We learn later that the two were old roommates but that relationship seems far away now. When these two men meet again, they are rediscovering each other with very tentative probings. On their first night out camping, Kurt gets really drunk and the true nature of his feelings for Mark come out. To say that he loves Mark is accurate. But that love is not an easy categorical love. It seems explosive in every direction–will Kurt kiss Mark? Kill him? rape him? Is he crazy, or just lonely and lost? Will Oldham bring out Kurt’s character so fully with so little dialogue. It’s really incredible that he is able to pack such a short film (111 minutes!) with so much subtext.
But he also conveys a lot physically. There are these moments when Kurt looks at Mark with something slightly more evil than longing. In the culmination of the film, when the two have reached the hot springs, stripped down and entered there separate tubs, Kurt (after getting out to smoke a bowl) crouches behind Mark and begins massaging his shoulders. Mark tenses up and Kurt tells him to relax. The camera focuses on Mark’s hand, which starts out tightly gripped around the edge of the tub and slowly loosens and sinks into the water. His wedding ring eerily prominent. His hand limp like a dead man’s. He’s given in to Kurt and maybe it was the right thing to do. But his giving in also seems tainted because we can see that he thinks Kurt is off his rocker and when he lets Kurt take control of him, physically, it’s like he’s going against his better judgement.
At the center of Old Joy is the tension of life lived deliberately versus life lived passively as a witness. I would also add that the film uses the buddy (homosocial) relationship to reveal the difficulties of male bonding in our society. This film could never have been made about two women. Women are allowed to be physically close to one another to a much greater degree without things getting “weird”.
I called my American friend Sarrita from the lobby of the Hotel Palace: ”Sarrita, I’m at a wine tasting in Charlottenberg. It’s going on till five o’clock. There are at least 60 wines to taste from the Ahr, Nahe, Pfalz and Rheinhessen. This is like the Super Bowl of German wines.” I was so excited that I barely gave her a moment to answer. Finally she said, “Hmmm. I don’t know. I’m kind of tired. I was going to work on some stuff. Maybe next time, though.” Americans, I thought, and proceeded back into the ballroom for more sweet torture.
Mainly I wanted Sarrita there so there would be another American witness to the glory of German wines. And I refer to this tasting (by far the largest I’d ever attended) as sweet torture because after the thirtieth or so sample I tasted, I could no longer smell all that accurately and the taste may have been objectively good, even perfect, but my mouth could no longer enjoy what it was tasting. My stomach felt a bit raw as well. I spit and spit and spit throughout the whole tasting, I spit into a basin so full of spit-up wine that my little trickle caused an upsurge to shoot back in my face, but at some point my palette became slack and tasting another exquisite Riesling seemed like very hard work.
That being said, I did taste some extraordinary wines and I met some of the growers whose wines I have been enjoying since I arrived in Berlin. One of the perks of the wine business is that the people who make wine tend to be really enthusiastic and fun to talk with. I learned about ‘petrol-tone’ which is a term for the smell of gasoline that is often found in old-vine Rieslings. I learned about the different growing sites and their reputations and I developed some generalizations of my own. The Oelberg site, for example, developed wines that, for me, had a nose very much like freshly cleaned linens drying in sunshine. The St. Anthony 2006 Oelberg Riesling had the most strongly developed laundry nose out of all the wines I tasted. The Kuhling Gillot 2006 Pattenthal Riesling had a much more pungent nose in which I detected everything from nectarines to St. Marcellin cheese.
When German wine makers talk about their wines they tend to use words like elegant, developed, and balanced. German wines, from what I’ve gathered, do not go out of their way to be earthy, rustic, or singularly set on conveying one scent note, like the very out of fashion ‘oaky’ Chardonnay’s of California. This makes German wine tasting more difficult than wine tasting in Sonoma, for example, because if you were trained to notice the nose, mouth feel and acidity and grew up with wine growers who wanted you to be smacked over the head with their wines, then German Rieslings can be tough to distinguish between. There constructions are subtle, ethereal, even shy. That being said there were some wines I tasted at the beginning of my long journey into nacht that had exceptionally distinctive characteristics.
The Wittmann Aulerdere 2006 had a sharp and flowery nose, which gave way to a yeasty hay smell and then to something much greener that reminded me of photosynthesis and the fact that grapes and grape leaves are really just sunshine junkies. The Schaefer-Froehlich 2006 Halenberg Riesling at first smelled so clean I thought of this ridiculous ‘new car smell’ my Dad used to have sprayed in his car after a trip to the carwash. As it opened up though, the ‘new car smell’ gave way to overripe tropical fruits. The structure of the taste was slow to open as well, a bit tight and acidic at first but then it smoothed out and balanced itself and the finish was quite long.
I suppose what I’m learning from German Riesling is that it’s not enough to rely on scent cues and to revel in shocking, distinctive descriptions. What I seemed to have passed over in my years of drinking and studying wine is how taste the stuff. Tasting is a much more inexact, frustrating process for a writer. When wine is good, balanced, elegant, and smooth, there’s nothing to do but close your eyes and enjoy it. But how do you write about that?
I have been working at Nostrana for a week now, manning the grill, discovering the fragile web that separates rare from medium rare, and inhaling more smoke than the Rat Pack.
You see, one of the attractive things about Nostrana is their adherence to very pure and ancient cooking practices. The pizzas are fired in a wood oven, and the meats are grilled over a wood fire. That fire adds a lot of flavor to the food, but it also requires a lot of man power to keep the system running smoothly.
On my second day of work, one of the cooks–lets call him No Smiles, took me to the wood shed across from the restaurant and gave me a basic lesson in humility. See, up until that moment, I had assumed that my duties stopped in the kitchen. I was finding it adequately rigorous to manage the various proteins, coordinate timing with other stations in the restaurant, and clean the enormous grill at the end of the evening. I felt proud and a little bad ass about being the only woman running the grill station. Having all that meat under my control and making sure the fire didn’t die down, seemed tough and sexy, and worth bragging about. Leaving work every night, I smelled like a camp fire. My clothes were dusted with wood shavings and my fingers were covered with soot.
Which is why I sort of froze when No Smiles informed me that in addition to the strenuous duties I had already undertaken, I would also be responsible for chopping the wood. He pointed to a stump in the middle of the shed with an ax buried deeply inside it. I don’t think I could even heave an ax forcefully enough to plant it into a stump, let alone chop multiple smaller pieces clear in half. I kept imagining the axe slipping and my leg being cleaved clear in half.
Losing face, it turns out, is more frightening than losing a leg. So with the stoic look of an expert chopper, I placed a log on the stump, raised my axe and lowered it so forcefully that a tiny chip came off the edge! I squealed with delight. No Smiles…not so much. “Try to hit the center next time.” he said, clearly masking his great excitement over my accomplishment.
Second swing and I’m all stump. Third swing and I get a slightly larger chip. No Smiles tells me to put down the axe. He gracefully chops 6 logs in what seems like 10 seconds. When he finishes. He says, ” I usually do this job so no one else has to.” I try to look disappointed and mumble something about wanting to share the load equally, but, honestly, THANK GOD!
Lets all raise our axes to No Smiles for keeping my legs intact.
This is the salad:
- 1/2 cup of decent mixed greens, though by no means transporting
- 5 halved grape tomatoes, not especially flavorful
- a quarter cup of chopped red and golden beets
- 6 string beans
- a really blah vinaigrette
HOW COULD THIS SALAD COST 12 DOLLARS??? And why are people paying for it? I just assumed a salad like this would be 8$ tops and so I didn’t look at the price. When the bill came, I was flabbergasted. Last night, at a cute hole in the wall place called Weird Fish, my sister and I spent 60$ on a salad, two sides and a fish dish (and two glasses of wine). The kicker is, I was so hungry after dinner, I ended up grabbing a 4$ taco. I just want to state for the record that no salad is worth more than $10 dollars, and that salad must have some kind of wildly flavorful protein accent–house cured salmon, or grilled prawns, or skirt steak. I really need to get out of San Francisco.
I just discovered that people are actually reading this blog, bookmarking it, and linking to it from google. It’s enough to make me have a Sally Field Oscar moment–but I will spare you all that self validation for now. Instead, I would like to direct you to a blog that I am writing in Berlin for a gem of an experimental film festival. The festival is called Directors Lounge and this is its 5th anniversary. I write reviews about the films being screened and sometimes I do interviews with visiting filmmakers.
http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/
For the next 10 days, you can find me there.
10 minutes into this film I knew it. I knew it the way you know you’ll be gassy after a lot of cauliflower. I knew that I would wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. find my bladder to be full and my body and mind unwilling to walk the 6 steps to the bathroom because of paralyzing fear.
How is it that I can watch the images on the screen and understand that I am separate from them, that Adrian Lyne, while a decent director, threw just about every horror cliche into the hospital scene. How is it that even though I actually know the screenwriter and went to his son’s 15th birthday party and got high in their treehouse, I can not go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? Somehow between the viewing and the waking up, Jacob’s Ladder has transformed itself in my mind into something close to sheer terror.
I sat up in bed and I debated waking Brendan. There he was sleeping his deep sleep with no bladder interruptions and all I wanted was for him to wake up and walk me to the toilet and stand there while I peed, making sure that nothing pressed its face against the window while I did it. 3 in the morning and I am flicking his legs intermittently to try and wake him up but at some point I see the cruelty in that and I just sit there in the dark trying to build up the courage to walk alone to the toilet.
It was a really good movie. It was dark without being overly stylized ala Constantine or Saw. It was funny and sexy at times. Elizabeth Pena has nice tits and a plethora of open robes which she puts to good use. McCauly Culkin was memorably ingenue in his role as the dead son. And Tim Robbins is so human on screen. He has such a weird startled face and his expressions seem so open and natural; at times ugly in a base way; at times full of wonder and sweetness. Throw in Danny Aiello as the guardian angel chiropractor and Jason Alexander as the schmuck lawyer and the movie is a fortress of good casting choices.
But this doesn’t help when it is 3 in the morning and you just want to pee really bad and you’re having that debate about how to get to the toilet without stepping on evil goat’s heads. I congratulate myself, my 28 year old self, for not peeing in the bed, for making it to the toilet with a racing heart, peeing as quickly as possible and running back to the bed at lightning speed where I sought Brendan’s hand out under the covers and made it, in its dumb sleeping numbness, sort of clamp over my hand. Finally my heart rate went back to normal and I fell asleep again.
It’s grey outside. I have no money and many bills. I have projects to work on but no will or inclination. While there is a small part of my brain that realizes self defeat and shame spirals are not going to help, the bigger part is saying, ‘don’t shower…don’t do the dishes…watch a long sad movie…. Stay inside, in slippers, in a robe, make little messes and don’t clean them up. And eat, eat all day. Eat whatever will take the least amount of effort to compile. Combine flavors that stoners would tssk at.
Today the main dish ended up being boiled brown rice with leftover bolognese sauce mixed into it. Dessert was half a bag of sugar jelly candies. But if I were really to do it right. I mean if I were to not just give in to the pity party inclination but make a grand spectacle of it, I think I could create a sweatpants affair of the highest order.
I’m imagining a windowless room decorated like the set of Roseanne but with way more couches and afghans. Participants would each get a couch to lay on, a liter of soda to drink from directly, and a pot of spaghetti-marinara with plenty of cheese on top. Joints and whisky would also be available upon request. A series of celebrity tabloids and fashion magazines would circulate to reinforce depression and low self esteem. It would be the opposite of a weight watchers meeting. Just a bunch of sad sacks slurping noodles and staring numbly at the screen together. No talking, no touching each other. Maybe there could be cats and dogs because they have such a soothing warming effect.
The party would go on for as long as people were there. The world would be waiting outside but the Pity Party would never let on that it knew.