Existential Oenophile Files: Nahe Riesling

With the success of my Yes, Chef series, I wanted to find a way for me to keep pushing the envelope a bit with regards to how we write and talk about food, sex, and beverages. Thus, my new series where I’ll be providing most of my “beverage” talking points.

For those not ingrained in the wine industry, there are few products on the market that cause as much of a cataclysmic split between its lovers and cynics than German Riesling.

Those who oppose sweet renditions of this most noble white grape variety scoff at those who sit back with a glass. from the bottle pictured above, as if we undoubtedly fit the mold of an out-dated stereotype — that those who drink sweet wine simply lack the sophistication to appreciate dryer styles.

For the rest of us, examples like this give meaning to a world nearly intent on destroying its most sacred and beautiful things. Forests are shrinking, oceans continue dirtying at alarming paces, and innocent families find themselves cast out into the world, children alone and forced to play the role of unwanted nomads.

As we age, we run out of excuses to ignore these problems. We run out of excuses, the crutch of our own ignorance, to ignore the aches and pains that begin to weigh in each morning. Happy hour cocktails no longer turn into 3 a.m. pizza at Artichoke on 14th Street (okay who am I kidding, yes they still do, but still) but rather a 9 p.m. bed time and three pills of Advil come sunrise. We’ve spent enough time on this Earth to know its beauties and vices, while trying to grapple with our own mortality and the fact that when we die, we’re as likely to fade towards black as anything else.

This is where something like Paul Anheuser’s Riesling Kabinett, from Schlossböckelheimer Königsfels, comes in to the equation.

The unfortunate truth of our lives is that after our early twenties, we begin to slowly die. Wines like those pictured above, remind us of a time of wild discovery, of enlightened maturation, when the world seemed so big and often so innocent. Rides in our cars were the ultimate escape from the walls within which our parents’ tyranny ruled, not the nature-killing guilt trip they’ve been turned into. Each taste, each aroma we took in was new and thrilling and created the context we’d operate around for the rest of our youth.

German Rieslings are among the most long-lived in the world, thanks to the foundation of acidity, minerality, and ripeness levels on top of which they are built. Like millennials, they go through periods of explosive growth, rebellious excitement, and ultimately, psychological complexity that, for the wine, brings on some of the most exotic sensual experiences one can have while enjoying a glass. For the rest of us, those periods usually just bring on self-loathing — without which, we’d just be living in a Bonobos catalog.

So here is to Riesling, to Germany, to the moments in your life when you look up into the night sky, searching the stars for one that might shimmer just a bit brighter than the rest, before finally going back inside the same disgustingly ironic bar with a faux-vintage juke box that plays The Ramons over and over again…at least before someone else picks Journey. Someone always picks Journey.

William Whelan is a writer turned wine professional who spends most of his time thinking of reasons not to open a bottle of Chablis before noon on the weekends and reasons why Bill Self’s baseline in-bounds plays always work. For interview requests (lolol), pitches, or scathing personal attacks, email him at [email protected] Look at him…using the third-person all professionally.