elevation, elation

You know a wine is really good when it makes your dinner taste better than it really is.

Case in point: We opened a bottle of 2001 C.H. Berres Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Auslese with some China Dragon delivery Friday night. The food from this place is okay -- it's not bad -- but it's not knock-your-socks-off-you-no-longer-have-to-miss-San-Francisco good. (In fact, every time we've ordered something from the specials menu, we've ended up with a really bizarre dish that is hard to eat. The salt and pepper prawns are actually whole prawns -- shell, head, legs, eyes and all -- that look they've been slightly battered and then fried. Why would you batter the outside of the shrimp when it's still in its shell? Then there's the pork tenderloin, which is also battered and fried -- even though some of the meat is still on the bone but you can't tell until you bite into it. Anyway, you get the picture.)

Still, the pairing was absolutely perfect, with the slight sweetness of the Riesling nicely complementing the heat of the food.

Now I didn't research this Riesling before we chose it for dinner. This wine was something that had been in the wine refrigerator for awhile, and we also have another bottle downstairs in the garage (I hope). So we thought, Why not? After all, Rieslings typically go well with Asian food. And we were right, and the wine was beautiful. I tasted lots of peach and stone fruit, a teeny-tiny hint of petrol (not too much -- just a suggestion of it) and even some cardamom, believe it or not.

But as I was preparing to blog about the wine today and started to do a little background work, I discovered this was a really special bottle. Really special.

Here's a description from Garagiste (I bought the wine from them in 2005 for $19.99):

It would be one thing to find a new winery of significance -- it's another to find a non-interventionist, boutique producer like Berres that has managed to fashion a cache of the most pristinely stored and desireable bottles of crystalline German Riesling vintage after vintage -- all in near silence. This is a bastion of artisanal wine -- the clearest expression of the grape in each portion of soil. Only indigenous and native yeasts are used with a natural vinification process and the purest low-predikat results from each site. As a generalization, the wines are fresh as a breeze and light on their feet without the cloying, heavy sugar of their more famous neighbors such as Dr. Loosen.

Much of the quality stems from the vineyards around Ürzig, one of the only places in the Mosel without Phylloxera. As a result, the Berres vineyards are planted on their own rootstock without grafting to a disease resistant stock. This is extremely special as it is prohibited by law in other regions. There is much debate regarding natural "whole" vines vs. grafted examples of the same varietal but one cannot argue that the results of decades of vine age are in the bottle (Berres has 50+ year old vineyards – all on their own rootstock and they will not bottle wine from any vine younger than 15 years of age).

Indigenous yeasts? No Phylloxera? Old vines? Did I do something terribly sinful by drinking this wine with mediocre Chinese food while sitting in my pajamas and watching college football on TV?

Nah. I think it would've been worse if I hadn't opened the bottle!