“People aren’t social; they’re tribal. Race doesn’t exist, but tribes are fucking real.” So says Duffy, the main character of Mat Johnson’s 2015 novel, Loving Day.
Seth Godin, entrepreneur and author of the book Tribes, writes, “What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 million years. It’s about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it’s something that people have wanted forever ... Humans can’t help it: we need to belong.” He defines a tribe as “a group of people connected to one another … connected to an idea”, and goes on to say that the only two things people need in order to be a tribe – to belong – are a shared interest and a way to communicate.
It’s a deep, almost primeval longing, this need to be connected, to belong. At one level, tribes bequeath identity. Flags, colours, team kit, badges, handshakes, code words, tattoos. We’re marked. We belong. An Arsenal shirt, a masonic ring, not only tell you where loyalties lie, but something of that person’s values, interests, prejudices, and perspectives. But at a much deeper level, there is something ancient, primordial at play. Belonging to a tribe, back through millennia, was – and in many ways still is – about survival. Within the circle of a tribe, you had protection from the elements, animals and enemies. Within the circle of a tribe, you had food, medical care and education. Within the circle of a tribe, you had a role, a purpose. Your weakness was someone else’s strength; your strength gave you status and privilege. Within the circle of a tribe, you were safe to be vulnerable, safe to learn, safe to fail. Someone always had your back.
When FONDATA approached me to write about Riesling, the question to me was, “Why do Riesling fans seem more zealous, more evangelical somehow than perhaps fans of other grape varieties?” It’s a good question. Riesling, more than any other wine grape variety on Earth, seems to form two powerfully distinct camps: Those In and Those Out. Those In revere the grape, the wine is hallowed, it is almost a kind of religion. Those Out don’t even know how to pronounce it. If they do, they think it’s sweet, or too acidic, or just “German – Germany doesn’t make good wine, surely?”. Riesling, it is safe to say, has a tribe. Riesling does indeed, as FONDATA suggested, inspire an almost extraordinary zealotry.
It is so very easy, as a wine lover, to rhapsodise about Riesling. Much has been written by wine geeks about why Riesling is wonderful and the arguments are manifold. It comes in a dazzling range of styles, from unctuously eiswein-sweet to stone-mountain dry. It’s not just food compatible – its tableside manner is that of a sorcerer. Riesling behaves like a chemist, a perfumer, a liquid Ferran Adrià – the one wine that changes the rules and creates new spaces between food and wine. Terry Theise, American author and wine critic, calls it “food’s best friend. If, from this day forward, you swore to drink nothing but Riesling and eat only the things that went with it, your diet would hardly change.” This is, in no small part, due to both its structural acidity and its dry-to-sweet scale, meaning that whether you need whetstone-dry and lemon for oysters, or liquid tarte tatin-sweet for pavlova – the answer is Riesling.
One of Riesling’s star qualities is that it is almost painfully honest, translucent, vulnerable when it comes to terroir. It transcribes terroir like Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes transcribed life. Theise, in his 2011 book Reading Between The Wines, writes that it “does more than just imply terroir: it subsumes its own identity as fruit into the greater meaning of soil, land and place”. John Winthrop Haeger, in his 2016 book Riesling Rediscovered, notes that Riesling “as a vehicle for terroir, is almost universally exalted by wine professionals”.
In his paper for the seventh Australian wine symposium in 2011 on What makes great Riesling, iconic Australian winemaker and trailblazer Brian Croser argues that “the attributes of nobility for grape varieties could be: consistent production of high-quality wine of unique varietal character; response to defined terroirs; recorded over multiple centuries; consistently attracting premium prices; making wines that age for a long time; creating high capital value for those vineyards that are especially suited to growing the variety. Riesling ticks most of these boxes.” This is a grape that ages beautifully, has an enormously long pedigree, a propensity towards magnificence in structure, complexity and length, and can attract eye-wateringly high prices (Eva Fricke is currently selling her 18 half bottles of Trockenbeerenauslese Riesling 2019 for upwards of £2,000).
It could, however, easily be argued that these things are true of other wine-grape varieties. Riesling does not stand alone in the noble class. When it comes to price, the most expensive wines in the world routinely come from one of (or a blend of) a handful of varieties: Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay – most often from Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, Napa and Tuscany. There are, of course, some Portuguese varieties up there in the listings, in the form of very old port and Madeira. Nebbiolo and Sangiovese can also clock up the per-bottle dollars along with some southern Rhône varieties, depending on appellation and producer.
In terms of ageability, Bordeaux (white and red), Burgundy (white and red), Rhône (white and red), Madeira, port, vintage Champagne, Barolo and Brunello also have well-earned reputations for being some of the most ageable wines on Earth. Tokaj has an incredible ability to age, as do the finest Loire Chenins. Riesling most certainly doesn’t have the corner on ageing.
Bordeaux wines might be a little embarrassingly meagre on the terroir-transmission trait, but no one could argue against the power of terroir in Burgundy or the Rhône, and there is a groundswell of empirical support for the importance of terroir and cru definition in Piedmont and Tuscany. Grape varieties Chardonnay, Cabernet (Franc and Sauvignon), Furmint, Chenin, Sangiovese, Nebbiolo, Grenache and Pinot Noir are all ready, generous reflectors of terroir.
The diversity of styles is another oft-cited reason why Riesling is somehow extraordinary. This, again, is not unique to Riesling. Chenin Blanc, particularly from the Loire, has quite possibly an even broader gamut than Riesling: its scope is not only from bone-dry mineral wines to luscious dessert wines, but Chenin, unlike Riesling, also takes to barrel and lees with the most gorgeous results, and it makes a remarkably good sparkling wine. Furmint is another stunningly terroir-prismic variety that can do liquoreux-sweet to racy-dry; it makes good sparkling wine and, again, covers a broader spectrum of styles than Riesling, from light and unoaked to rich, weighty and barrel-aged.
But search for Riesling on the internet and it’s one of the few grape varieties that comes snakehip-entwined with words such as addict, mania, love rekindled, revolution, freak, obsession, comeback, maverick, geek and nerd. Type ‘riesling fanatic’ into Google and you’ll get nearly 900 results. Type ‘sauvignon blanc fanatic’ and you’ll get just 120 results (‘grenache fanatic’ gives you the sum total of nine). Other grape varieties have their global ‘celebration days’, but Riesling gets entire weeks. In fact, in the UK, it’s a whole month – every July since 2012, ‘31 Days of Riesling’ is the rallying cry taken up by wine merchants, bars, restaurants and festivals the length and breadth of the country. There are even awards for the best campaign.
Yet, according to statistics from the IWSR (International Wine and Spirit Research), Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio make up 67% of UK white wine sales, with Sauvignon Blanc leading the way. There has never been a Sauvignon Blanc Week in the UK – let alone a Sauvignon Blanc Month! Despite all the best attempts of the trade to convince consumers that Riesling rocks, it remains an underdog, widely misunderstood, unloved by the masses.
Jancis Robinson MW has argued that “Riesling just has too strong a personality to appeal to enough consumers to gain global traction.” I disagree. Sauvignon Blanc is still (to my personal distress) the wine choice of most of my non-wine-industry white-wine-drinking acquaintances. The Savvy B they prefer is somewhat beyond what I would describe as strongly flavoured. It’s strident, dominant, shrill, klaxon-loud, right-up-there-in-your-face. Most of my friends who drink wine, but don’t work in wine, love (apart from Sauvignon Blanc) Malbec, Zinfandel, Primitivo, Viognier. These are not introvert wines. So, the strong personality argument, with all due respect, Ms Robinson, does not fly.
The average wine drinker likes a recognisable wine, which, by its very definition, is a wine with strongly recognisable characteristics. Step forward Malbec, Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling. The burning question is, therefore, why is it so easy to sell Malbec and Sauvignon Blanc to practically everyone, but Riesling remains an insider grape – loved only by the inner realm, understood by few?
Going back to the concept of tribes, Seth Godin wrote, “If you’re a middle-of-the-roader, you don’t bother joining a tribe.” Perhaps this is our first clue. Sauvignon Blanc, that wide-open wine that doesn’t require thought or demand understanding, is as middle-of-the-road as it comes. It’s unmistakeable, predictable, and you’re not going to make a fool of yourself when you order a glass at the pub. Riesling, however, makes you vulnerable to judgement and vulnerable to mistakes (could the wine you’ve just chosen turn out to be sweet and will your guests think you have bad taste in wine?), and vulnerable to looking like a fool (just how do you pronounce Clüsserath-Eifel Trittenheimer Apotheke Fährfels Riesling Grosses Gewächs?).
About successful tribes, Godin also said that “skill and attitude are essential. Authority is not. In fact, authority can get in the way.” This might be our second clue. A third clue lies in the word ‘fanatic’, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘A person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal’. No middle road there. Look under the lid of the Riesling tribe and you’ll find that many of its dedicated members are neither middle-of-the-road, nor particularly in awe of authority. You might even find that some of them are pretty close to anti-authority. They are the curious, the questioners, the challengers and the disrupters. They are people who burn with fierce energy and determination.
Eothen ‘Egon’ Alapatt is a musical artist and avid vinyl collector (since the age of 13) who founded his own record label company (Now-Again Records) aged just 22 and has been described as ‘some kind of a musicologist trying to trace the roots of music and connect the dots between different genres’. He was the General Manager of Stones Throw Records from 2000–2011, and is partner with music producer and rapper Madlib with another label, Madlib Invazion. He’s into everything from Spanish psych funk to punk rock, from Ethiopian music to rap. It’s no secret that he’s also into Riesling, having being introduced to the manifold joys of the variety by a Riesling-loving uncle by the name of Dave. It was when Alapatt travelled to the Mosel to visit his friend Torsten in 2003 that he really caught the bug: “[Torsten] brought me on my first cellar visit,” recalls Alapatt, “where I had my first old Riesling, and realised the joy of sampling old wine that had perplexed me in its youthfulness. Since then, Riesling has been a constant study and, of course, a constant pleasure. It doesn’t take long to get from JJP to Egon Müller, and that journey was even shorter for me, as Egon is my nickname.”
Robert Dentice, Managing Director of Healthcare at Cantor Fitzgerald is also a vinyl fanatic, self-confessed gourmand and record collector who loves jazz, rock and soul. His Instagram pals include hip hop and lo-fi musicians. His Twitter handle is @soilpimp and he is founder of the @rieslingstudy event series. He has, he estimates, around 10,000 bottles of wine in his cellar, 95% of them are German. And he gets just as excited by an entry-level Riesling for under 20 bucks as he does about a Keller Schubertslay GG (around £1,200 a bottle, if you’re lucky enough to lay your hands on one). “There is nothing else like it in the world,” he told me. “Riesling has a ton of depth: it takes a lot of work to learn about it. That’s what makes it different. Part of its allure is that you are in on something that the rest of the world just doesn’t get.”
Jancis Robinson MW, too, has long been one of Riesling’s most outspoken evangelists. Search for Riesling on her website, and you’ll find well over 2,500 Riesling-related articles and nearly 20,000 tasting notes. She’s been banging the drum for decades for the world to wake up and realise that Riesling is, in her words, “the world’s greatest white wine grape”. Robinson, with her hefty intellect and fearsome energy and drive has, all her life, been a disrupter, challenger, and relentlessly curious.
Terry Theise, once the most highly regarded German-wine importer in the US (although he no longer imports wine) is, without doubt, The Bard of Riesling. No one writes love poetry to the grape quite like he does. Although both his books, Reading Between The Wines and What Makes A Wine Worth Drinking, explore varieties and wines from all over the world, it’s clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that his first love, his one real love, is Riesling. Theise is no middle-roader, and couldn’t care less about authority. He nonchalantly uses the f-word and peppers his writing with references to sex (in an artless, non-grubby way, I hasten to add). He is politely contemptuous of the establishment, he writes poetry, reads poetry, eats bacon only once a year, listens to prog rock, fusion jazz, blues (“well, there’s so much really lame blues, but when it’s good it’s really good… ”) and classical (“late romantics up to the post-Impressionists, until the serial/dissonant era. I think the minimalists are egregiously pretentious”).
Then there’s Paul Grieco, owner of Terroir wine bar in New York (and a trademark beard), who failed to achieve his early career aspirations of footballer, DJ and concert promoter, and became, instead, a restaurateur. Grieco’s wine list introduction goes thus: “Simply put, there are 83 wines by the glass available … whoever crafted this list is crazy and confrontational ... at least his Mom likes him. Truly, we have a disease and it is known in certain circles as ‘failure to commit to a single path’. Alas, we are therefore driven to explore the entirety of the world of grape juice. If you love journeys, then sit down, apply the seat belt tight, and get ready for a bumpy ride … ALSO, the Summer of Riesling 2021 has officially begun.
YES, there are about 30 Rieslings by the glass.
YES, I am in therapy ... the doctor recommends I enjoy more Chardonnay.
YES, I am searching for a new doctor.”
Grieco is the very definition of a Riesling zealot. Every year, since 2008, he has run what he calls the Summer of Riesling, which The New York Times describes as “an act of evangelism for a grape he worships and a distillation of his idiosyncratic ways”. His wine list is, indeed, idiosyncratic. In Grieco’s own words, “If it appears like Woodstock 1969 at times (layers of confusion & rain & cool s*#t happening & more confusion & the greatest time of your life), we are cool with that.” In it, he rants about people’s phobia of residual sugar in wine (“remember, that 12oz can of Coke you enjoyed earlier today has 125 grams of high fructose corn syrup and that sugar is going to kill you”), posts pictures of vineyards with captions such as “this is where Fred, the winemaker, and Oskar, the master blaster, water ski and search for pre-historic monsters”), and exhorts his customers to scream to the heavens about the profound terroir expression of Schoffit’s Grand Cru Rangen Clos Saint-Théobald Riesling. Grieco sticks a giant finger up to convention, and if anyone could lead a tribe, it’s him.
When you look for the red thread, Riesling fanatics are often complex, highly intelligent, outliers, thinkers, enthusiasts and communicators. They’re not afraid to rattle cages. I sense people who are as comfortable with dissonance as they are with consonance, willing to stand in the liminal spaces of life. It’s fascinating to see how many Riesling fanatics are also music lovers, writers, art lovers, avid readers, word lovers. People who are not afraid of strong emotions, or expressing strong emotions themselves. People who are self-deprecating, quick to laugh at themselves as well as at the world around them. Riesling fanatics, far from being middle-of-the-road, go against the flow. They’re ok with being uncool – nay, even taking a certain pride in being uncool. Riesling fanatics make it cool to be uncool.
Trying to understand why this might be so, I found myself considering the Grateful Dead. It must be noted, at this point, that in my household, I am routinely mocked for my terrible musical taste. I love everything from Hans Zimmer to Roxette, Lindsey Stirling to Steve ‘n’ Seagulls, Pentatonics to Pink, Pink Floyd to Meatloaf. I’m not proud or sophisticated. My taste in music has long been a source of mirth amongst family and friends. I’m ok with that. But it was the discovery of the Grateful Dead – not a band on my Spotify list – that helped me to better understand Riesling.
The Grateful Dead only ever had one Top 40 album, but they sold more than 35 million albums, played live to more than 25 million people and earned more than US$300 million from touring. Only the Rolling Stones topped them in their time. Fans of the band even have a name: a Deadhead is ‘a person who greatly enjoys the music of the Grateful Dead and particularly the genius of Jerry Garcia’. This may possibly be the understatement of the century. Fans of the Grateful Dead didn’t just go to one concert – they tended to follow the band round to every concert, sometimes for years. They got to know each other, kept in touch, travelled together, forming a strange sort of kinship. They even developed their own code of communication, and to this day collect and share memorabilia and taped recordings of the live shows. There has not only been a book about them but a documentary, called Long Strange Trip (2017). So, what was it about this quirky, non-mainstream band that inspired such devotion?
It was said of them, over and over, that they actively promoted a sense of community among their fans. According to one source, the band performed “more free concerts than any band in the history of music”. Some of their fans were people who felt marginalised; some just loved the fascinating modern folk+rock+punk+everything-else-goes mix of the Grateful Dead’s music. The band not only didn’t stop people from recording their concerts, they set up a taping section – a space specifically set aside for those who wanted to tape the concerts. They led a community that put the ‘in’ in ‘inclusive’ – you just needed to ‘get it’ to belong. Deadheads had a strong identity and sense that they belonged. From outliers and rebels, the Grateful Dead created a tribe.
They weren’t the best band in the world or the most iconic, or the wealthiest. They never won a Grammy. They weren’t the wildest band, the loudest, and most certainly weren’t the most famous. But the Grateful Dead inspired the most devoted tribe – a vast, world-spanning band of brothers (and sisters) – who felt compelled to communicate, congregate and commune.
Riesling is similarly compelling, and Theise goes some way (further than most) to explain why: “Riesling is so digitally precise, so finely articulate, so pixilated and pointillist in detail that other wines seem mute by comparison. Riesling wine may be the most complex in the world, but it’s never boastful; it is a team player, there to make food taste better. Riesling isn’t shy or demure, it is modest and tactful, but if you pay attention to it – which it never insists you do – you’ll discover how deep those still waters run. Ironic, isn’t it? The grape with the most to say is the very one that speaks with a moderate voice.”
If we go back to Godin’s claim that all a tribe needs to exist is a shared interest and a way to communicate, and combine that with his observation that tribes aren’t for middle-of-the-roaders, then the answer to the Riesling conundrum becomes exquisitely clear. We Riesling fans, I am going to argue, are just that. We’re a tribe.
This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two.
