A friend and I got together and were going to “order in” Thai food for dinner. I, of course, offer to bring wine.
Some general rules of thumb in pairing wine with Thai food are that the wine should be low-tannin, light, fruity, and (if the food’s spicy), have a touch of sweetness. My highly knowledgeable colleagues at the New York store helped me pick the Wiltinger Schlangengraben Riesling Spätlese Feinherb Weingut Johann Peter Reinert 2005. (It’s almost as exhausting to type as it is to say.)
I meet my friend and her roommate at their 5th floor walk-up apartment in the East Village. It’s August and they don’t have A/C, so it’s feeling like an oven…I’m hoping the wine is refreshing.
Before we open the bottle, it occurs to me that this is an opportune time for me to practice speaking about wine. I’ve discovered that speaking about wine is similar to speaking another language: you can know hundreds of random words, facts and figures but having to articulate them is a completely different thing.
I start with the basics: The wine is a Riesling. Riesling is a type of white skinned grape historically grown in Germany. I freeze. I’m looking at the wine label with all the long, funny German words and drawing a complete blank. I had first laid eyes on the bottle only about an hour earlier so there was no time to study it. “Relax…they’re my friends…they won’t judge me”, I tell myself.
Luckily, I remember the German wine class I had recently attended at the store. Greg showed six German wines, and the various parts of the wine labels were reviewed. Typically a German wine label consist of the name of the village, vineyard, grape, ripeness level of the grape (if it’s a QmP wine – see notes below), and producer.
I decide to dissect the wine label for my friends, word by word, based on the how they appear on the tasting note that comes with all the wines at Moore Brothers.
Wiltinger is the village in which the vineyard is located. Schlangengraben is the name of the vineyard. Reisling is the grape from which the wine is made. Spätlese means late harvest (here I attempted to digress into the different picking times and ripeness levels of the QmP wines but although I know them in my head I’m having difficulty explaining…I decide to spare my friends and move on). Feinherb: OK, I have no idea…will look this up later. Weingut signifies the wine is estate-bottled. Johann Peter Reinert is the producer. Done! – that wasn’t so bad. My friends ask a lot of questions and seem to have genuinely enjoyed the exercise.
We open the wine and begin to drink. It’s wonderful. It’s light, delicately sweet, and has a slight hint of effervescence – absolutely perfect for a hot summer evening. My friends really like it too. It’s going down so easy. I’m surprised to see my friend drink so much (she rarely has more than one glass). We’re having such a great time talking, laughing, drinking, and before we realize it, it’s been over an hour, and we completely forgot to order the Thai food. It’s around 9pm, at which time I’m usually about to chew my arm off if I haven’t eaten. But I’m feeling a comforting sense of satiation (and I’ll admit, slight inebriation). I think to myself, great company + great wine can = meal replacement.
Notes:
1: QmP (Qualitätswein mit Prädikat). The top “legal” German wine designation. QmP wines may not have sugar added to the fermenting juice to raise the alcohol level. They must indicate the Prädikat (ripeness level) of the grapes at harvest which is denoted by the following:
Kabinett (full ripeness), Spätlese (late-harvest with higher sugar levels than Kabinett), Auslese (selected late harvest), Beerenauslese (individually-selected grapes usually affected by botrytis), Trockenbeerenauslese (individually-selected grapes that are both affected by botrytis, and raisined on the vine), and Eiswein (grapes of intense ripeness, picked and pressed while frozen – usually not affected by botrytis).
Moore Brothers provides free tasting notes on all the wines in the store. They contain information about the wine, including the producer, regional history and cuisines with which it pairs well.
Oh, and Feinherb is a term used for a style of wine which falls between halbtrocken (half-dry) and fruchtig (fruity). Designations such as these, are dependent on residual sugar levels balanced against acidity, and differ between growing regions within Germany.