riesling means everything

If you're one of the three original publishers of this piece, please know, I'm a big fan... and that this post was inspired by half bottles of Selbach-Oster 2003 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Spatlese and 2006 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Auslese. Yummmmmmm.

Taken from "Riesling Manifesto" without permission:

If we consider it futile, and if we don't waste our time over a word that means everything...the first thought that comes is of an enological order - at least to discover its ampelographical, historical, or psychological meaning. We read in the wine-papers that the Germans of the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer call the tale of a sacred vine: RIESLING. A masked sheep cubist, and his mother-vine in a certain region of Alsace is also called: RIESLING. The word for roaming Rhine Ranger's bobby horse is also RIESLING. Some learned journalists see it as an art for Babes, other Galetcallingthehybridsuntohim saints see it as a return to an emotional noble varietal primacy. We are compelling anyone who follows us, because everyone makes wine in their own way, if he knows anything about the joy that rises up like a CO2 bubble to the stony rooftops. The RIESLING ASYLUM was born, out of a need for independance, out of mistrust for the hegemony of the cabo-chardocentric paradigm. People who join us keep their pocket protectors. We don't accept any tannin-mongering. Do we make wine in order to earn money and keep the dear bourgeoiste happy? Besides, what else can one serve with soluble fish?

Here we are dipping our wine-thief into fermenting vessels. Here we really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the revelations of acidity. Drunk with energy, we are homecoming trusting the sawblable into heedless oak chips. We are streams of blessings in the tropical abundance of esters and vertiginous plantings. Rain is our sweat, we bleed and burn with thirst, our blood is wine. We are always looking at the world with newborn eyes, turning over a fresh slate.
Chardonnay was born out of a simple manner of looking at objects :
Charlemagne planted a vine twenty times lowlier than Riesling. The Colonies looked at it from above, and complicate its appearance by shameful marketing dollars. The New Winemaker protests: he no longer makes wine, but creates directly from the cellar structures capable of being spun and spun in centrifuge by the limpid wind of the momentary sensation even if it is a sickly-sweet monster to adorn the sad fable of humanity.
The way people have of hurriedly looking at things from the opposite point of view, so as to impose their opinions indirectly, is called Parker.

- Randall Grahm "Riesling Manifesto" 1999