Skurnik Tasting TNs - 6/24/25

[Marc Hanes]

originally posted by Rahsaan:

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

If nothing else, it is much easier today (than 30 years ago) to find wine-buying advice. Everyone can read a blurb on Instagram, only so many people in a day can talk to David Lillie. People may simply be able to do something to focus their curiosity now, whereas before they might have had to simply buy something (or, heaven forbid, do some reading).

Not sure about that. 30 years ago people were buying wine in person and could get advice from the retailer in store. It may not have been David Lillie levels of expertise, but (at least in places like Nyc) it was their neighborhood store and they could develop a relationship.

Not sure the average wine consumer really looks to IG, or knows what to make of that for their wine advice.

But then there are lots of segments we could dissect.

There is wine buying advice and then there's good (and consistent) wine buying advice. A greater sheer quantity of wine buying advice does not ineluctably lead to *better* wine buying advice. Could just as easily result in a lot of confusing white noise.

A guy who used to work with me also worked as an online "wine advisor" with Wine.com. He would interact real time with online customers. His wine knowledge was pretty basic. But he got good reviews from customers and superiors. That to me spotlights most wine advisors these days.

Also, a consideration is that most folks here live in urban areas (or have) with stores which employ knowledgeable staff. Not everyone does. Having that personal advising experience is actually fairly rare.

It's probably the case that for every Thatcher there's likely hundreds of other purveyors with the same online "reach" whose "curation" abilities are lacking. And, of course, Thatcher has limited stock on hand so if say 300 clients buy from him, 3,000 couldn't. Where do these potential customers go?

In terms of the curiosity question I don't think I am too dissimilar from many casual+ wine lovers. If I decide I like Loire Cabernet Franc and see a new producer and the price is right I will probably pull the trigger. I'm curious. Once in awhile I get bored with the same old stuff and decide to range further. Dao. Baden. Greece. South Africa. Hungary. Uruguay. Etc. Most of the time there I am flying blindly. But I draw upon X amount of years of consumption to try and increase chances of success. With the predictable middling results.

Confidence helps build curiosity. You know you like Zinfandel, you try a bunch of unknown producers. Your Zinfandel knowledge deepens, topic mastery. You gain confidence. So when you try, say, a Willamette Pinot Noir you sort of "know" they aren't all the same and the one first bottle may not be representative. You are more apt to try half a dozen before nearing a conclusion on whether or not you like the category. Good or bad, you feel more confident because here's another type of wine you have assessed firsthand. But this statement in turn leads to open questions of any individual's desire for depth of knowledge, topic mastery, new experiences per se, and so on. This is where we need Eden Mylunsch to provide a lengthy treatise tying together all the loose threads. Even if he has to pull some threads loose in order to retie them.

 

[Keith Levenberg]

I must say this is a remarkable thread - it's rare to come across statements so perplexing I can't even fathom where they're coming from.

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
Terry did have interest in most regions (but Baden, Franken, and Württemberg excepted), but even though he understood the terroirs in each region very well, he never made an effort to explain them to his customers, just putting the wines out there for people to taste with no explanation.

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
No, the complaint of the sales person is that Terry did not support them in explaining the terroir to their sales -- e.g., the problems that I noted in the catalog and the fact that at the tastings the wines were just lined up with no explanation.

Well, here is a passage from Terry's catalog:

originally posted by Terry Theise:
Several years ago, while I was with a group of customers, we had a nice alfresco lunch along the Nahe with Helmut Dönnhoff. After we finished eating, people began rising from the table and stretching. Helmut set out on a walk between rows of vines. I followed. We were in the Oberhäuser Brücke, a small, one hectare site along the river. It is longer than it is wide, and I followed Helmut as we walked, heads bent, silently. Finally after having walked perhaps a hundred yards, we reached the end of the row. Helmut stopped, and turned to face me. He was grinning from ear to ear, and by then, so was I.

We returned to the group and I beckoned them to follow me. The exercise was repeated, this time with eight of us walking one behind the other—we looked like a chaingang! We got to the end of the 100-yard row of vines, and this is what we all saw: four distinct, absolutely different soil types in the space of a two-minute stroll. There was grey slate, pale yellow loess, silvery-tan porphyry and deep rusty melaphyr. I turned to the group. “You hear a lot of crap about what makes complexity in wines. Some people would like you to think that winemakers give complexity to their wines. Look at what you’ve just seen here. THAT, and THAT ALONE is complexity.”

I know of nowhere else in the world of wine where grapes grow on such an intricate confluence of geological currents. No grape except the Riesling could do justice to such soil. Each year I try to hike to the top of the Lemberg, the highest hill in the region. It does me good: the birds, the world, grateful in my utmost heart for the beauty that lives in the land, but also somehow lost.

In my dream I wished I could bring you here with me, and we could sit out for a few hours in the afternoon light and look down on those miraculous vineyards and listen to the birds. Let that time gestate in our hearts, so that when we taste the wines later on we taste them with that heart, relaxed, dilated and ready. And then I think of those wines, arranged in sterile rows on a table somewhere, while I pace nearby and worry about how they’ll “show.” And for a moment it becomes impossible to be both people at once, the hot-shot wine guy and the plain-and-simple me who sits on the hill pensive, calm and grateful.

This is a guy who doesn't make an effort to explain terroir and just lines up bottles? Really?

 

[Claude Kolm]

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
I must say this is a remarkable thread - it's rare to come across statements so perplexing I can't even fathom where they're coming from.

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
Terry did have interest in most regions (but Baden, Franken, and Württemberg excepted), but even though he understood the terroirs in each region very well, he never made an effort to explain them to his customers, just putting the wines out there for people to taste with no explanation.

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
No, the complaint of the sales person is that Terry did not support them in explaining the terroir to their sales -- e.g., the problems that I noted in the catalog and the fact that at the tastings the wines were just lined up with no explanation.

Well, here is a passage from Terry's catalog:

originally posted by Terry Theise:
Several years ago, while I was with a group of customers, we had a nice alfresco lunch along the Nahe with Helmut Dönnhoff. After we finished eating, people began rising from the table and stretching. Helmut set out on a walk between rows of vines. I followed. We were in the Oberhäuser Brücke, a small, one hectare site along the river. It is longer than it is wide, and I followed Helmut as we walked, heads bent, silently. Finally after having walked perhaps a hundred yards, we reached the end of the row. Helmut stopped, and turned to face me. He was grinning from ear to ear, and by then, so was I.

We returned to the group and I beckoned them to follow me. The exercise was repeated, this time with eight of us walking one behind the other—we looked like a chaingang! We got to the end of the 100-yard row of vines, and this is what we all saw: four distinct, absolutely different soil types in the space of a two-minute stroll. There was grey slate, pale yellow loess, silvery-tan porphyry and deep rusty melaphyr. I turned to the group. “You hear a lot of crap about what makes complexity in wines. Some people would like you to think that winemakers give complexity to their wines. Look at what you’ve just seen here. THAT, and THAT ALONE is complexity.”

I know of nowhere else in the world of wine where grapes grow on such an intricate confluence of geological currents. No grape except the Riesling could do justice to such soil. Each year I try to hike to the top of the Lemberg, the highest hill in the region. It does me good: the birds, the world, grateful in my utmost heart for the beauty that lives in the land, but also somehow lost.

In my dream I wished I could bring you here with me, and we could sit out for a few hours in the afternoon light and look down on those miraculous vineyards and listen to the birds. Let that time gestate in our hearts, so that when we taste the wines later on we taste them with that heart, relaxed, dilated and ready. And then I think of those wines, arranged in sterile rows on a table somewhere, while I pace nearby and worry about how they’ll “show.” And for a moment it becomes impossible to be both people at once, the hot-shot wine guy and the plain-and-simple me who sits on the hill pensive, calm and grateful.

This is a guy who doesn't make an effort to explain terroir and just lines up bottles? Really?

I understand that in a thread this long, one sometimes reads through it quite quickly and so misses certain things. I stated above that Terry did a very good job of explaining the respective terroirs of a producer vis-a-vis that producer's own holdings, but did not place them within the context of the region as a whole.

 

[Claude Kolm]

originally posted by georg lauer:

originally posted by mark e:

originally posted by georg lauer:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:

Re his attitude toward dry wines, it persisted long after dry wines began to be made in a more skillful manner, and one can see it also in his resistance to the wines from Franken, Baden, and Württemberg. The ferocity with which he condemned German dry wines in his catalogs was at times embarrassing, e.g., his positing why Germans had deformed palates. He lost some great producers, e.g., Wittmann, because he only wanted their wines with residual sugar.

It also did not help that in a German TV documentary he was seen telling a Rheinhessen vintner that this and that barrel needed an additional X amount of Süssreserve for his customers. At a time when wine pimped with unfermented grape juice was seen as complete heresy back home.

I'm probably going to get this a bit wrong, but I do remember some skeptical comments in Germany about the wines Terry liked (with more Süßreserve than many of his producers wanted to use - but, after all, it is a business - and they did sell a fair amount of wine), but there was also this weird matter of dry wines being a reaction to the pre-war wines; a sort of "denazification" of the wine styles, though I can't really say much more.

The move towards dry wine was a reaction to the POST-war wave of sweet plonk that had nothing but the names Spät- or Auslese in common with the great wines of the early 20th century (ok, they also shared the most prestigious site names since the new wine law from 1971 allowed their use far beyond the original boundaries of a vineyard). There was clearly a desire for sweet treats after the war and wine in most households was enjoyed after the meal and not with it. To satisfy demand, sweet wines were made cheaply and in huge quantities and even in regions outside of the classical areas for off dry Riesling, eg Württemberg, almost all wines, including the reds, had substantial sweetness. With the improvement of the restaurant scene/better meals at home in the eighties and nineties there was more interest in having dry German wines of quality that can accompany a meal and slowly more producers went in that direction, usually with commercial success even as the results were pretty uneven initially.
Regarding the pre-war wines, I need to dig in some of my books, but there are on and off discussions about the question of how much residual sugar the famous wines from around 1900 actually had. While there were always very sweet specialties like Beerenauslese, these were extremely rare and most of the wines that made the reputation were more in the Cabinet (that was the old spelling, as a wine worthy for the long term storage cabinet) or Spätlese category, which then were loosely defined but usually meant a wine with better ripeness but especially higher quality than the standard wines. To associate names like Kabinett and Spätlese/Auslese with specific ranges of must weight is a phenomenon invented in the law of 1971. It is actually quite possible that the famous pre-war wines were more like some of the the current Grosse Gewächse, but with long elevation in large casks and, while not bone-dry, with rather limited residual sugar. And to come back to TT and Süssreserve: This was only feasible with sterile filtration, a decidedly post WWII invention. Certainly no grand tradition in that process.

Thanks for this, Georg. With respect to regions other than the Mosel (and perhaps the Mosel, too), I think it's pretty much settled these days that the pre-war wines except for the noble sweets were dry. I think I once mentioned before on this board that I asked Dr. Franz Michel of Domdechant Werner, who is one of the older people still around, about how the wines were. He said that they were predominantly dry, but that there would always be a barrel by the cellar door that wound up with a little more sugar left in it than the others.

 

[Claude Kolm]

originally posted by Yule Kim:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
The Rheingau event may be a better introduction. I don't know what wines of Künstler the store has, but in theory, he's a good place to start because he has wines from Hochheim and Flörsheim to Rüdesheim with Hattenheim and Erbach in the middle. Don't feel that you have to only try GG; for earlier drinking and for better understanding what's going on the other wines are often more instructive. If they have the Stielweg in stock, be sure to get that, it's always a great wine. A Stielweg, Kirchenstück, Domdechenay, Hölle, Weiss Erd, (Flörsheim) Herrenberg tasting could be quite instructive because it would show all vineyards that are in that small portion of the Rheingau that is by the Main and not the Rhein.

Thanks Claude. This is very helpful.

Larry, let's do this sometime this summer.

If you really want to do a comprehensive tasting, add in his Marcobrunn and Pfaffenberg and the various Rüdesheims. But you probably would have to get Skurnik to do some special imports for you -- Künstler makes a LOT of different wines and I'm sure that Skurnik doesn't take all of them.

 

[Claude Kolm]

originally posted by mark e:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:

originally posted by mark e:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:

originally posted by mark e:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:

originally posted by mark e:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
Terry did have interest in most regions (but Baden, Franken, and Württemberg excepted), but even though he understood the terroirs in each region very well, he never made an effort to explain them to his customers, just putting the wines out there for people to taste with no explanation. And then there was his problem with dry wines (ironically, he posted on his blog a few years ago that most of what he drinks now is trocken).

Well, I can say from first-hand experience that this is simply not true. He did explain the regions to his customers, but those customers were his distributors and his wholesale customers, and they, in turn, were the ones who needed to translate that information to retail customers in understandable terms.

Regarding Terry's shift toward dry wines, I honestly believe that a lot of it has to do with the changing climate and the fact that many dry wines in the past were unbalanced.

I don't know what Terry said to distributors other than what was in his catalogs.

Quite a bit, actually. You should not assume that the catalogs were the whole story, given I did travel to Germany and Austria with Terry and Bill a number of times. As far as sales people complaining, well, many who came on the trips just tuned-out for whatever reason, so that is on them.

No, the complaint of the sales person is that Terry did not support them in explaining the terroir to their sales -- e.g., the problems that I noted in the catalog and the fact that at the tastings the wines were just lined up with no explanation. The complaint is not that Terry doesn't know terroirs of the regions -- he knows them superbly -- it's that he did not make any effort to situate the wines within that context on the regional scale. So he took you and Bill on trips, but for most customers the main source of information was the catalogs and maybe the tastings, and as I indicated, they were lacking.

I agree with you about not situating his producers within a larger, regional context. I think that might have been helpful, though, maybe that is not within the scope or purpose of a trade tasting. However, if you spoke to the producers who were there, and there were many, they were happy to explain in detail their various terroirs.

Yes, the producers were there, but if you spoke to the representatives from Darting, Eugen Müller, Müller-Catoir, and Theo Minges, for example, they would tell you about the differences of the terroirs of their wines but wouldn't situate them in terms of the Pfalz, in part, maybe, because that would involve bringing in other areas where Terry did not have representatives . . .

I feel like now you are being willfully naive about the fact that trade tastings were designed to sell wines, not flesh out the gaps in knowledge regarding regional wine terroirs or contextualize those wines, though a wine writer might desire that.

No, not willfully naive, just making an observation.

 

[Claude Kolm]

originally posted by Larry Stein:
I recall going to a German Riesling trade tasting in SF (Claude, you might have been there?) in the early 2000s. Lineup was extensive, many wines. Eden Mylunsch was definitely there. Morning session was tasting dry wines, then catered lunch, sweeter (Kab and up) in the afternoon. Dry wines were painful to taste. Not nearly enough fruit to balance out the acid. Pretty much across the board. My take was why would anyone want to drink these?

I first met Bill Mayer when I worked at Pacific Wine Company at the original location on Washington St. I susequently subscribed to the Age of Riesling newsletter. My regret was not purchasing more Austrian Riesling and Gruner. Fortunately, I have a few friends in my main jeebus groups who are Austrian collectors. One fellow is Austrian (glousf on CT and IG, AndyK on the other bored). He's pulled several rabbits out of his hat. Yule is part of that group.

I've never had a JB Becker wine that's spun my wheels. I found them to be too rustic. Old Vine Imports brought in some older ones in the early 2000s, vintages from the late 80s through mid 90s. I tasted through those. Has the winemaking style changed?

Yule, I'd definitely be up for a Rheingau tasting!

Sounds like a Rudi event. He did several in the early 2000s promoting dry wines. As I indicated above, the wines had been rough sledding, and not everyone figured out at the same time how to make dry wines that were enticing to drink. Also, if all one knew at the time of German wines were those with residual sugar, the change to dry could be quite an initial shock. It took until the latter part of the first decade of the 2000s for the knowledge of how to make approachable dry wines (hint: don't do 0 g/l residual sugar) to become more or less universal.

The VDP began its GG program in 2002 with the 2001 vintage in Berlin, which I attended. Subsequently, I have attended every GG premiere tasting (they are now held in Wiesbaden) except for two (one I couldn't attend because of COVID restrictions and one I missed for another reason that I've forgotten -- probably because I couldn't fit the time off from my job).

Additionally, almost every year in the 2000s up to COVID, I visited on my own and tasted at 30-40 producers in Germany (not always the same) and spoke with them about their wines, plus I received a lot of unsolicited samples. So I've had some experience in observing how German wine has changed and developed in the 21st century -- and it very much has changed and developed -- and of course the effect that global warming has had on the wines. It's interesting, too, to see at the estate the wines that the US importer chose not to take and to talk with the producers when the importer is not present.

 

[Rahsaan]

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
... several in the early 2000s promoting dry wines. As I indicated above, the wines had been rough sledding, and not everyone figured out at the same time how to make dry wines that were enticing to drink. Also, if all one knew at the time of German wines were those with residual sugar, the change to dry could be quite an initial shock. It took until the latter part of the first decade of the 2000s for the knowledge of how to make approachable dry wines (hint: don't do 0 g/l residual sugar) to become more or less universal.

So if the great German wines of the 19th and early 20th century were dry, that knowledge was lost during the tumultuous mid-20th century?

I understand that getting ripeness was more challenging compared to recent years, but surely that was also an issue in the late 19th/early 20th century!

 

[Claude Kolm]

Yes, there was a lot of knowledge lost. By all reports, a tasting Kloster Eberbach put on a few years ago of its Spätburgunder from the 19th century and first part of the 20th century was most impressive. Yet in 1990, when Rudolf Fürst made his first Spätburgunder, he called up Geisenheim for advice on what to do and no one could help him, they didn't have anything to do with Spätburgunder in those days. (BTW, I tasted Fürst's 1990 from half bottle in 2019 at the estate and it was quite spectacular.)

 

[Rahsaan]

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
... a tasting Kloster Eberbach put on a few years ago of its Spätburgunder from the 19th century and first part of the 20th century was most impressive.

Impressive indeed!

 

[Claude Kolm]

Incidentally, Germany today is the world's third largest producer of Pinot Noir!

 

[Keith Levenberg]

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
I understand that in a thread this long, one sometimes reads through it quite quickly and so misses certain things. I stated above that Terry did a very good job of explaining the respective terroirs of a producer vis-a-vis that producer's own holdings, but did not place them within the context of the region as a whole.

I am still perplexed! The passage I quoted came from his introductory section on the Nahe, one of the many introductory sections whose whole point is to place his producers' wine in the context of the region as a whole. Perhaps I should have included this paragraph that comes right before that part:

There are four basic soil types in the Nahe. Each gives its own kind of wine. Slate does what it always does; the Nahe variant has more middle, almost like a super rich Saar wine. Rotliegend, our old friend from Nierstein, gives smoky, tangy wines along Nierstein lines but they are more compact, with an ethereal red currant taste and a cool marbeline feel. Loam and clay are the plebians, mostly planted to the commoner varieties, though even these varieties are more fetchingly graceful along the Nahe. Finally the volcanic soils with the exotic names: porphyry, melaphyr, gneiss, rhyolite, give the world’s most spellbinding white wine, Riesling at an
impossible pinnacle of fire and grace. Blackcurrant, honeysuckle, raspberry, a heavenly host of flavors astonishingly differentiated and an almost prismatically filigree.

What would be an example of an importer who does a *better* job than Terry placing his producers' terroirs in a regional context? What's even the fundamental grievance here, that one might have followed Theise's stuff and come away with a deep appreciation for Christoffel, Schaefer, Merkelbach, etc. but somehow not the Mosel in general? I can't even wrap my head around what that means for practical purposes.

I've heard all the criticisms of Terry Theise - too much of a sweet tooth, too much purple prose - and understand where they're coming from. But this one, nope. I don't get it. It's like you're talking about Bizarro Universe Theise.

 

[Yule Kim]

originally posted by Claude Kolm:

originally posted by Yule Kim:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
The Rheingau event may be a better introduction. I don't know what wines of Künstler the store has, but in theory, he's a good place to start because he has wines from Hochheim and Flörsheim to Rüdesheim with Hattenheim and Erbach in the middle. Don't feel that you have to only try GG; for earlier drinking and for better understanding what's going on the other wines are often more instructive. If they have the Stielweg in stock, be sure to get that, it's always a great wine. A Stielweg, Kirchenstück, Domdechenay, Hölle, Weiss Erd, (Flörsheim) Herrenberg tasting could be quite instructive because it would show all vineyards that are in that small portion of the Rheingau that is by the Main and not the Rhein.

Thanks Claude. This is very helpful.

Larry, let's do this sometime this summer.

If you really want to do a comprehensive tasting, add in his Marcobrunn and Pfaffenberg and the various Rüdesheims. But you probably would have to get Skurnik to do some special imports for you -- Künstler makes a LOT of different wines and I'm sure that Skurnik doesn't take all of them.

It actually looks like Woodlands carry most of the wines you cite (with the exception of the Holle and the Herrenberg). I'm definitely intrigued, but may have to wait until after the summer when the weather cools for shipping.

Thanks Claude! I appreciate the guidance.

 

[Claude Kolm]

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
I understand that in a thread this long, one sometimes reads through it quite quickly and so misses certain things. I stated above that Terry did a very good job of explaining the respective terroirs of a producer vis-a-vis that producer's own holdings, but did not place them within the context of the region as a whole.

I am still perplexed! The passage I quoted came from his introductory section on the Nahe, one of the many introductory sections whose whole point is to place his producers' wine in the context of the region as a whole. Perhaps I should have included this paragraph that comes right before that part:

There are four basic soil types in the Nahe. Each gives its own kind of wine. Slate does what it always does; the Nahe variant has more middle, almost like a super rich Saar wine. Rotliegend, our old friend from Nierstein, gives smoky, tangy wines along Nierstein lines but they are more compact, with an ethereal red currant taste and a cool marbeline feel. Loam and clay are the plebians, mostly planted to the commoner varieties, though even these varieties are more fetchingly graceful along the Nahe. Finally the volcanic soils with the exotic names: porphyry, melaphyr, gneiss, rhyolite, give the world’s most spellbinding white wine, Riesling at an
impossible pinnacle of fire and grace. Blackcurrant, honeysuckle, raspberry, a heavenly host of flavors astonishingly differentiated and an almost prismatically filigree.

What would be an example of an importer who does a *better* job than Terry placing his producers' terroirs in a regional context? What's even the fundamental grievance here, that one might have followed Theise's stuff and come away with a deep appreciation for Christoffel, Schaefer, Merkelbach, etc. but somehow not the Mosel in general? I can't even wrap my head around what that means for practical purposes.

I've heard all the criticisms of Terry Theise - too much of a sweet tooth, too much purple prose - and understand where they're coming from. But this one, nope. I don't get it. It's like you're talking about Bizarro Universe Theise.

1. You seem never to have learned that terroir is more than just soil.

2. For soils "slate", to take but one example, is too broad a term. There is blue slate, gray slate, red slate, green slate, all of which occur in the Nahe, and indeed all of which occur at at least one estate there that I can think of and give different wines.

3. The question is not whether any importer did a better job of explaining terroir, although that's what you're trying to make it. For the period that I'm talking about, 1990s and first decade or so of the 2000s, there really were only two major importers of German wines, Terry and Rudi. So you're asking whether Rudi gave a better idea of terroir of regions than Terry. Again, it's not relevant, but FWIW, yes, Rudi gave a better overall view of terroirs of the regions and how they related to the producers and where the producers were, at least so that I could understand how they related, although to be fair, even that was a somewhat simplified view, as I guess is necessary when one is marketing. I've spent literally hundreds and hundreds of hours visiting producers in Germany, tasting their wines, visiting their vineyards, asking questions about how and why their wines are the way they are and what are the determining factors in their regions, and they respect me for knowing what I'm talking about. You're free to think otherwise.

Bottom line, we're so far apart that it's not worth my taking the time to discuss this with you any further.

 

[Peter Creasey]

Claude, I'm not qualified to choose sides, so far be it from me to judge.

I will say, though, that your customary measured commentary, even about subjects I may not be not focused on, is much appreciated. Hope you stay active here.

. . . . . Pete

 

[mark e]

originally posted by Claude Kolm:

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
I understand that in a thread this long, one sometimes reads through it quite quickly and so misses certain things. I stated above that Terry did a very good job of explaining the respective terroirs of a producer vis-a-vis that producer's own holdings, but did not place them within the context of the region as a whole.

I am still perplexed! The passage I quoted came from his introductory section on the Nahe, one of the many introductory sections whose whole point is to place his producers' wine in the context of the region as a whole. Perhaps I should have included this paragraph that comes right before that part:

There are four basic soil types in the Nahe. Each gives its own kind of wine. Slate does what it always does; the Nahe variant has more middle, almost like a super rich Saar wine. Rotliegend, our old friend from Nierstein, gives smoky, tangy wines along Nierstein lines but they are more compact, with an ethereal red currant taste and a cool marbeline feel. Loam and clay are the plebians, mostly planted to the commoner varieties, though even these varieties are more fetchingly graceful along the Nahe. Finally the volcanic soils with the exotic names: porphyry, melaphyr, gneiss, rhyolite, give the world’s most spellbinding white wine, Riesling at an
impossible pinnacle of fire and grace. Blackcurrant, honeysuckle, raspberry, a heavenly host of flavors astonishingly differentiated and an almost prismatically filigree.

What would be an example of an importer who does a *better* job than Terry placing his producers' terroirs in a regional context? What's even the fundamental grievance here, that one might have followed Theise's stuff and come away with a deep appreciation for Christoffel, Schaefer, Merkelbach, etc. but somehow not the Mosel in general? I can't even wrap my head around what that means for practical purposes.

I've heard all the criticisms of Terry Theise - too much of a sweet tooth, too much purple prose - and understand where they're coming from. But this one, nope. I don't get it. It's like you're talking about Bizarro Universe Theise.

Bottom line, we're so far apart that it's not worth my taking the time to discuss this with you any further.

Rule #1: Don't be a jerk.