easy for you to say

So we're drinking wine with dinner, which is something that everyone should do. Tonight is a Mosel Riesling, which is a surprise, as usually with rain (and generally with dinner) we go red, because red is a better rain-cutter. But it's that kind of night. Yet, this is an "inexpensive" Riesling, which should be (and has been) a warning to us: pretty bottle, potentially nasty juice. (Read here to see what happens when one drinks a liter of cheap German wine. It involves Finnish metal and short skirts.)

There's many a challenge to discovering the world that is German wine. German labels are terrible, for one. Labels are covered with very long words, usually in some terrifying, Teutonic script, with lots of hyphens and little dots over places that aren't usually dotted. What's more, there's usually some 800-year old family crest with dragons or picture of a haunted, crumbling castle that screams "Run!" rather than, "Enjoy me with Thai curry, please." It's too bad. Some weinguts get it and have made changes for the better; many, typically, in the search for simplicity muck it up even more.

Which brings us back to our dinner bottle. It was a nice label, something you'd see out of New Zealand--a lovely image of the Rhein, nice gold touches, the word "Riesling" big and bold. It even smooshed the tongue-twisting "Mosel-Saar-Ruwer" region designation (say MOzel, Zaahr, RUUver) into a fairyland-sounding, "Moselland." But what tickled me the most is the bottle's bold claim of quality (even though this was a 3 Euro wine, at most) with the label Hochgewächs, in bold gold script.

Germans have a word for everything. Really. What do you call a football team that plays kinda shoddy during the regular season but then turns it on for the tournaments? Turniermannschaft. What do you call the rule for making sure if your dog dies you remove it to a safe and sanitary location, approved by the local authorities? Tierkoerperbeseitigungsgesetz. I wish I was joking. Hochgewächs is an unofficial way of saying the wine is of a high caliber, judged by no one else but the winemaker. It's kind of like a sticker with a smiley face, or a thumbs-up. While there's plenty of other official ways to designate vineyard and wine quality, this is one for the guys who make the 3 Euro wine, and want to say, hey. Enjoy it, 'cuz it's a lot better than that 2 Euro swill.

And enjoy it we did. With Thai curry, in fact.