Rocks Into Wine with Geologist Brenna Quigley & Dry German Riesling

Rocks Into Wine: Geologist Brenna Quigley & Dry German Riesling

We didn’t wait long (in geologic time) to make the vine our own with vitis vinifera domesticated some 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and wine flowing ever since. Terroir arises at the intersection of human agricultural innovation and billions of years of geological activity. If we dig deep and properly calibrate our senses, I like to think we can taste the marine sediments accumulating, the tectonic plates shifting, the lava spilling out onto the earth’s surface.

Brenna “works with wine professionals in all areas of the trade, from growers in France to importers in the US, in order to precisely define the most impactful elements of their terroirs in a relevant and approachable manner.” She’ll be joining us for a tasting of Germany’s finest dry Rieslings from six vineyards representing a variety of geological circumstances.

Riesling tolerates stress of every kind, be it low vigor soils, drought conditions, disease pressure, or extreme cold. It thrives in so many different environments with such dramatically different results that it is a perfect showcase for geological diversity. Riesling is also a varietal that needs no adornment, no new oak veneer, such that each wine is a very pure expression of the place that birthed it. The Germans have always celebrated this capacity for individuality, and a new generation of growers fiercely committed to drier styles is driving an even deeper engagement with terroir.

Dry German Riesling is harder to come by than it should be, especially the best single-vineyard examples. Look for “trocken” on the label as an assurance of dryness or seek out one of the VDP’s Grosses Gewächs bottlings. These are essentially German Grand Crus as certified by the country’s preeminent association of wineries. They are by very definition dry and universally extraordinary.

Bill Jensen, sommelier for Michelin-starred Washington DC restaurant Tail Up Goat launched online Wine School on March 29, 2020. In April 2021, Michelin named Bill the DC Sommelier of the Year.

In Bill’s recap email, he said this:
Florence Bascom is widely recognized as America’s first female geologist, earning a doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1893 and becoming the first woman to work for the USGS in 1896. She said of her field: “The fascination of any search after truth lies not in the attainment, which at best is found to be very relative, but in the pursuit, where all the powers of the mind and character are brought into play and are absorbed by the task. One feels oneself in contact with something that is infinite and one finds joy that is beyond expression in sounding the abyss of science and the secrets of the infinite mind.”

I’m fond of saying that wine exists at the intersection of many different realms of knowledge. We engaged it through the lens of vineyard geology, but there’s also a world of chemistry and biology we could have covered among the hard sciences. Wine is a cultural force with a history that stretches back to the beginnings of human civilization. It has inspired some of the world’s greatest poetry and prose while infiltrating the most sacred rituals of major religions.

Brenna straddles these divides by giving scientific weight to romantic notions of terroir. She arms the layman with the geologic vocabulary to understand what translates in the glass, defines the limits of the claims we can reliably make about this sense of place, and identifies future areas of inquest for oenophiles and scientists alike. Like Florence Bascom, Brenna reminds us that the best questions leave us deeper in wonder than fully satisfied with answers.