June 1, 2016 - Perfection in Wine Achieved

Hi, everybody.  Welcome back to Cépage et Cuisine, Mary’s and Brian’s blog about wine, food, and culture.  Mary, being of German heritage herself, is trying to teach me how to say good morning or whatever in German, but I am clueless.  Knowing even basic phrases in one foreign language is as much as I can handle on one vacation.

Mary here:  Brian, it’s guten morgen.  It’s not that hard.  Gu-ten mor-gen.

I’m back.  The apartment is great, very modern with all the amenities, including excellent wi-fi and a nice, big bathroom.  It is an otherwise ordinary-looking building in an ordinary-looking neighborhood in Trier.

Vera and Werner live just downstairs.

But Germans, being German, and loving their gardens (so says Frau Mary), look at what Vera and Werner have done with their back yard.  It’s a peaceful, beautiful little island of nature in the city.

That cute little house back there is a tool shed.  Amazing.

Werner (pronounced Verner), said there is a bakery nearby and I found it just up the street.

The type of pastry we might call a danish is called a plunder in German.

Here’s Mary’s kirschplunder (cherry).

Their signage is unequivocal.

                 Ausfahrt freihalten!  Keep the exit clear!

Trier is Germany’s very oldest city, which is quite something.  It includes eight UNESCO World Heritage sites.  We spent the day being extremely touristy.

Our one complaint is that the old historical city has become essentially a pedestrian shopping mall.  Shoe stores, souvenir shops, hair salons, and coffee shops are housed in ancient buildings built by the Romans or from medieval history.

No escaping American fast food.

Right away, I’m finding that the language barrier is a bit more challenging than I expected.  Menus are hard to decipher, but the server is sometimes able to interpret some of it for us.

This is a salad of cold cut sausage, cheese, onions, lettuce and pickles with fried potatoes, a very typical dish at lunch, which is called schweizer wurstsalat.

Mary had this dish of potato dumplings with mushrooms in a creamy sauce, which she thinks is called kartoffelkloesse.  An emerging trend is clear that a dietary staple is various forms of pork, especially schnitzel (breaded and fried), and potatoes.

We bought an English language self-guided tour brochure and braved the shopping and swizzling hordes to try to appreciate the history of Trier.  The Porta Nigra, the black gate, is the largest surviving Roman city gate in the world.

St. Simeon’s College housed the priests in the 11^th century and later.

The House of the Three Magi was built around 1230.  Because Trier did not have a city wall, the wealthy owners relied on self-defense.  The house was accessible only through a door in the upper story via retractable wooden stairs.

Here’s the main market platz.

St. Peter’s Fountain was built around 1595.

The original Steipe building was constructed in 1430.  It is notable for the statues of two giant guards and the four patron saints, St. James, St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Helena.  The building was destroyed in 1944 during World War II and reconstructed later.

St. Peter’s Cathedral in Trier and the Liebfrauenkirsche, the Church of Our Lady, are adjoining.

The Church of Our Lady was built around 1235, the oldest Gothic-style church in Germany.

The vault is supported by twelve columns, each with an ancient painting of one of the apostles.  I didn’t see the name of the artist in our brochure.  Here, you see the portrait of St. John (Johannes … don’t forget to pronounce with a Y sound, says Frau Mary).

Here’s something amazing.  In this giant church, there is one stone in the floor, one stone that is pretty much covered by my feet when standing there, where all twelve apostles can be seen when standing upon it.  I recorded this video to demonstrate.

       St. Peter’s Cathedral next door is just as astonishing.

                       This ceiling sculpture is incredible.

As well as other sculptures in the church.

This building is called the Imperial Throne Room, built for the Roman emperor, Constantine.  It is the largest single room from ancient times, built around 310 (no typo).  Hard to comprehend.  And some of the room is still original.  Interior photography is not allowed, but it is massive.  Today, it is a Lutheran church.

The bridge over the Mosel is also of Roman construction.  The piers date to A.D. 144 (again, no typo).

The weather was rainy off and on and Mary’s dogs were barking at her after walking around on cobblestones all afternoon, so we relaxed at the apartment for a while before dinner, which was at Schloss-Monaise in Trier.  The restaurant was suggested at an online wine enthusiast message board that I read, which is the only way anybody would know about it.  To say it isn’t on the main drag is an understatement.

Schloss Monaise is quite an interesting place.  It was built in the 1700s as a country retreat on the Mosel River for a wealthy family.  Of course, back then it was in the country, but not now.  Getting there is quite interesting.  We drove through an industrial park, thinking we must have made a wrong turn or Google Maps was wrong.  Then we went down a short private road, meadows on both sides, past some vegetable gardens, apparently for the restaurant, then the road became a driveway, and there it was.  It was raining that evening so we couldn’t take exterior photos, but here’s a photo I clipped from the website.

The dining room is old and elegant.

Here’s Brian perusing the wine list, which was extensively populated with Riesling.

The chef and owner, Hubert Scheid, asked us about our menu preferences and I told him I’d like to build the dinner around the wine instead of vice versa.  It turns out he is a Michelin-starred chef of some renown who opened Schloss-Monaise almost 20 years ago in order to enjoy a slower pace of life.

I selected this Reinhold Haart Piesporter Kreuzwingert 2008.  We have experience with Reinhold Haart wines, but I had never heard of the Kreuzwingert vineyard.  As we would learn a couple of days later when we visited Johannes Haart, Kreuzwingert is a specific vineyard parcel at the top of the larger Goldtröpfchen vineyard.

Here’s why I hadn’t heard of it.  Kreuzwingert is all of 0.1 hectare, which is a quarter of one acre, about the size of a lot in an American subdivision, perhaps the size of your back yard.  There’s just not much wine that comes out of there and it is special.

This is probably the finest Riesling we’ve ever tasted.  It has an energy and tension among the acidity, the minerality, and the fruit that is exquisite.  It is a feinherb, which means it is half-dry, not quite trocken, or completely dry.  It’s like a rubber band, extended to tautness.  It can’t be stretched too far or it will snap.  If it’s not stretched tightly enough, it’s flabby and tired.  It was crisp, delicate, with great acidity and flavors of citrus, tree fruit, and an almost saline minerality.  In the mouth it was seamless, refreshing and silky at the same time, with a finish that goes on and on.  With food it showed a synergy, intensifying flavors and texture.  What a wine.

We just placed ourselves in the hands of Hubert for dinner and put away our menus.  I couldn’t read it anyway.  He offered an amuse bouche of baby shrimp, the smallest I’ve ever seen, with a tiny dollop of salmon roe.

White asparagus is in season, which he topped with a Riesling cream sauce.

The main course was monkfish and diced and julienne vegetables.

We declined dessert, but he offered these little sweets.

Dinner was perfect, memorable, one of the most memorable of the trip.  By evening’s end, we just sat with coffee and gazed out the window over the candlelight.  For our readers, dinner at Schloss Monaise is almost worth the trip to Trier.

That’s our post for today.  We hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting.  Thanks so much for reading us at Cépage et Cuisine and for your comments.  Tomorrow we move up the Mosel to Bernkastel for another week of wine, food, culture, history, geography, and people.  In the meantime,

Cheers!

Mary♥Brian