Sexy Germans By the Bottle

Fashion Week

By PETER HELLMAN
February 2, 2007

Goodbye, chardonnay. Hello, red spätburgunder! That's German for pinot noir — and the crowd at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week will be getting to know it, plus a whole lot of riesling: The trade group, Wines of Germany, is this season's wine sponsor.

It's a bold step into the American market, where German wine names are as hard to pronounce as the wines are easy to drink. Glasses of Müller-Catoir's Gimmeldinger Schlossle and Leitz's Rudesheimer Berg Roseneck will be poured this week at the tents in Bryant Park. But those who are language challenged will only have to push a button on the Enomatic wine dispenser.

Why did German wine industry angle for this sponsorship? "We looked at what we would like to achieve in the American market," an official of the German Wine Institute, Ulrika Bahm, said. "We didn't need to put more wine under the nose of your wine critics."

Grown mainly on slopes over the Rhine and Moselle rivers, German rieslings have low alcohol content, often below 10%. "You can drink a couple of bottles at dinner and still stand up," Ms. Bahm says.

And yet, there is a potential downside according to importer Terry Theise. "The danger is that when you make something trendy, you also make it ephemeral. I have long tried to make a cogent and durable argument for these wines, not flog them to hipsters."

But Mr. Theise also sees a bright side: "It's a way of at last giving German wines the sex appeal that they deserve."