Thurs night I was meeting up w/ my niece, Cris, and her husband Kyle Hurla at Vinology to share some wines and some small plates. The guy in the wine cellar, when I asked about David, gave him a head’s up that I was going to be back in later. So David let him know that he would be in about 7:30pm to meet me. The opportunity to meet a Venerated Icon is one of life’s rare occurrences.
I’ve known David forever in Cyberspace, back when I had to log in with my punched card reader. We started way back on USENET: alt.food.wine, Thru the Squires board, the Parker board, WCWN, WLDG, most recently WineBerserkers. Our exchanges were always cordial and David struck me as somebody I’d love to meet. So David joined us to share our wines and apps.
He was an absolute gem to visit with.of course, very knowledgeable. We were there for well over an hour. It’s always a pleasure to meet one of your heros.
Tom
He’s such a great person, and a joy to speak with. Glad you had the opportunity.
One of my favorite people on the face of the earth! I’ve known him for 44 years. I was leaving the wine job at Rex Wine & Spirits in DC and he was taking it. We worked together there for a few months during the transition.
David has profound wine knowledge, great breadth in the whole world of wine and incredible depth of knowledge specifically about German wines. He’s got monumental tasting experience as well as an amazingly acute palate.
None of this is as important as David being an exceptionally kind and considerate human being. Thank you for this post. I need to reach out to David, it’s been too long.
YES, David is a wonderful humble person. I met him half a dozen times over the years. 2 times at my home in Berlin for a tasting and also for a dinner when he was named new taster for R. Parker.
He is a walking encyclopedia regarding RIESLING.
I used to buy wine from David when he was in retail in the DC area in the 1980s and early 1990s. I think I first met him at Rex in around 1985 or so. I learned so much about wine and wineries from David - not just with respect to German wines but also with Loire wines and esp. Burgundy.
It was also great talking about wine with David. His enthusiasm is tremendously infectious. I have a good friend who was scared to go into a store (whether Rex, Mayflower or Pearson’s over the years) because once David started to talk to him about wine, my friend knew he would not be able to control himself and would buy more wine than he ever planned to buy. But, still my friend bought from him - could not stay away because knew that the wines David raved about were going to be as great as David said.
I loved buying wine from David and wish he was still in the DC area.
When David worked at Pearson’s, he introduced me to German and Alsatian wines. He was a tremendous resource and the most enthusiastic wine store person I ever met. Amazingly, he was there the same time Josh Raynolds was.
Here’s another DC local singing David’s praises. I started buying from him when he was at Rex’s (I still have bottle of 1975 Sociando Mallet he sold me in the early 80s, I promised him I would share it with him, still looking for the opportunity). (Dan, I don’t think I ever met you there.) DC was blessed with many excellent wine shops and knowledgeable sales people back then - Between David and Chris Smith (who I first met at the old Woodley Park Wine and Liquor, and then followed to Morris Miller) - and of course, Terry Thiese (although he wasn’t working retail), the German wine knowledge in this town was off the charts.
David’s wife is from my home town and is the older sister of my best friend’s high school boyfriend, so we also have that connection.
David is also a great cook. Once, when I needed o be in Cincinnati on a Monday for work, he encouraged me to come early Sunday and spend the day with his family. I asked if there was anything he wanted me to bring him from DC. That is why I flew there with a half dozen freshly cleaned softshell crabs, which David prepared expertly for the three of us.
David is a legend. He has driven out to Chicago for weekends on his own dime to support our RieslingKenner charity events the last couple of years. He is also charming and kind and fun to be around.
Schildknecht was my best friend in the wine business for the 3+ decades i was active in it…
my favourite Schildknecht story is from some twentycouple years ago,
when the two of us were travelling together in Austria, at the moment terrorising the Wachau…
found ourselves at Weingut Prager, tasting with Toni Bodenstein, one of the finest estate proprietors in the land
at some sip of GV »Hinter der Burg« Federspiel
Bodenstein asked what our American critic Mr Parker might think of such a wine
i, who never kept my trap shut when there was opportunity to open it, said
– and in recognisably decent German –
‘Parker is a close second to phylloxera, as a plague upon wine…’
not knowing that old buddy Dave had just signed on to work for the WA…
I just gave a big grin, but consider Robert Parker to be the best thing to happen to wine in the past half century.
At one point I was ‘representing’ Maximin Grunhaus (not exclusively) in the US (I hosted Karl von Schubert in the U.S. one time, including a private dinner with Parker). Before that trip, I tasted the wines with Parker, very nervous that he would not ‘get it’. I don’t remember the dates, but this would have been in the late '80’s, when besides Hand Picked Selections, I was a partner in a German wine import business. I was wrong about Parker not ‘getting it’. Everything scored well and in particular an Abtsberg Spatlese was awarded a 96 point score (this is not on the RP website any more).
Have had the honor of hosting David here in the Finger Lakes a couple of times for the FLXcursion Riesling conference, and he has been nothing but supportive and passionate of the endeavor. We now just give him his own afternoon to host seminars!
As a producer, I would also add the perspective that having him visit and taste with you in the cellar is both a delight (it is immediately clear which writers are genuinely good at tasting and are enthusiastic about wine in general in that setting In particular) and a riot. He still uses a push-button tape recorder to take his tasting notes, including reporting what he’s just been told while adding his own editorializing: recorder click on “Kelby says this wine shows the sandstone via [insert context], …we’ll see about that.” recorder click off 
Mind you, just as often, he will try the wine then click the recorder back on to quickly add “Ah yes, I can taste that.”
Blockquote
What other producers did you work with?
I remember buying from David at Pearson’s. Always a pleasure, made the drive to DC worth it.
Probably the most erudite wine writing I’ve ever seen. The Faulknerian length of his sentences was sometimes challenging, but worth the effort.
