Riesling Evening

I used to think all Rieslings were sweet but they're quite often dry. And I've always imagined that I liked just the dry stuff, believing that sweet wine was somehow undesirable. Why did I think this? Maybe sweetness seems too everyday. Or maybe it's because it's easy to appreciate sweet things and so to mark oneself as sophisticated requires the putting away of easy pleasures. Anybody can like sweets, but it requires taste to enjoy austerity.

Having said all of this, on most days I'd rather drink dry wine, but that doesn't mean wines with a little more sugar aren't great. Like with Chardonnay: I used to be anti-oak. Oaking was for rubes. But now I think that oak is just an instrument that has its place, kind of like timpani. One of the lessons I've learned for myself over the past few months of tasting varietals in all their various expressions is to keep an open mind.

The other night, Tracy, Tina, Claude, and I tried four Rieslings, three on the dry side and one fairly sweet. They were all very good, and to a certain degree this was to be expected: we didn't include a bottom-shelf or mass-market Riesling in this tasting, only fine wines. These four Rieslings were from the three major Riesling areas on earth: Germany, Austria, and Alsace. We also tried a New World Riesling, from California. In fact, all the wines we drank were from well-established wineries from their respective areas, which was kind of exciting because we felt that we were getting a real representative sample of some of Riesling's best expressions. Tracy made a spicy coconut fish dish to accompany the tasting. Rieslings go well with spicy, tangy food. Thai is a good choice. In any case, the wines were:

2007 Trimbach Riesling ($18)
2007 Weingut Bründlemayer Riesling ($25)
1989 Rüdesheimer Berg Roseneck Riesling Spätlese ($35)
2008 Trefethen Family Vineyards Riesling ($20)

Trimbach
This was our representative Alsatian Riesling, one of the most popular regions producing Riesling worldwide. Trimbach is also a very well-known winery, and this particular Trimbach was voted one of the top 100 wines of 2009 by Wine Spectator, earning a very high 91 points from that magazine. However seriously you take these things, it's worth mentioning.

Especially because this wine was so good. Cold, deep, and absolutely clear, the Trimbach was everyone's favorite (scores of 26 and 22.5 from Tracy and me, and an A-/B+ from Claude, who was more comfortable using letter grades). The color was crisp and bright and had a pale, grassy tinge, the body was light and mineral, though simultaneously round and smooth. The standout flavor was green apple, noticed by Tracy and affirmed by all. We also tasted very clear dried apricot flavors, as well as vanilla. This wine also displayed extraordinary balance: the palate was full of fruit flavors but they were intermixed with crisp acidity. The wine had "levity," as Tina put it--it floated across the tongue. And the finish was quick and snappy--though it did linger an extra moment on the upper palate, as Claude noticed. 

Bründlemayer
This was the Austrian Riesling, and it was dry and crisp as Austrian Rieslings tend to be. While it earned slightly lower scores (Tracy and I gave it a 22, Claude a B+), it was really nice. More sharp and angular than the Trimbach and with a noticeable fizz of effervescence, this is nervy wine: alive, tingly, bright, crisp, edgy. We noticed kerosene (Claude), tons of citrus, especially lime, stony minerality, and just a shadow of woody mustiness--was it oak? Claude said it was like drinking Champagne. While this is a great wine with tons of busy brightness and dry depth, it was a little less calmly regal than the Trimbach.

Roseneck

This is classic, sweet, German Riesling--and it was great. Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl's book Drink This: Wine Made Simple, from which I've quoted and cited numerous times on these screens, explains that German Rieslings may be quite dry or very sweet. Dry German Rieslings are called Kabinett Rieslings, and we didn't try one of these. Sweeter German Riesling (but by no means dessert-wine-sweet) falls into the Spätlese and Auslese categories. But like all things German, it's more complicated than that: both Spätlese and Auslese can be dry as well, in which case they'll be called Riesling Spätlese (or Auslese) Trocken. In any case, we had no Trocken in the house.

Tracy gave this wine a 20, I gave it a 19 (Claude marked it a lowly B). It was dramatically different from the dry wines we'd just tasted. Honey was the flavor that burst through to me--honey in the wine's hips and on my tongue, and honey flavors all up in the sinuses. The mouth-feel of this wine is full, deep, dark, rich, and vibrant. The color echoes the brown glass of the bottle in which it comes. Besides honey, we tasted tangerines, oranges, and what Claude described as charcoal. The finish lingered on and faded slowly away. In the past few days since the tasting, I've been taking a small glass of this wine as a post-dinner treat and really liking it. This is a 1989, quite an old vintage for a Riesling. I was 19 years old, probably watching the Berlin wall come down as they cut the grapes from the vine. 

Trefethen
If I had to compare California Riesling to the other regions we tried that night, I'd say that it most closely resembles Alsatian wine. In many ways, it was like Trimbach's younger brother. We got all the same lightness and acidity with all the fruit flavor, especially lemon peel and maybe peach. Two of us noticed lilacs as well, and I could have sworn I picked up on blueberry, but Tracy's doubt made me second-guess my own experience. The fourth wine can be tricky after three previous tastings (no spit-buckets here). We also got things here like caramel and salt, and began saying things like "this is a summer wine" and "it would go well with oysters." Altogether enjoyable, altogether delicious.

Sometimes I think maybe it would be great to go super-microscopic with these tastings--a whole tasting of German Rieslings, for example, trying a low-end mass marked German Riesling, a Kabinett, a sweet Spätlese, a dry Spätlese, and a German dessert Riesling. One could even do a full tasting of just Spätleses, or even hone in on just one vineyard and do a four-year vertical tasting (verticals are wines of successive vintages from the same vineyard). I guess I'd rather do this in France.