Dory here, guest-blogging on Dirigo
Wine. Having been living in Munich now for well over a year, we
finally decided it was time for another tasting. While we missed our
usual crew, we had a number of enthusiastic tasters who were willing
to join the fun last Saturday night. One of them, our pal Gemma, a
young Yorkshire lass, can’t drink reds (poor dear) so we decided on
Rieslings for a first go-round, since it’s native to these parts
and all. Rounding out the Tasty Tasters: Susie from Oz, Susan from
Scotland with her out-of-town friend Tricia from Canada (but
currently teaching in Brussels), Sanna from Finland via Munich, the
English lad Jonathan, Gemma’s visiting mom Jackie, plus Dave and me
(and Sanna’s adorable dog Feliz, who is Swedish). It was a very
lively crowd.
We did a few things differently than
our tried-and-true Soto format. Since Riesling is billed as
“hands-down
the best food wine in the world,” we made it a potluck and
there were all kinds of interesting foods: two kinds of hummus, a
typical Alsatian quiche, pear-gorgonzola-walnut melt, cheese scones,
a gorgeous cheese and dried fruit platter, oven-roasted root veggies
with an apple juice/Riesling glaze, and for dessert, flapjacks
(which, in the UK, turn out to be sort of a granola bar affair). At
the end of the meal, we had to concur that Riesling seems to go with
just about anything.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
We stuck with our usual format of
asking people to bring a bottle of Riesling from anywhere in the
world, priced under €20. As most of the Tasties were neophyte
tasters, we started with a
quick YouTube video on how to taste wines:
Then we broke out a new wine notes page
– not a scoring sheet, as Dave was quick to point out, but a simple
way to summarize what we were tasting. We also had copies of the
wine wheel to help us think about what we were sniffing and
sipping. Dave had wrapped up the bottles as they came through the
door and in an effort to keep things both anonymous and lively, each
bottle was christened with the name of an American football team. We
were restricted to one wine glass a piece, since that’s all we had,
so we tried each wine one at a time, the first round without food and
the second round with heaped plates before us.
We sampled eight bottles all together,
ranging in price from €6 to €20. Two people brought the exact
same bottle, so there were 7 different wines, 6 of which turned out
to be from Germany and one from Austria. Riesling has the reputation
of being on the sweet side, but these examples did not fall into that
category at all. Common descriptors included citrus-y, tart, sour,
grapefruit, sharp, lemon-y, but these tags were balanced with
characterizations ranging from marzipan, floral and toffee to
mineral-y and kerosene. We found that all of them were better with
food – some were better with one type of food than another, but at
least one was deemed by everyone to be good with everything.
In the end, it was the Austrian that
won our hearts and mouths, a 2008 from a winery called Maitz (but
known at our table as the Colts, for the evening anyway; I must note
that the wine did a lot better over the weekend at our house than the
team did on the gridiron, however). And interestingly enough, one of
the words that popped into several of our minds when we first sniffed
this one was kerosene. But the taste: smooth, mango, butterscotch,
full, minerals, pineapple, rich, to highlight a few of the reactions
to this very nice bottle. And wouldn’t you know it: it was the
most expensive at €20.
So what did we learn? That there’s a
lot of decent Riesling to be had, and that you can have it with
pretty much anything you want to eat (which therefore makes it a safe
bet for our gal Gemma). And the gang loved it. Next up: Cabernets
in January – something to look forward to after the holidays.
Post Script:
It actually turned out to be a big wine
weekend for Dave and Dory because the Forum Vini was in town. On
Sunday afternoon, we rode the U-Bahn to the north of the city and
paid €17 a piece to taste wines from all over the world. Such a
deal! Shipping wines to private customers is the norm here in
Germany, and we found ourselves ordering bottles from South Africa
and France, a great rosé Prosecco, and, as it turns out, a Riesling
from Austria. So the moral of the story is: if you’re looking for
a nice white, give a Trocken (dry) Riesling from Austria a try.
