Riesling

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.