I do encounter it less frequently these days, but all of us who man the tasting table at Moore Brothers (especially when we have visiting producers from Alsace and Germany) still hear it often enough: “I’ll pass on the Riesling. I only like dry wine.”
Of course, the likelihood is that the Riesling in question is drier than most California Chardonnays, but that’s not the point. We all prefer sweet ripe fruit to sour green fruit. Probably eat ice cream, too. In fact, we all like sweet things. We’re primates, aren’t we?
“I’ll pass on the Riesling. I only like dry wine.”
Now I’m only a huckster, but believe it or not genuine wine authorities like Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson are happy to proclaim their opinion that Riesling is the king of grapes; more noble, in fact, than Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, or Chardonnay.
Here’s why:
Riesling describes in detail – eloquently – exactly where it grows, provided it’s happy where it grows. It’s like a sensitive FM tuner that finds the “frequency” of each unique location, and amplifies it. So a wine made from Riesling grown in the Rheingau could never be mistaken for a wine from Alsace or Lake Seneca.
Pinot Noir alone is as sensitive to its environment. So it’s no coincidence that Pinot Noir and Riesling were selected by the monks, who were the stewards of viticulture in the Rheinland and Burgundy through the centuries between the fall of Rome and the French Revolution.
And because even very ripe Riesling retains high levels of acidity, both dry and sweet wines can be made. And sweet wines made from Riesling are never stupid sweet like cotton candy at a baseball game. They’re sweet like ripe fruit. In fact, the really distinguishing characteristic of Riesling isn’t sweetness. It’s acidity.
And Riesling gives some of the longest-lived natural wines, which can evolve over decades in a cool cellar, developing aromatics and flavors that can barely be inferred in the young wine.
All that explains why British aristocrats of the early twentieth century routinely paid more for fine German Rieslings than for classified growth Bordeaux. They recognized among them some of the finest wines in the world.
Remember, there are only two kinds of wine in the world: good wine, and the other kind. We’ll only offer good wine for you to taste, so don’t let a bad experience you may have had with a terrible wine that happened to be sweet (or white, or red or whatever) deter you from trying everything on the tasting table at Moore Brothers. We only have good wine, not “the other kind.”