On the Riesling Trail: Day 9 – The Riesling Show Must Go On!

OK, so the weather in Seattle is beautiful and the sun is shining brightly (doing its very best to make the billows smooth and bright), but the Riesling Rendezvous begins today and for Riesling producers from around Planet Wine this is the equivalent of Christmas Eve. I have just one more hour left for my prep and as usual I’m scrabbling to pull everything together at the last moment, but there’s no alternative since that’s the only way I can speak well in public. At least this afternoon in the grounds of Chateau Set. Michelle just outside the city I don’t need to speak, only taste some wines make notes and exchange impressions with colleagues and friends. That’s the easy part. Monday and Tuesday will be very intense, so please be patient for the next posting. I promise that when it comes it will be packed with serious surprises!

I must also tell you about the Long Night of German Wine 3 which takes place in the late evening of  Thursday, July 25th at Hearth Restaurant in New York City. It features a trio of young winemakers from the Rheinhessen region of Germany, which in recent years has become the Dream Factory of Dry White German Wine. They are, from left to right, Mirjam Schneider of Schneider estate in Mainz-Hechtsheim, Christine Huff from Weingut the Ekkehard Huff estate in Nierstein-Schwabsburg and Eva Volmer of the eponymous estate in Mainz-Ebersheim. From my cellar there will be a slew of German wines from the forgotten 2003 vintage (in my view a dead ringer for 1959) plus the amazing house wines from the Weinstein wine restaurant in Berlin. For more information click on the link below.

Long Night of German Wines invite 2013

My last day in Okanagan Valley/BC brought one of those serious surprises. From the producers I’d visited during the first days I’d got the impression that the Bladerunner Riesling’s of this region in Canada represented the Wild West of my favorite grape. At the producers I visited the acidity levels were high to off the scale, alcohol levels were low to moderate yet the wines tasted astonishingly big and bold for those numbers. Then it occurred to me that these producers were nearly all based (and growing their grapes) in the cooler northern end of the region. How did Riesling from the warmer south of the Okanagan Valley taste. There, close to the US border where most of the Merlot and Cabernet are grown, so theoretically the Rieslings should also have more ripeness and less acidity. Was that the case and if so did it taste good? More importantly, how on earth was I going to answer that question in my last half day in “The Valley”?

Then I got lucky. Lindsay Kelm of the BC Wine Institute had gathered together a slew of Rieslings from producers I couldn’t visit and many came from the south. Of these, the wines from Gehringer in Oliver proved conclusively that a richer, riper style of Riesling is not only possible Down South, but can taste surprisingly like a ‘Grosses Gewächs’ (GG), the new category of high-end single-vineyard wines from Germany. Amongst the wines from further north there were also some serious surprises, most notably the dry wines from 8th Generation. They married a sleek, cool climate wine style to less strident acidity than established top producers like Tantalus, that is they seemed to offer a serious alternative to that Bladerunner path. Then there was the 2011 ‘Farm Reserve’ Riesling from Lang Vineyards, which like the Gehringer wines had over 13% alcohol, but is lush and tropical like no other wine from that vintage.

But now I must dash to the opening of Riesling Rendezvous. Watch this space!