Riesling Renaissance
As wine regions in North America, Australia and New Zealand search for unique marketing opportunities, many are embracing France's concept of terroir — crafting wines that exhibit the special characteristics that come from the geography, soil, weather and climate conditions.
The notion of terroir assumes that the land where grapes are grown imparts unique flavour and aroma attributes that are specific to that area. So a Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough, New Zealand is different from a Sauvignon Blanc from the Adelaide Hills, Australia because they are shaped by different physical factors in the vineyards that produces the grapes — to say nothing of established winemaking practices.
Different regions, different wine personalities.
In emerging regions, the search for terroir (pronounced "ter-whah") is tied to grape varieties that are traditionally favoured by terroir-centric regions like Burgundy (where Pinot Noir and Chardonnay excel) or a "transparent" variety like Riesling that reveals different expressions whenever it's grown. Austrian and Australian Rieslings are wildly different just as Rieslings from the many famed regions of Germany exhibit different characteristics.
As veteran British wine expert Hugh Johnson writes, "Riesling alone makes pure wine, innocent of oak, that precisely reflects its origin in a spectrum from flowery and feather-light through tense, dry, and mineral-laden, to unctuous and creamy to a piercing liquor like celestial marmalade."
I'll have what he's having...
I've heard winemakers complain that Rieslings is hard to sell because people think it's sweet. That people have had a bad experience with Black Tower or Blue Nun or some other candied, sickly sweet wine that wasn't even made from Riesling. So what?
Great Riesling has nothing in common with those syrupy concoctions. I guess Riesling devotees need to pull more corks and twist more screwcaps. Tasting is believing.
I've also heard marketers of Riesling wistfully say, "If only Hollywood would make a movie that could promote Riesling, the way Sideways promoted Pinot Noir..."
They have. Only the message wasn't for consumers, it was directed towards our winemakers and marketers.
Consider every Cinderella or Pygmalion story, every teen movie about the ugly duckling who morphs overnight into the prom king or queen, simply by getting contact lens and a new hair style, a metaphor for the amazingly, jaw-droppingly beautiful creature we have in our midst that we have (mostly) overlooked.
The successful single vineyard bottlings we enjoy today — the Cave Spring Vineyard, St. Urban, Nadja's, Picone in Ontario or something like the Tantalus Old Vines from British Columbia — aren't the sole sites that are available for crafting otherworldly, electric Rieslings. They're merely the sites that have been identified and showered with time and attention. There are many others out there. Someone just needs to take an interest in them, farm them methodically, pick, press and ferment with TLC — and then take that bottle of wine out in public and show it off.
Wine of the Week:
Wynns Coonawarra Estate 2008 Riesling
Coonawarra, South Australia
$17 (528216)
Australia's Coonawarra region is most often associated with Cabernet Sauvignon, but Wynns has also enjoyed a long success with fruity and floral-scented Rieslings. This flavourful white showcases the electric tension between lime/lemon fruit and lively acidity that makes well-made Riesling as bracing and refreshing as lemonade.
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